Lunarpages
Hosting Plans
0
Starting at / per month
4.66
Reviews
0
Hosting Plans
0
Starting at / per month
4.66
Reviews
0
Lunarpages is
among the oldest web hosting providers in existence today. Starting from
scratch in a garage in California in 1998, the company has grown tremendously
and now hosts over 150,000 sites, including clients such as BlackBerry, Microsoft,
Sony, Cisco and more. Lunarpages was founded by Ron Riddle who decided to swap
careers from a brick mason to a webmaster. After a few years of wading into the
murky world of online business, he decided to partner with Maximilian Anderson,
a Swedish programmer he met online; together they developed Lunarpages which
they’ve grown together and now has data centers in California, Nevada, and
Arizona.
What this
company offers is not necessarily different from what you’d get from other web
hosts. However, it is the attention to details in hosting options, excellent
support, and transparency in regards to its infrastructure that should push
Lunarpages to your list of preferred companies when making a decision.
Lunarpages
specializes in scalable web hosting aimed at developers, businesses, as well as
industry-leaders. The web host offers both Window and Linux hosting services
that cover various categories including shared, VPS, cloud and dedicated hosting.
In this review,
we examine their plans, features, strengths & weaknesses, and FAQs.
Since its
inception over two decades ago, LunarPages has continued to provide a broad
range of hosting solutions that are customized to meet diverse user needs. The
firm achieves this by investing in scalable hosting that offers reliable
services at economical pricing. Currently,
it has five packages namely shared
hosting, VPS (both windows and Linux),
dedicated hosting and managed hosting.
Below is a
breakdown of the individual plans in each of these packages:
LunarPages
offers what has come to be known as unlimited hosting on their Linux based
platform. While shared hosting is popular for its capability to pool resources, it’s also the reason why the service
is not recommendable for resource
intensive websites. These plans offer several standard features such as LPCP
control panel and the ability to upgrade to cPanel, though the latter will cost
you around $15 for the license. The packages also include Softaculous Web
scripts for all your optimization needs.
LunarPages also supports installs of some of the leading CMS packages like WordPress, Joomla,
Magento, and Drupal.
Starter Linux Hosting
This package
offers up to 5 Gb storage and up to 50 Gb bandwidth. The plan accommodates only
1 FTP account, MySQL database, and up to
5 email accounts. A monthly subscription is available for $3.95.
Basic Linux Hosting
LunarPages
offers this ultimate unlimited package for as little as $4.95 per month. The
storage, bandwidth, FTP accounts, MySQL databases, an email accounts all being
unlimited. The plan also includes Facebook Ads credit worth $25. In terms of scalability, you can get shell access for an
extra $2 per month while a cPanel license will set you back $2 per month.
Business Hosting Plans
This is a compilation of
shared packages that are customized to fit enterprises
rather than basic shared hosting. The plans are PCI compliant and include both
an SSL certificate and dedicated IP dresses.
Premium Plan
This package
packs 20 GB worth of storage space and up to 200 GB full speed bandwidth. Monthly subscription will cost you $22.95.
Advantage Plan
LunarPages
includes 40 GB storage and 400 GB bandwidth cap on this plan. A monthly
subscription goes for $42.95.
Enterprise Plan
If you are
looking for a fully unlimited plan for your business,
then this is the perfect package. It features unlimited storage and bandwidth
the plan costs $62.95 per month.
Windows Hosting
When it comes to programming having the right environment to run your custom programs goes a long way into ensuring the success of such
solutions. Luckily for you, LunarPages offers a Windows-based
hosting solution via this package which features a free domain name and runs
Plesk control panel version 11. The firm also
provides unlimited storage and up to 500
MB mailbox storage per domain. The plan includes support for DotNetNuke, report
starter kit, and portal starter kit. A monthly subscription is going for $9.95.
Reseller hosting
offers clients a high-returns investment program thanks to its private label
capabilities. This eliminates the need to
purchase costly hosting hardware and having to build custom management software
- all you need is to brand your package with your customization. These plans
also support private nameservers making it possible for your clients to use
your nameservers instead of LunarPages nameservers.
