Lunarpages Review
In preparation for this Lunarpages review, we purchased our Lunarpages review account through the Lunarpages website, just like any regular customer. We did not inform Lunarpages that we intended to write a review of their services. In our opinion, this guarantees that we receive no special treatment and our experience closely approximates that of any other customer.
About Lunarpages
Lunarpages was established in California during the late 1990's and has quickly built an enviable reputation for providing top quality web hosting services at affordable prices.
These days, Lunarpages boasts an impressive 1500 servers, housed in 2 modern data centers, featuring full UPS protection and backup power generation. The data centers are monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by trained specialists. Data center connectivity is provided by a 2000Mbit fiber-optic network, connected directly to over 100 upstream carriers.
Plan Features and Pricing
Lunarpages offers various web hosting solutions, including both Linux and Windows based shared web hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers.
For this Lunarpages review, we chose to sign-up for the 'Basic Hosting' plan, which offers 1500GB of disk space, 15000GB of monthly data transfer/bandwidth, a 'free' domain registration for the life of the hosting, the ability to host up to 11 domains (and unlimited sub-domains) and all the features you've come to expect from a quality web hosting package. The very affordable price of $6.95 per month makes this package exceptional value.
One of the more interesting items included with all Lunarpages web hosting plans is a software package consisting of 20 web page design applications by CoffeeCup software, valued at over $700! This package could prove to be extremely useful to those just starting out in web design, or even to those more experienced in web design that are looking to add more tools to their software arsenal.
We don't have enough space in this review to list all the features available with this comprehensive package, but the table below shows the major ones. Of-course, for a full list of features included with this plan you should visit the Lunarpages web site.
| Key features of Lunarpages 'Basic Hosting' plan (as reviewed) |
|---|
| 1500GB storage space |
| 15000GB monthly data transfer /bandwidth |
| Free domain name registration for the life of the hosting |
| Up to 10 additional add-on domains |
| Unlimited sub-domains |
| Unlimited parked domains |
| Unlimited FTP accounts |
| Unlimited MySQL and Postgre SQL databases |
| Unlimited POP3 and IMAP e-mail accounts |
| E-mail SPAM filtering |
| PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby / Ruby on Rails script support |
| SSI - Server Side Includes fully supported |
| Microsoft Frontpage extensions supported |
| Easy to use cPanel control panel |
| Fantastico Script support via control panel |
| 99.9% network uptime |
| Free CoffeeCup Software package ($700 value) |
| 30-day money back guarantee |
Control Panel
Lunarpages supplies a customised version of the industry standard cPanel for administration of your account. The Lunarpages implementation of cPanel consists of all the functions we've come to expect from cPanel, including a web-based file manager, domain and email configuration and access to full traffic statistics for your domains.
Overall, if you are coming from another cPanel based host, you should have no problems using the Lunarpages administration panel.
Scripting Support
The Lunarpages panel offers Fantastico script support, which allows the automatic install and upgrade of dozens of popular software packages, including content management systems, blog software, forums, galleries, polls, surveys etc.
Manual installation of software packages or scripts is, of-course, fully supported and Lunarpages provide a large variety of scripting languages for this purpose. The scripting languages provided include PHP, CGI, PERL, Python, SSI and Ruby / Ruby on Rails.
Reliability
On their web site, Lunarpages state that they experience a 99.9% uptime on all servers and network equipment over any 12 month period. While we often see this type of boast on web hosting providers' web sites, we are happy to report that this particular boast was somewhat confirmed by our own experience.
Our Lunarpages test site was monitored for a 3 month period and during this time we detected absolutely no down-time. While we obviously can not guarantee that you will experience similar 100% uptime with your own Lunarpages hosted site, their infrastructure does appear to be extremely robust and reliable.
Technical Support
The quality of technical support is one area often overlooked by those shopping for a new web host. This is unfortunate, as the ability to obtain prompt, accurate technical support is tremendously important and can mean the difference between a satisfying hosting experience and one where you are constantly struggling to make things work as expected. Thankfully, Lunarpages provide many methods to obtain technical support.
Firstly, Lunarpages have phone support lines available during their business hours, Monday-Friday 7:00AM - 12:00 Midnight PST, Saturday - Sunday 8:00AM - 5:00PM. They also maintain a 24 hour 'Network Status' hotline.
You can lodge a support ticket outside of these hours by using their excellent online system, besides providing the mechanism to lodge support tickets, the online system also has a very complete FAQ / knowledgebase and dozens of useful animated Flash based tutorials.
Lunarpages also maintains a very active discussion forum, frequented by many friendly, knowledgeable customers and Lunarpages staff. Often, a quick search of previous forum threads can turn up the answer to your question, without even having to make a post.
Overall we rate the technical support provided by Lunarpages as very good to excellent. We would have liked the phone support lines to be available 24/7, but, in our opinion, the other avenues of support that are available more than make up for this 'business hours only' policy.
Conclusion
It is hard not to like Lunarpages; they offer high quality, feature rich hosting plans at very affordable prices. The plan we tested provides 1500GB of storage space and 15000GB of data transfer / bandwidth for the low cost of $6.95 per month. The Lunarpages infrastructure is modern, fast and, judging from our experience with the test site, extremely reliable. Overall, we recommend you give Lunarpages serious consideration for your hosting needs.
| WebHostAnalysis.com Rating For Lunarpages |  |
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