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#3 Web Hosting - LunarPages Review

"It is not the large disk space or bandwidth that makes us rank LunarPages as #1 but its superior customer support! Their open community forum is flooded with tons of happy customers."

$7.95/month (FREE Setup)
(Just Upgraded!) 3,000 MB 1,000 MB disk space, 100 GB 40 GB Bandwidth

Significant Upgrades! (21 September)

LunarPages has just announced their most recent upgrades on 21 September 2005. These upgrades apply to all new customers and existing customers. We are glad that LunarPages has finally taken aggressive actions in competing with their strong competitors.

Bandwidth Upgrade - Increased to 100 GB/month (previously 40 GB)
MySQL Databases - Increased to 3 databases (previously 1), Increased again to Unlimited on 4 October!
Add-on Domain - Increased to 1 (previously none). That means you can host 2 websites with 1 hosting account. Additional add-on domain can be purchased at only $1/month.
Domain Pointers - Increased to Unlimited (previously 3)
Subdomains -Increased to Unlimited (previously 15)
FTP Accounts - Increased to Unlimited (previously 1)
Shared SSL - Now Included for Free.

You can click here for the complete details of this upgrade.

2 Special Offers From LunarPages!

#1 - Not happy with your current host? Let LunarPages make your day.
If you are unhappy with your current web host and is looking to switch, then you may want to consider LunarPages. Move your website to LunarPages from another web host and sign up for a new annual plan. They will add the time remaining from your existing pre-paid web hosting account to your new LunarPages account (up to 11 months). And they'll even transfer your site for you! They even back their offer with 90 days money back guarantee. Click Here for offer details.

#2 - FREE Domain Name For Life (Beginning 9 September 2005)
LunarPages will offer a free domain name with all annual plans. All new customers may register a new domain or transfer their existing domain to LunarPages at no additional charge.  The domain will be registered in the customer’s name and will be free for as long as the customer hosts with LunarPages. This offer is automated and no coupon code is required.

Overview

This site has been hosted by LunarPages under this $7.95 plan for more than 2 years. We also have another six websites hosted by LunarPages and are very satisfied with their service. The discussion below is based on our experience with LunarPages as one of their customers. You cannot get more InSIDe information about LunarPages elsewhere :-)

LunarPages serves over 80,000 clients (as of August 2005). It was founded in the summer of 2000 when a successful large scale hosting provider, Add2Net Corporation, expanded its hosting offerings to include shared hosting. They offer two hosting plans - Shuttle ($7.95) and Voyager ($22.95).  The $22.95 plan is an ecommerce ready package with 4,000 MB of disk space and 80 GB of bandwidth. We will be discussing the $7.95 plan.

Plan Size and Features

3,000 MB of disk space and 100 GB of bandwidth are a lot. Click on the small picture to view the original wallpaper of Saguaro National Park, Arizona. The size of the large and high quality picture is 228 KB (kilobyte). With 3,000 MB of disk space, you can store more than 10,000 copies of this picture! And with 100 GB/month bandwidth, this picture can be viewed more than 400,000 times a month! The most suitable words to describe 3,000 MB of disk space and 100 GB of bandwidth are "More Than Enough!". :-)

We understand there are many hosts which offer large bandwidth, but keep in mind that these hosts might have funny restrictions such as file size limit, daily bandwidth limit, or even binary files bandwidth limit (pictures, MP3s, Flash ...). We can assure you that LunarPages does not have such restrictions with your disk space and bandwidth usage. You can upload a single 3,000 MB file if you want and you can finish your 100 GB bandwidth in 1 day. As the LunarPages founder and director, Maximiliam Andersen told us, "We actually allow people to use everything and we have no problem offering them what we are currently offering."

Your account is pre-established with 1,000 MB of storage. You can upgrade to maximum 3,000 MB free of charge. What you need to do is simply request the upgrade by email and you will be given a 500 MB increment at a time. You will be granted the free upgrade whenever you have utilized more than 90% of your allocated disk space.

Customer Support

It is not the large disk space or bandwidth that makes us rank LunarPages as #1 but its superior customer support! They spend a great deal of money hiring a lot of support staff to take care of their customers. All of them are very friendly and knowledgeable. With their effort on customer support, you can expect the best attention from them.

1. Email support - Simply email support@lunarpages.com and you will always get a useful reply, no matter if you are a current customer or you just need to ask some presale questions. Useful replies mean they will give you the exact answer you need. We suggest that you send them an email right now to see how effective they are. All email will automatically be tracked by the same ticket system used by the support help desk. This is our favorite method to request support, because it is fast, convenient and effective. Email support is available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

2. Support Help Desk - You will send your inquiry through the use of an online form. All your inquires will be tracked and recorded using their ticket system. They even keep a history of all your issues so you can refer back to them anytime you want. There is also a knowledgebase of frequently asked questions in the help desk so you can find your answers without creating a support ticket.

3. Toll-Free Support - Just call 1-877-LUNARPAGES if you need phone support for USA and Canada. For the United Kingdom, call 0800-072-9150 instead. If you live outside of these countries, you cannot dial the toll free number. They provide another support line for their international customers: 1-714-521-8150. We have called them several times and they actually answer the phone very well!

4. Lunar Forums (LunarForums.com)- LunarPages provides forums to let their customers communicate and help each other. You can find many answers for your questions. You will also meet many happy customers there. Remember only hosts that are confident with their services and have many customers dare to set up an open forum. Currently, the forum has more than 13,000 registered users.

