Performance Improvements: Releasing the handbrake of our servers

We have just released the handbrake on our web servers.

At this moment there are more than 1000 users online at the same time.
It turned out that 2048 concurrent connections are no longer enough to deliver HeliumTracker.io.
We have drastically increased the number of concurrent connections and it looks like we have solved this bottleneck.
The response times of our servers are now back in the optimal range.

We have also just enabled the manual hotspot ping test feature which can ping the last known ip address of your miner and validate that it is online and ports are forwarded properly.
This feature will find its way to the hotspot guard as soon as we have finished the integration of the heliumstatus api to determine realtime ip address information.

@Sinbad has started a feedback contest:

Contest Time - Ends 01/17/21
Drop a HT review in feedback and a winner will be picked next Monday.
Bonus: If you have old screenshots of the website and how far we’ve come, your entry will count as two raffle tickets.
Rules: Must be a subscribed member of HeliumTracker’s service.
Winner will receive 1 HNT 🙂

Hearbeat Monitor & Hotspot Guard

We have just added the heartbeat monitor to our hotspot guard.
You can customize the heartbeat threshold in your account settings.
Whenever the difference between the current blockchain height and the last heartbeat (=POC activity) is greater than this threshold you will receive an email notification.
The default value is 480 which is roughly 8 hours.

Within the next days we will also enable the hotspot ping check for everyone and integrate it into the hotspot guard as well

2021 Helium Noble Awards - 2nd Place for HeliumTracker.io

You have chosen HeliumTracker.io as the second place winner in the category "Favorite Community App" of the 2021 Helium Noble Awards.

We are overwhelmed and very grateful for this support.

We will continue to do our best in 2022 to provide you with useful tools around the Helium network.

Thank you!

Upcoming: New memberships & new features

We would like to inform you about an upcoming change of our premium memberships.

To better meet the needs of our users we are introducing 3 new memberships:

# STARTER $2.95 per month
- Max 3 Hotspots
- 60 days of reward data
+ Real time updates
+ Telegram notifications
+ Premium Queue
+ Commission Payment with qrcode
+ Bulk payments with qrcode
+ Monthly Reward & Commission report
+ Neighbourhood Comparison
+ Hotspot Guard

# IDEAL 5.95$ per month
- max 15 Hotspots
+ everything from STARTER
+ 90 days of reward data
+ Online Status Monitor (coming soon)
+ Hotspot Ping Test (1 per hour & hotspot)

# PROFESSIONAL $15.95 per month
- max 50 Hotspots
+ everything from IDEAL
+ 180 days of reward data
+ Hotspot Ping Test (2 per hour)
+ API Access (10.000 req / month) (coming soon)

# BUSINESS 49,95$ per month
- Max 150 hotspots
- everything from PROFESSIONAL
+ Hotspot Ping Test (2 per hour)
+ API Access (50.000 req / month) (coming soon)
+ Premium Host Dashboard (All premium features for your hosts)

# ENTERPRISE 99,95$ per month
- Max 500 hotspots
- everything from BUSINESS
+ Hotspot Ping Test (12 per hour)
+ API Access (250.000 req / month) (coming soon)
+ Whitelabel Solution (coming soon)

Accounts that already exist at the time of this change are not affected by this change and will continue to run at the old terms until the end of the subscription.

As you can see there are a few upcoming features marked with "(coming soon)". Those features are already in development and/or testing stage and are supposed to be released within the next weeks.

The next major update will include the changes to our subscriptions and an improved version of the hotspot guard including a regular ping/relay check for your hotspots. We will also add telegram notification support to the hotspot guard.

Last but not least: The release of the ios/android app for heliumtracker.io has been postponed in favor of the above mentioned changes.

Avoiding dowtimes with more redundancy

This morning we had another system failure on our loadbalancer server which led to a heliumtracker.io downtime of several hours.

HeliumTracker is already powered by a total of 6 dedicated web servers. To increase redundancy we will add another loadbalancer server today.

While researching the cause, we came across two common triggers:
1: There are some users with several thousands(!!!) of hotspots in their account.

The elaborate calculations in the dashboard are not designed for this scale and thus overload our servers.

For this reason we will have a maximum hotspot limit of 500 per account starting today. If you really need more than 500 devices in one account contact us - we have an enterprise solution in the pipeline.

2nd: The calculations of the city charts is too computationally intensive.

Every morning around 5:00 am UTC our system recalculates the revenue statistics of the cities. This background job now takes several minutes to complete. Together with the above mentioned loads, this job then apparently leads to a crash.

To counter this problem we will stop the calculations of the city charts until further notice.