Each package comes
with a dedicated IP which is a standard requirement for standard SSL
certificates and creating private nameservers. The firm also recognizes the
need to have scalability options on the hardware allocation. As such, it offers users 80 GB disk space and
700 GB upgrades for $15 a month. Other additional features you’ll enjoy with
this plan include premium restore for $10 per month and a reseller JSP account
for $3.95.
Lunarpages currently has only
one reseller plan; the Developer Reseller
Hosting Plan. This plan packs WHM
control panel with cPanel control panel for clients. In terms of hardware, the plan
packs 50GB disk space and 500 GB
bandwidth. A monthly subscription goes for $19.95.
With each growth
stage, your businesses hosting needs will
grow up to the level where the cost of upgrading your hardware outpaces the
benefits gained from using such equipment.
Having a dedicated server opens new doors especially when it comes to
flexibility and scalability. With such room to maneuver you can implement and
manage software and configurations on the go without having to worry about
hardware bottlenecks.
Lunarpages offers both Windows
and Linux based dedicated servers to take care
of these growing needs and demand for resources. While the hardware
allocation is similar for the two OS platforms, some
software upgrade costs may vary.
Let’s take a
detailed look into each package.
Linux Dedicated Servers
Single Quad-Core
Plan
This plan runs
on an Intel Xeon E3-1225 v5 quad-core
processor and 4 Gb RAM. In terms of storage,
the server packs dual 250 GB SSD drives. The bandwidth cap kicks in after the initial 10 TB per month.
The operating system of choice is Linux CentOS. The package also includes 2 IP
addresses and goes for $99 per month.
Single Octa Core Plan
LunarPages
equips this plan with an Intel E5-2670 octa-core
processor and 16 gigs of RAM. The bandwidth cap kicks in after the initial 10
TB per month and the plan retails for
$289 per month.
Dual Octa Core
If you are
looking for a data-crunching server then
look no further, this behemoth runs dual
Intel E5-2670 octa-core processors. The
server packs 32 Gb of RAM and up to 10 TB full speed bandwidth. The firm
permits either RAID 5 or 10 depending on your needs and includes two dedicated IP addresses with each package. A
monthly subscription will set you back $589.
Windows Dedicated Servers
These plans run
on the Windows Server operating system. Currently, Lunarpages supports Windows Server
2012 and 2016. A Windows licensing fee is also applicable and will cost you $25 per
month for the standard license; alternatively, the data center version will costs
you $135. These plans also come with additional standard
features like dual 250 GB SSD storage, up to 10TB full speed bandwidth and 2 IP addresses.
Single Quad Core server
This package
runs on an Intel E3-1225 v5 quad-core
processor and 4 GB RAM. It retails for as little as $99 per month.
Single Octa Core server
LunarPages
utilizes an Intel E5-2670 octa-core
processor on this package and 16 GB of RAM. A monthly subscription costs $289.
Dual Octa Core Server
Running on a
pair of Intel E5octacore processors this server is more than capable of
handling multithreaded work on the go. The
server also features 32 GB RAM and a monthly subscription is available
for $589.
VPS packages are
ideal for businesses whose hosting needs are expanding too fast to host on
shared plans but still not heavy enough to call for an entirely dedicated server. This
is further supported by the instant resource allocation that ensures your
server is ready to go as soon as you pay for it. LunarPages currently has one
plan under this product line.
Lunarpages
offers a number of unique features that helps to set them apart from the crowd
in the hosting space. Here are some of those features.
Like any other
business, web hosting companies have to always adapt to changing customer needs
if they are to survive in the overly
competitive digital space. This is true for LunarPages, a web host that’s still operating more than 20 years later.
To get a better
understanding of this firm, we have to delve deep into its performance features
which is undoubtedly the main reason why it has managed to survive this long. For
starters, this firm offers various personal and business packages each backed
by a highly scalable hosting architecture. We
would be doing this company a disservice if we just generalized its
performance; so, to avoid this, let's
take a look at some of the features that help it maintain such successful performance
and speed counts.
