Web Hosting Company: Lunarpages
Web hosting features and remarks: Lunarpages offers a good web hosting package (Basic) for beginners at a reasonable price. Whether it will be your first time in hosting a website or you are switching over to Lunarpages, you have some advantages in choosing one of their hosting plans. First, if you switch over to Lunarpages, you will get up to 6 months of additional length besides one year or two years with Lunarpages. So you will never lose a day after switching from one hosting plan over to Lunarpages. Secondly, Lunarpages gives out '$700 CoffeeCup Design Software.' Of course, considering the price you pay at Lunarpages, $700 is a total exaggeration. But if you are hosting a website for the first time, it will be nice to have this web design package that contains HTML editor, FTP application plus hundreds of web templates. (Applications are for Windows OS only.)
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'Lunarpages' customer support system is pretty good. Lunarpages doesn't use Livechat support. In a sense, they still rely on an old-style open-ticket support system. That is, you open a ticket to fill out a form. Your ticket will be serialized. So when they answer your question and you want to reply, then this serialized ticket number will be used. The average response time, according to Lunarpages, is about 4 hours. You can set the priority level of your question to 'Low,' 'Medium,' 'Hight' or 'Urgent.' But setting the priority level to 'Urgent' doesn't necessarily give you the most prompt response as they don't always have the answer for your question. So if you have an urgent matter, you are advised to pick up the phone and dial their 1-800 number (for U.S. and Canada).
Lunarpages' support is relatively good. But it's no perfect. For instance, we noticed that our shared server became inaccessible at least twice within 5 days or so. If you have some important files to upload, you can't waiit even by one hour. When our shared server went down for the second time, we were mad. The mail server was dead, so we couldn't receive/send e-mail messages, either. We waited for six hours, but they didn't fix the problem. Then their support page became inaccesible. We posted an urgent help message numerous times, but they weren't around. We waited for 10 hours. But they didn't fix the problem. Eventually, the problem was resolved 15 hours after we first reported the problem. And we ended up working around the clock. Well... The story doesn't end there. The FTP server and all mail servers became inaccessible again the next day. The story doesn't end there. One of our domains and its mail server were inaccessible again. Lunarpages knew that DNS entries were made such that our domains were pointing to 2 servers. But they failed to correct the problem. In the end, some e-email messages never reached our mail servers. What would you get with 3 strikes in baseball? Out!
Unlike HostMonster and HostRocket, Lunarpages doesn't offer SSH for file transfer protocol to shared-server users. Instead, you can use FTP over Explicit TLS, which has better security against eavesdropping than regular FTP. If you are a Windows user, you can use FileZilla. If you a Mac user, you can use the Mac version of FileZilla, YummyFTP or possibly other FTP applications. |
Updates
Lunarpages has increased disk space and monthly bandwidth for both hosting packages. And lunarpages offers CoffeeCup Design Software, which contains Windows applications plus hundreds of web design templates.
January 11, 2007: Lunarpages increased disk space and monthly bandwidth for both Basic and Business plans.
March 2, 2007: Lunarpages now offers PHP5 and MySQL 5. Special offers: Anyone who enters 'MHouse' as a coupon code will get $26 off plus 1 additional month when you sign up for 12 months or longer (Basics, Business, Windows and Virtual Private Servers hosting plans). Furthermore, anyone switching over to Lunarpages will get a 90-day money back guarantee as opposed to regular 30-day money back.
April 27, 2007: Following other hosting companies, Lunarpages updates its Basic Hosting by increasing disk storage from 250 to 350 GB.
April 30, 2007: Lunarpages makes bandwidth changes one again for both Basic and Business plans.
September 3, 2008: Lunarpages offers unlimited disk space and unlimited monthly bandwidth for Basic Plan.
Hosting Plans and Main Features (Last updated: September 17, 2008):
Basic
- Free domain name (for annual sign-up) x 1
- Annual fee: $4.95 x 12 months = $59.40 (was $95.40)
- Disk space: Unlimited (was 1,500 GB)
- Bandwidth: Unlimited (was 15,000 GB)
- No. of MySQL databases: Unlimited
- No. of Subdomains: Unlimited
- Add-on Domains：Unlimited (was 10 add-on domain)
- Parked Domains：Unlimited
- No. of e-mail accounts: Unlimited
- Control panel Cpanel: cPanel Pro 11.18.2
- Statistical analysis: Analog, Webalizer
- PHP version: 4.4.7 or 5.2
- MySQL version: 5.0.45
- PERL version: 5.8.0
- System: Linux server
- Online support forums: Available
- Online chat for technical assistance: Not Available
- You must send your request by e-mail if the filled disk space exceeds certain number. So you won't automatically get the maximum storage space as advertised. => There is no need for a written request any more. You will automatically get maximum disk space.
- Special Offer for those who are switching from another web hosting provider, whic will give up to 6 months
- $50 Yahoo Search Engine Marketing (Overture) credit for new Sponsored Search advertisers
- Payment options: Credit Card, Check/Money Order plus additional payment methods (PayPal, e-Gold, NETeller, Western Union...) through Strategic Payments, Inc.
* There is something interesting to note. Lunarpages claims that there are several unlimited features such as the numbers of parked domains and sub domains and FTP accounts. However, if you open the control panel, the denominators for these features are set to 999. We asked Lunarpages, and they say that these featues are in fact set to unlimited although the control panel can go as far as 999.
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This screenshot comes from Lunarpages' webshite and has been altered to reduce the horizontal size. The screenshot was taken on March 8, 2007 |
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Business
- Free domain name (for annual sign-up) x 4
- Annual fee: $21.95 x 12 months = $263.40
- Disk space: Unlimited
- Bandwidth: 15,000 GB (was 3,500 GB)
- No. of MySQL databases: Unlimited
- No. of Subdomains: Unlimited
- Add-on Domains：Unlimited (was 3)
- Parked Domains：Unlimited
- No. of e-mail accounts: Unlimited
- Control panel Cpanel: cPanel Pro 11.18.2
- Statistical analysis: Analog, Webalizer
- PHP version: 4.4.7 or 5.2
- MySQL version: 5.0.45
- PERL version: 5.8.0
- System: Linux server
- Online support forums: Available
- Online chat for technical assistance: Not Available
- You must send your request by e-mail if the filled disk space exceeds certain number. So you won't automatically get the maximum storage space as advertised. => There is no need for a written request any more. You will automatically get maximum disk space.
- Special Offer for those who are switching from another web hosting provider, whic will give up to 6 months
- $50 Yahoo Search Engine Marketing (Overture) credit for new Sponsored Search advertisers
- Payment options: Credit Card, Check/Money Order plus additional payment methods (PayPal, e-Gold, NETeller, Western Union...) through Strategic Payments, Inc.
Video tour
This video gives you a quick tour over Lunarpage's control panel cPanel Pro. |
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Video tour
This video gives you a quick tour over CoffeeCup's web design templates. |
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More Information
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