Lunarpages
A review of the hosting company Lunarpages.
About LunarpagesStarted in 2000, Lunarpages offers cheap plans with great value with good service and also offer dedicated hosting. They have grown considerably over the past 5 years but this doesn't seem to be hurting their ability to service their customers well. Because Lunarpages has a great reputation and offers great value you know that they will always be around, which puts their customers at ease. Although Lunarpages is not a strong e-commerce host, it is definitely a good web hosting choice for many users because of their great features, price, support, and reliability.Price & CapacityTheir main plan, "Shuttle Plan", is 1,500 GB of diskpace and 15,000 GB of transfer for $7.95 per month on the yearly plan. Even though this is pretty huge, they also offer an upgraded plan, "Business Hosting", with unlimited diskspace and 15,000 GB transfer for $22.95 per month. Dedicated hosting plans are available if you need them. Their basic plan comes with 1 free domain name for life. Their upgraded plan comes with 4 free domain names for life. Unlike most web hosts, they don't seem to have any hidden restrictions so you can be confident that you can take advantage of all that capacity.FeaturesTwo of their best features are the unlimited email accounts and unlimited MySQL databases. Their control panel is CPanel which is easy to use. They offer a 30 Day Money Back Guarantee. They offer CGI Bin, FrontPage Extensions, PHP, Python, Perl, and Web Based Email. Like most other web hosting companies, they offer many free tools like: blog, forum, photo gallery, osCommerce Shopping Cart, Cube Cart, and Zen Cart. On February 15, 2006 they added windows web hosting plan. ASP, SSL, and JSP are available for an addition fee.Reliability and SupportBoth customer support and reliability at Lunarpages is great and they seem to actually care about their customers which can be rare in the web hosting world. The have timely responses to email and phone calls. Lunarpages doesn't offer 24/7 phone support. This may be acceptable for most people, but some people like to get immediate solutions to problems if they're running a very profitable site. They also offer e-mail and live chat. They make an effort to provide the best reliability possible in the hosting market.RandomTheir forum, LunarForums, is a very popular forum where you can get help you from Lunarpages or directly from their users. They also has 2 nice extra offers. First, they have a Special Transfer Hosting Offer where you get a credit from your existing host when you transfer your web site to Lunarpages. And second they will also pay your transfer fees when moving a domain to them. Check the the site for any restrictions though. |
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Hi, I appreciate your feedback. I gave price a 9/10 because I simply ignore many of the $1.99 deals that are advertised. These plans give so little for the money that I don't consider them to be "full" hosting plans. Not only that, but many of the sites that are undercutting the $5-$7/month plans are domain companies like GoDaddy and Namecheap that are just getting into hosting on a large scale and have no experience with being a host. The $6.95/month plan from Lunarpages gives you many features and is with a company that is sure to stick around for a long time. The web site hosting industry in an industry that has a broad consumer appeal yet there is very little "price-to-value knowledge" among consumers. This is why you will see many hosts come out with advertising talking about how their plans are a great value at $29.99 per month. There are so many people that simply don't know better. I consider any plan in the $5-$7 per month range that gives you good bandwidth, storage, and features to be a 9 or higher. Nitpicking about 50 cents here and there is semantics. As far as service and support, every host has customers that have complaints that are basically word-for-word copies of yours. Midphase has had major problems lately, and Powweb had major problems in mid-2007 with their databases. Every host has problems when they switch to new servers (and they all have to), upgrade their versions of PHP or email, or get bought out. Go to any hosting forum and you'll see them. The support and service ratings are simply graded on a scale. This is because anyone that has endured shared hosting for a number of years will testify to the truth is that the is literally NO shared hosting company that give supurb service and support. If you do hear a testimonial from someone claiming that their host has been perfect ("I've been with XYZ Hosting for 7 years and never had a problem"), then that story needs to be greatly discounted due to the fact that, with hundreds of thousands of customers, I'm sure that [I]all[/I] large hosts have at least [I]some[/I] customers who are completely happy. To me, shared hosts are the "fast food companies" of the hosting world. Getting a completely-reliable shared hosting plan with superb service is like ordering a quarter pounder [I]without[/I] cheese fom McDonald's 100 times and expecting them to get it right every time while giving you a smile every time. If you expect this, then your expectations are simply too high. As far as the terms of service, hosting companies are notorious for having less-than-friendly terms. If they lose your web site (and, hence, years worth or work), they are not liable. It's your job to back up your wokr. I'm afraid that having a host go down for a day or two and not getting any kind of financial retribution is par for the course. Another note on the "all shared hosts are bad" theory. You'll see many times during a discussion like ours, a poster will pop up and refute my claim: "Oh, so-and-so hosting doesn't have any problems. They always give good support, balh, blah, balh". Well, many times these hosts will simply be start-up hosts that are driven by an idealistic mission to be the world's first high-quality shared hosting company. They'll claim they have TRUE uptime, REAL personal service, etc, etc. But, the problem is, these idealistic hosts run into the same problems as the big hosts do when they start to grow - how do maintain high levels of service? how do we keep adding features while keepign costs low and staying price competitive at the same time? how do we scale our operations to deal with problems?. Many of these supposedly-better hosts are simply hosts that haven't ben around long enough to have any problems. But if I hear more bad things about Lunarpages I will take note and lower my ratings. |  |
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admin December 27, 2007 |
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Price, features, reliability, and service were all given 9/10. That almost looks like paid advertising. In reality, price 8/10... other exist that are better in price. Features either 8 or 9. Comparable to other similar big hosts. Reliability I would have to give a 7. When problems occur it is due to poor workmanship in that upgrades or other tasks are performed by staff and they cause subsequent problems. Service would have to be 4 or LESS. There is no 24/7 support via phone and their website fraudulently says 24/7. Their email system for customer to company emails is poor, they use a problematic trouble ticket system. Original trouble ticket system was better and this new version is poor. When troubles are reported the staff have problems understanding the trouble and it often takes long times to get problems fixed. Many other reasons for giving low rating on service. Their terms of service (not truly provided to customers) gives mostly supposed protection and rights to only Lunarpages and not to customers. If their product and service quality become unacceptible a customer can not be refunded even though the cause is that of Lunarpages. | |
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exLPcustomer December 26, 2007 |
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please post comments | |
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admin November 21, 2006 |
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