Enterprise SSD Storage
Solid State
Drives offer speed improvements over the traditional hard disk drive solutions.
These improved read/write speeds directly reflect on your website or web app’s
performance. This is as a result of the over ten-fold I/O speeds and file fetching
capabilities. Ideally, your site should always have instant loading which is precisely what LunarPages offers on its SSD
backed hosting services. However, while the
company does offer unlimited storage options on some of their plans, they haven’t specified if such plans actually run on their enterprise SSDs.
Scalable Architecture
LunarPage’s
hosting architecture is all about scalability; this results in scalability options in just
about every computing allocation. The company, therefore, allows RAM, CPU, disk
space and bandwidth upgrades depending on your hosting package. These upgrades
make it easy to step up your plan’s performance on the go without having to
result in excessive charges which would otherwise obstruct the very essence of
scalability which is economically viable performance.
Multi-OS Environment Support
Over the past decade, we have witnessed considerable investments in various operating systems each with its pros and
cons, especially in performance
capabilities. LunarPages recognizes the need to offer their customers the
freedom of selecting which OS to use. Currently,
the firm is offering Linux backed LAMP and windows OS hosting. This freedom
allows developers to host their apps on
the recommended platform thus ripping maximum performance from the service.
It’s important to note that each platform features various speed optimization
scripts to streamline your service’s interaction
with the hardware further. The result is
a general increase in performance across the entire platform as each site gets
hosted on a compatible operating system.
Intel Xeon E-series Processors
LunarPages
relies on the latest lineup of Intel Xeon server class CPUs. These offer a
competitive edge over traditional desktop processors, especially in multi-core workloads. Having your site hosted on a
server that runs one of these will grant you more processing power for your
custom apps. Besides, it also should be able to record additional computing
capacity to handle those traffic spikes that occur every time you have a sales
campaign going on your site. These performance improvements also reflect on
your visitor’s end whereby they experience much better loading speeds.
Multiple Data Centers
LunarPages
currently operates three SAS 70 type 2 data centers. This grants you the much-needed freedom to decide which data center
you would prefer to host you site on.
Each of these facilities gets multiple
gigabit internet connections backed by redundant power supply to ensure that
the servers never go offline. The firm currently has data centers in Las Vegas,
NV and Irvine, C., and the Hawthorne data
center.
This company
takes website security seriously by offering top features for security. For
instance, all their hosting packages come with DDoS protection to prevent
attacks that inconveniently take websites down.
Check more
Lunarpages security features below.
SecureLive
This is an
advanced security system designed for a variety of platforms such as WordPress,
Joomla, Drupal and many more. Installing the plugin will enable you to identify
and block threats, and hackers and see any reports of malicious activity on your
site.
SecureLive goes
a notch higher to report the hackers to appropriate authorities. LunarPages
used this system for real-time monitoring and blocks violators through bans. It
has been endorsed by industry experts in independent testing as it has been
tested to be effective at blocking online theft.
This service
costs $9.95/mo per domain.
Secure Socket Layer (SSL)
Lunarpages
utilizes SSL certificates to enhance the safety of information exchanged
between the site and visitors. Having one on your site not only ensures secure
transactions but also helps to put your customers’ minds at ease when it comes
to completing payments. Lunarpages offers free dedicated SSL certificate for
business plan. Shared SSL certificate will only function with cgi/perl and HTML
based scripts. However, SSL does not work with ASP, PHP and JSP pages because
of the security-based restrictions on the servers.
Backups
Backups are
important in the event you blunder with your website. Luckily for you Lunarpages
is committed to ensuring all your data files are backed up each night. This is
a great feature because third party tools and plug-ins are known to cause site
crashes sometimes. Therefore, you can install any plugins and third-party
software without fear.
