Lunarpages
Posted under: Lunarpages Web Hosting Ratings
A good web host if you are starting out, not otherwise!
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Summary
Lunarpages have been in business for quite a long time, and have helped host Fortune 100 corporations, private resellers, and more. With 160,000 satisfied customers, they have become one of the most reliable hosting companies to date. They include all the services you could possibly want when hosting a website, big or small.
Quick Facts About Lunarpages
- Lunarpages was founded in 1998, and now has 160,000 customers.
- Datacenters in Irvine and San Diego,CA, Las Vegas,NV and several satellites locations in the United States.
- Web Hosting Services: Starter Plan ($3.95/month), Basic Plan ($4.95), Business Plan ($18.95)
- Phone: 877-586-2772
Products and Services by Lunarpages
When you first visit the website, you are placed in front of a wall of different offers and services to choose from. It can be rather confusing at first glance compared to other hosting sites, but you can find any solution that you may be looking for, from a basic blog to eCommerce site to VPS hosting.
The Starter plan is a cheap hosting option priced at $3.95/month. With the low price, comes limited features as the storage is only 5 GB, 50 GB of bandwidth, and the only support option is by email, not phone. This option is great for someone who knows what they’re doing and needs a space to develop the look and feel of a website in a live environment, but definitely not suited for someone who may want assistance in the development of a website.
The Basic hosting plan is $4.95/month, has unlimited storage and bandwidth, includes 24/7/365 phone support, and a free domain name. It also comes with $110 worth of advertising credits for MySpace, Facebook, and Google AdWords. The Business hosting plan is $18.95/month, includes everything the Basic plan has, plus 3 domain names. It also includes some features a business may be interested in, including Tremmendesk hosted Help Desk, 3 months of unlimited backup through KeepIt!, and a dedicated IP.
Hostorian’s Review of Lunarpages Web Hosting
Lunarpages’ Performance
Lunarpages offers a 99.9% guarantee for uptime, plus a 30 day money-back guarantee. They also have tape backups, and 24/7/365 server monitoring.
Lunarpages’ Features
All plans come with over 30 web scripts to install software, which include the popular options of WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, ZenCart, and osCommerce. They also include a package worth $700 of free software or coupons that help you design a logo, get customer feedback, and more.
There is also the ability to register a domain name (if it’s not included with your hosting package), but the prices are rather expensive. I did a search for a .com domain which are $19.95 at Lunarpages, and $11.00 at GoDaddy. If you need a domain to include with your package, use a different service.
Support and Customer Care by Lunarpages
Support for Lunarpages has almost as many options as their hosting packages. They offer free 24/7 support, 365 days a year through email, and phone (except for Starter packages). They also have a series of FAQs, a Glossary of terms, Online Tutorials, Knowledge Base, a Wiki, forums, and a ticket system.
In addition, they also monitor the servers 24/7/365.
Pros
- Offers great choices for software to get your website operational right away.
- Cheap Hosting plans make it affordable for amateurs
- Business Plan offers some great add-on features, like the Help Desk.
Cons
- Starter package does not include phone support
- Registering a domain name is expensive.
- Customers routinely ranked the customer service levels as poor.
Actual Customer Reviews for Lunarpages
“I’ve been with Lunarpages for some time now. Prices were great and support were great also.
It used to be that their prices were always the most competitive that you wouldn’t think twice about signing with other hosting company. Now the great price and great offers are mainly for the new accounts while accounts like mine are getting hit with increased prices each year. I asked on their forum page as to why the price increase while others are much lower, I get a response of “Times are changing”.
Support used to be great on the forum and also submitting tickets. Now when you post questions in the forum, you don’t get the same quality of support. It seems like they have more forum moderators than knowledgeable support staff. At least submitting support ticket is still fast and reliable.” – lostchild368
“My previous host was not so good. Lunarpages had great special for two year plan. I must say I’ve saved good money and the hosting has been rock solid, fast, and as I’ve had no issues with service can only say when I caused an htaccess error due to some sloppy ftp handling and brought down all sites – they got back to me in no time and politely informed me of cause of issue and quick fix. I fixed the file and voila, all better. I’ve begun implementing all sorts of php etc. and have five sites now, still rock solid! Super Host, am very pleased!” – satisfiedincny
“Lunar pages is the worst company I have ever dealt with. I have had countless issues with their utterly horrible customer support both via email and phone. They have now taken to “hiding” any complaints and issues about their service on their forums. You can only see the issues customers are posting about if you have made an “account” and have at least 10 posts to your name. This is an obvious attempt to hide the growing number of issues with their service from potential customers viewing their forum.” – Mike
Verdict of this Lunarpages Review
At first glance, Lunarpages looks like a great option for people to use when starting up a website. The Starter package is very reasonable for a beginner blogger who is just starting to build up some reliable traffic to the website, but only if they don’t think they will need support. Registering a domain name is rather expensive compared to other sites, but if money is no object, than it won’t be an issue.
Problems begin to arise when you delve deeper into the customer reviews of the site. There are not too many performance issues as far as the servers being down, but there are a lot of issues with shifty behavior by the company and by poor customer service. Several people have mentioned that the support center is located outside of the US, and is so large, you never deal with the same person twice. They end up wasting a lot of time repeating themselves over and over again.
Another issue that has come up is the site or account being locked out because of “suspicious behavior” which is actually fairly common – for example, checking an IMAP email account from a desktop and mobile on the same wifi network. Having the same IP address send duplicate IMAP requests raises a red flag for the system.
Hosting a small site on Lunarpages seems to be the ideal situation to be in while dealing with the company. If you plan on hosting a major site that will be using a lot of processing power, or have a lot of bandwidth usage, Lunarpages is not a great option for you. The only reason to use this service is for their Starter package to get a site up and running quickly. Otherwise, I would suggest finding a better alternative.
Rolling all of the above into a number, I would only rate this company a 3/5 and warn people to be extremely cautious with what they do with their website.
Click here to visit the official Lunarpages website.