5. Live Chat - This is not the normally seen 1 on 1 live chat but a chat room. Instead of chatting with only 1 person, you can actually chat with a few support staff that are available in the chat room! Not only the support staff will hang around in the chat room, but also some of the LunarPages members! You can head in and ask for their experience with LunarPages. The live chat is accessible by clicking on the "Click Here for Live Chat" link on top of Lunar Forums.

We will surely rate their customer support as 10 over 10, or 11 over 10 if we can :-) Their customer satisfaction speaks for itself. We always stress to our visitors who write to us that if they are web hosting newbie who require a lot of attentions and supports, they should always pick LunarPages. This will make sure that they are fully taken care of in their "early age".

If you have read other reviews we have posted, you will notice that we will state that if you have any unresolved issues with the host, you can always forward them to us and we will take them directly to the officers. Even though we have direct contact with many important officers of LunarPages, we never mention it in our LunarPages review. We don't need to do so because all LunarPages clients are able to resolve the issue directly with the dedicated support staffs without going through a third party like us.

Last month we have submitted a possible SPAM issue to them. To our surprise, not only that they reply to our email but they have also called us and left a voice message! You can click on the 'Play' button below to listen to the voice message yourself (windows platform only).

Important Highlights

Up to Date Software
Compared to other hosts in the top 10, LunarPages is the most effective in keeping their software up to date. Software that we are referring to include PHP, PHPMyAdmin, MySQL, Perl, Linux Kernel and others. This is one of the reasons why we rank them so high. It is very frustrating when you realize that your host is not updating their software.

CPanel Control Panel
LunarPages uses CPanel as the web site control panel. Another popular control panel is Plesk. But from our experience, CPanel is far more user friendly and powerful then Plesk. It allows you to control a lot of things, including email accounts, MySQL databases, custom error messages, password protected directories, setting up forum, shopping cart, chat room, cron jobs, sub domains, MIME types, apache handlers, search engine submission, free CGI scripts and many more. You can even upload and manage your files with its powerful file manager. What we really want you to know is that you can do a lot with CPanel and have a lot of fun with it. There are no such things as setting up forum or cron jobs in Plesk. Plesk control panel is also very slow to load even with a broadband Internet connection.

Fantastico Scripts Library
You can install 37 different scripts to your website INSTANTLY with a few clicks! No installation or programming language required. These scripts include blogs, discussion forums, portals, image galleries, polls, customer support scripts and a lot more.

Transfer Your Website Easily!
Transferring a website to another host is very stressful and time consuming. Now you can ask LunarPages to transfer your existing site to them so you don't need to do it yourself! A customer service representative will contact you to obtain your previous account information and within 24 hours will move your site to their servers as well as make all necessary changes to your domain name.

Sub-Domains and Domain Pointers
You can create Unlimited sub-domains and Unlimited domain pointers (domain alias/parking) for FREE. For example, we create the sub domain webdesigners.webhostingpal.com for our small web designers directory. Domain pointers and add-on domains are different. A domain pointer/alias is merely a second name for your website. Both domain point to the same website. An add-on domain is actually a second website. Both domain point to 2 different websites. They will share the same resources in one hosting account.

Multiple Domain Hosting (1 Free add-on domain. Additional for $1)
If you have read our DWHS Review, you know that multiple domain hosting will be the future of web hosting. LunarPages offers 1 free add-on domain along with the plan. That means you can host up to 2 websites with 1 hosting account. You can easily purchase more add-on domains for only $1 each per month! This means you can easily host more websites with the same hosting account at a reasonable cost.

Web Statistics Referrals
Referrals allow you to know where your visitors come from (i.e. which site or search engine sent them to your site). They configure their web stats to show up to 250 of your web site referrals. More referrals mean more information. Almost all other web hosts configure their stats program to list only the top 30 referrals.

Flash Video Tutorials
You can enjoy learning by watching video tutorials instead of reading boring text tutorials. These tutorials include changing nameservers, working with CPanel, setting up your email client, uploading your site with FTP, using Dreamweaver MX, using Macromedia Flash and using Microsoft FrontPage.

PHP & MySQL Platform

LunarPages offers a very good platform for PHP and MySQL. They do a great job on keeping both software up to date. With PHPMyAdmin pre-installed, you can manipulate your MySQL database easily through the web-based interface. As you can see, we use PHP and MySQL extensively in our site. We use MySQL to store all the information about the web hosting plans. We use PHP to write scripts that search the database, compare plans and display the plan information. You are even allowed to connect to LunarPages MySQL server remotely using MySQL monitor or other MySQL remote connect tool, or even a self-written PHP script on your local computer!

Server Information

LunarPages has more than 200 live servers for web hosting. Every month, they will add around 5 new servers to their server farm. New customers will most likely be placed on the new servers because they have the most resources. They are using Dell PowerEdge 2850 servers powered by dual Intel Xeon 3.2Ghz hyper-threaded processors, 4GB of memory and 5 x 73 gig hard drives in Raid 5 configuration. Each server cost more than $10,000! Backup of all servers is performed in a daily basis.

Our Final Advice

If you need a host that will spoon-feed you like a child, then LunarPages will be your first choice. They will pamper you like a child by providing you with the best customer support. You will get your best hosting experience from them. You are also advice to read our DWHS review (rank #1) and PowWeb review for comparison!