This company
offers R1Sost Managed Backup which backs up at the block level instead of file
level. This feature reduces disk I/O and shortens backup windows compared to
file-based full backups. Another impressive feature with R1Soft backups is that
you have 5 restore points to choose from hence you can be sure to restore earlier
site versions. Lunarpages provides 24/7 support for backups and offer it for
free. So, if you need to restore backup, you can just need to contact the
support team to have it sent to you.
LunarPages
relies on two control panel solutions to manage their hosting platform. For the
shared hosting architecture, the company offers the popular cPanel control
panel software. On their dedicated and VPS platform,
there’s the additional choice of utilizing LunarPages Control Panel (LPCP).
While the two do defer in terms of functionality and pricing, most of the
features are uniform across the two programs.
We take a look
at their functionality below:
Email Management
LunarPages
allows unlimited emails on their plans. Therefore, for one to fully take
advantage of this opportunity, you can
use the cPanel email tab to create unlimited email addresses, manage existing
email accounts create forwarders, set up mass mailing orders, and even
configure your anti-spam settings on the
go.
DNS Management
This tab offers
a centralized domain name configuration tab. You can add parked domains,
subdomains, and even remove irrelevant ones to ensure that all your traffic
points in the right direction. On the other
hand, you can use the DNS zone editor tool to manage the DNS zones for
your domains directly from cPanel.
Account Information and Stats
If you have multiple
teams working on your site, then it’s advisable to create user accounts with
set permission levels. To do so, you can
use the accounts tab on cPanel which lists all active user accounts and admins for easier management. The tab also displays a few basic stats such as
performance logs and visitor count.
Lunarpages has on-site
team of experts ready to help its customers. The company has dedicated lines
for customers in the US, UK and Canada to ensure enough coverage for any
customers who needs assistance. You will be impressed by their US-based team of
experts who listen and respond in the most professional and polite way
possible. For their phone support, you can reach them starting 7 AM to 5 PM for
shared hosting clients.
For VPS and
dedicated hosting clients, there is a 24/7 phone support. This company also
offers Live Chat for quick responses through the website. However, the live
chat support is only available for sales. You can also submit a ticket through
the website though their response time may take up to 12 hours. This may be a
lot of time especially if you are facing a potentially money-losing issue.
Knowledgebase
The web host
also provides users with a knowledgebase as well as frequently asked questions
sections. There are numerous articles where you can find solutions to common challenges.
The company also provides a full-blown wiki page where you can browse through
the over 430 guides to common problems that clients face. And if you feel
chatty, you can visit their user forums for simple solutions to common issues. There
is no doubt that you will find speedy answers to sticky situations you
encounter at Lunarpages.
Lunarpages does
offer a solid 30-day money back guarantee. It is certainly a big relief to know
that if you are dissatisfied with your plan from Lunarpages, you can cancel to
get your money back or upgrade to a better plan. As with other web hosts, this
company does not refund the fees for domain or setup costs depending on the
plan you choose.
Building an ecommerce
store at Lunarpages is a breeze due to the choice of shopping carts and
ecommerce platforms you get. These platforms offer the tools that small
businesses require for building and managing the store even when you know
nothing about coding. The best part about it is that they are very affordable
to ensure that small businesses make sufficient profits.
Additionally, this
web host offers Weebly hosting plans with customizable templates, unlimited web
pages and an advanced platform for ecommerce. Using Weebly you can easily sell
products online and offer secure experiences to customers across mobile and web.
This platform offers a whole plethora of themes, discount codes and you can
easily track your inventory. Besides, Weebly will automatically set up your
site to be optimized on various search engines. You can also use most popular
payment methods such as PayPal and Stripe.
Weebly offers a drag-and-drop website building experience making it not only easy to use but also eliminating the
need to have technical programming knowledge. The builder comes with over 40
professionally built themes for you to select and customize according to your
needs.
LunarPages
provides Microsoft exchange 2016 email support to all its clients which is not
only cost-effective but also offers universal compatibility.
R1soft offers
disaster recovery solution as a service. The software runs on a separate server
to avoid bogging down on your server resources. The backups are available for
as long as you wish and are easy to restore from
the disk-based, block-level backup storage solution.
