Lunarpages Web Hosting Review

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Support:
Features:
Reliability:
Value:

IP Address	Service	Status	Response Time	Last Monitored
209.200.229.4	HTTP		0.146 secs	05-13-2008 22:20:00pm
209.200.229.4	HTTP		0.099 secs	05-13-2008 22:10:00pm
209.200.229.4	HTTP		0.341 secs	05-13-2008 22:00:01pm
209.200.229.4	HTTP		0.14 secs	05-13-2008 21:50:00pm

Lunarpages.com Profile and Background

Lunarpages is a web hosting company founded in the summer of 2000 by its parent company ADD2NET Corporation as it began to expand into the lucrative shared web hosting marketplace. Since then Lunarpages has been successfully providing large scale managed and unmanaged hosting services, and hosting over 70 000 websites for both business and personal use.

Lunarpages considers itself to be different to many web hosting companies according to its websites, in that it heavily invests into its support infrastructure, and strongly believes in that “customer service and rock solid hosting platforms” are central goals of its business.

The company and its data center are based in Los Angeles, California. The data center is comprised of a BGP4 routed gigabit fiber network multi-homed with over 60 carriers, such as, Mzima Networks, Level3, NTT/Verio, Global Crossing, Genuity, SBC, Microsoft/MSN, AOL/TimeWarner, Japan Telecom, Hurricane Electric and Savvis.

Signup

After pondering what web hosting plan we wanted we went ahead and purchased its Shuttle Hosting plan for one year. The signup was conducted over a secure connection and it processed my credit card without a hitch.

Lunarpages offers two main web hosting plans, the Shuttle and Voyager. Since we ordered the plan for one year, the setup fee was wavered. Any contract less than one year incurs a $30 setup fee.

We soon received the login account details after our order went through Lunarpage's billing system. We moved one of our anonymous text domains onto the DNS they provided, and also logged into the system to check the account details was accurate.

Value for Money

Both the Shuttle and Voyager web hosting plans can be considered great value for consumers. The standard $7.95 Shuttle plan comes with 3GB of disk space and 40GB of data transfer per month while the $22.95 is given twice the amount of data transfer allowance, 4GB of disk space, anonymous FTP services and more.

The web hosting services is powered by, at the time as this review is written, by Dell Power Edge 2650 servers. These servers are 4-way CPU systems with a standard 6GB of RAM and 3x70GB RAID. If any one hard drive fails, the other two should immediately take over. Such data redundancy is crucial for business websites that rely on it stay up.

All web hosting services offered by Lunarpages is managed by the well-known CPanel Hosting automation software, and is certainly targeted to be user-friendly. However, the software is known to report wrong disk usage and data transfer statistics in some cases. Apart from a few bugs, the software was more than satisfactory in terms of the features it provided customers like us.

Overall, these features certainly make these web hosting plans, especially the standard Shuttle plan, value for money for the typical consumer.

Support

We found support to be very responsive at Lunarpages, more than most major web hosting companies in the industry. During our time at Lunarpages, we asked questions related to support issues through the community forum, support ticketing system, the toll free number and also the general support e-mail. All avenues were responded in a prompt manner even if it was a note such as ‘….we will look into it’. What made a greater difference with the follow up when such e-mails was sent. In one such case, our ticket was answered in less than 10 minutes.

The online community forum was surprisingly active, and existing clients seem encouraged to answer questions when fellow customers came across problems. It made the whole experience rather refreshing than your average ‘downtime-and-response’ discussion boards.

Stability

During the two months we spent at Lunarpages, our in-house monitoring tool did not detect any downtime with the web server we were on. Therefore, we can say with some evidence that Lunarpages is a reliable web hosting provider. It is one of the few rare providers that we tested in our top ten web hosting companies that did not suffer any downtime.

In the future, we will publish the results of our in-house monitoring tool and give a graphical display of the web hosting company’s performance under review.

Final Words

Although it is difficult for web hosting companies to receive a perfect score, Lunarpages came very close. Lab tests in all areas showed Lunarpages scored highly, and we would certainly recommend their web hosting services to other people. The only downside with Lunarpages is their lack of service offerings and value-adding features, such as, a web page building tool. We hope they do fix such shortfalls in the future.

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