Lunarpages Reviewed: Rock Solid Hosting at an Affordable Price

Lunarpages (review) was founded in the late 90’s when Ron Riddle started offering free web hosting. Late one night, Ron was inspired by a Star Trek episode and came up with the name Lunarpages.

What has started with a web server in Ron’s closet became a family business and is now one of the best web host in the industry.

With over 100,000 accounts hosted on more than 2,500 servers, Lunarpages now have data centers in Las Vegas, Riverside and Los Angeles.

Lunarpages provides a wide array of hosting products:

• Linux and Windows Website Hosting
• Business Hosting
• Reseller Hosting
• Linux and Windows Virtual Private Servers
• Linux and Windows Dedicated Servers

Standard hosting features include PHP 5, Ruby On Rails, ASP, JSP, MySQL 5 and PostgreSQL.

Signing Up With Lunarpages

As a part of the review process I went and signed up with Lunarpages. I decided to go with the Basic Plan which offers cPanel-based hosting with Fantastico Deluxe. You get 1,500 GB of storage, 15,000 GB of bandwidth and lots of unlimited features.

Looking at the pricing options I was sort of uncomfortable with the fact that I had to sign up for two years to get the best value out of my money. Here’s the total cost of the initial sign up depending on the term you choose:

• 3 Months: $59.95 ($30 setup fee included)
• 6 Months: $83.70 ($30 setup fee included)
• 12 Months: $95.40 (free setup)
• 24 Months: $118.80 (free setup)

Usually I don’t really like to sign up for 24 months, I rather go for a year and see how thing goes. But seeing that for a small additional amount of $23.40 I’d get another year, I decided to go for it and take the 24 months plan anyway. If it wouldn’t be for Lunarpages’ strong reputation I would not have signed for such a long term though.

The sign up process went smoothly. I used Paypal to make the payment and it took about 25 minutes to get my account activated.

Lunarpages Customer Account Control Panel

When I logged in my customer account control panel, I was greeted with a nice, clean and intuitive interface (click to enlarge):

The control panel allows you perform tasks such as updating your customer profile, paying your bills and managing your domains. It also gives you access to Page Mason, a website builder that will turn less experienced customers into professional web designers overnight (more on this in a future post).

Lunarpages also provides you with an extensive library of video tutorials that will help you manage your website account. Click on the screenshot below to see the available video tutorials for yourself:

But aside the standard account management features, Lunarpages gives you $775 worth of additional tools! Ok usually I’m like “what kind of crap are they giving out?” but they’re actually giving out some really cool stuff:

• Crazy Egg is an advanced tracking system that will allow to study how visitors are behaving on your website with some graphical interfaces and all.
• Filestream’s TurboBackup allows you to backup your photos easily. Ok I gave that one out to my girlfriend, she’s the one who takes a gazillion pictures every day.
• The Logo Creator from LaughingBird Software is a great tool to help you create professional logos.

There are also some advertising credits from BidVertiser and Linkworth among others. All in all, Lunarpages has setup a nice bonus package.

Lunarpages’ Control Panel

Depending on the hosting plan you’ll be choosing, you will either get cPanel or Plesk to manage your website account. Since I chose the Basic Plan, I’ve got cPanel with the X theme installed (click to enlarge):

For those who don’t know cPanel, it is probably the best web hosting control panel for Linux web servers (and soon Windows servers too). Even though it’s packed with a lot of features, it remains very easy to use. CPanel allows you to manage your email accounts, databases, password-protect directories, view your website statistics and lots more.

Lunarpage Customer Support

Unlike many web hosts, Lunarpages’ support information is everywhere to be seen. They offer 24×7 support and you can contact them by phone or through their ticket system.

I wanted to see how long it took them to reply to my support ticket on a Sunday afternoon so I used their online helpdesk and asked them if there were any ways to install Typo3 through Fantastico Deluxe. I opened my ticket at 4:09pm and got a reply at 5:48pm. Daniel McCall kindly answered my ticket stating that he “didn’t know if Typo3 was going to be added to their Fantastico list but that he moved the ticket to their feedback department”.

I wished he could’ve made Typo3 available in Fantastico on the spot but oh well. We’ll see if they add it in a near future.

The next day I decided to call them and test their phone support. I wish they had a toll free number (I haven’t seen a lot of web hosts having a toll free number to this day). On my first attempt I was greeted with a voice mail system. I don’t like leaving messages. I happen to be like that.

I’ll try a second time a little later then…

So at 9:53am I try calling Lunarpages’ support again. This time I’m put on hold for about 6 minutes. Now I got that U2 song stuck in my head. A tech support guy answers the phone (sorry I totally forgot his name). I ask him how do I setup a dedicated IP address for my website (I know this should’ve been for the sales department but I like shooting in the wrong direction sometimes, it usually pisses them off).

So the customer support guy tells me that I have to pay an additional $2.95 per month to get an IP address and asks me how I’d like to pay. So since I wanted to use Paypal, he put me on hold for another 2 or 3 minutes and filled a request for the sales department.

About 2 minutes later, I got an email from Lunarpages saying that I had an invoice to pay and which I proceeded to. So all in all, it took me like 20 minutes to get a dedicated IP for my website. Not bad.

Lunarpages Review: The Conclusion

I can honestly say that Lunarpages is a strong web host who actually care about their customers very much. Quick and professional support is very important and Lunarpages isn’t scared to go a step further to please their clients.

I’ve easily transferred a blog (a new blog I’m currently putting up should I say) to my Lunarpages account and my first impression was the server it’s hosted on really delivers the good. I’ll see over time if it’s stable or not but I’m very confident it will work great from all the user reviews.

So that said, I strongly recommend Lunarpages. Great price, great value, great product and awesome support.

• Pros: Well experienced and established web host, good 24×7 customer support, phone support, lots of disk space and bandwidth, free domain for life, scalability, low cost.
• Cons: no toll free number, high setup fee on short term contracts.

Lunarpages Rating:

Links

• Lunarpages Website
• Lunarpages Review
• Lunarpages User Reviews
• Lunarpages Detailed Hosting Plans
• Lunarpages Coupon Codes