While the good
old fax may be seeing declined usage now,
there are still some firms that rely on fax services on a daily basis. If this sounds like your business, you’ll be glad to know that LunarPages offers
the fax to email service which conveniently sends and receives faxes in the
format of webmail. This provides added
security and mobility as you can access the faxes on the go.
LunarPages is
offering up to $100 AdWords credit on select hosting plans. The credit will go a long way into subsidizing the
cost of advertising your site.
Reliable Customer Support
While the
customer service provided by Lunarpages is not the best, it is commendably decent.
You can access the customer support team via phone, live chat or by email. The
email system is available 24/7. The response to the emails may however take some time to get a reply, but when
you finally do, the answers given are often detailed and personal.
They have also
made available two types of documentation
to boost their customer service reliability. The first one is the knowledge base system which consists of easy to
understand articles but with no images. The second documentation is the support
wiki which contains over 400 guides on common
topics well written to help customers navigate and get instant answers to the
most common issues.
Fast Site Loading Speed
Apart from great
customer experience, fast site loading speed is paramount as it has a huge
bearing on a site’s ability to rank high on
search results and also on user experience. Lunarpages has an above average loading speed which helps
attract and retain more customers from sites with slow loading speed.
Their Pricing system is Straight Forward
Unlike most web
hosting platforms that charge low introductory prices and increase them later,
Lunarpages is pretty straightforward on its
pricing model. Failing to inform the client about the real price will only make
the customer experience worse and get negative reviews.
Lunarpages does
not play any such tricks. They offer a fixed rate whether you subscribe for one
or several years. Like most web host, Lunarpages does not offer a monthly
subscription; however, there’s a 30-day money
back guarantee in case you’re dissatisfied with its products or services.
Lunarpages Uptime
Lunarpages
guarantees you a reliable, stable uptime for your site with a little above the
average of industry uptime. Unfortunately, Lunarpages does not specify if there’s any kind
of compensation if your site experiences a downtime below the promised
as is the case with most web hosting companies today.
Free Site Transfer and Domain Name
Site transfer
can be very costly and time-consuming in most cases. Lunarpages makes
this easy by helping you move your site into
their servers and getting your site working for free. While most web host
offers the same free of charge, there are usually exemptions based on the
maximum size or the number of pages a site must have to be eligible for this
service.
Another great
feature offered by Lunarpages is the free domain.
This will come in handy if you’re looking to keep your initial costs low.
Free Backup and Restoration
This is a rare feature only available with very few
hosting platforms despite being a lifesaver to site owners. Lunarpages
automatically backs up your site on a nightly basis. This is great news, particularly
because plug-ins and third party don’t always work well together and might cause a crash to your site with no
warning. Lunarpages helps to eliminate such risks with nightly backups and free
restoration. In case, you need backups, you only have to contact them and
they’ll provide them free of charge.
Complains about
the customer support
For most web
host’s customer service, you can get help through a call, email or via IM.
Unfortunately, Lunarpages has a limit when it comes to accessing customer support. For instance, even though
they offer the live chat system, is only limited for sales issues. Their phone
call system is available but not 24/7 throughout the year. Their main focus is
the ticket system which takes a relatively long time to get a replay. So
however great their responses might be, the time taken to get a response might
cause damage especially if your site is facing serious issues that require
immediate attention.
Their Website is not the easiest to Navigate
There is plenty of customer support information on
their website. However, the information is not designed to help beginners with
little or no web hosting knowledge. Their clustered website makes it hard for
navigation. If you are a beginner, you might need to first learn the basics
from somewhere else.
They charge for cPanel
cPanel is one of
the plans that Lunarpages offer. This feature has been known to be offered as a built-in
part of a web hosting package. Lunarpages however
charge at least $2.00 for you to get it. The price might be low but when you compare to her competitors who
offer the same for free, but it is quite
unreasonable.
The risk of Account Suspension
The unlimited
features they offer are in real sense limited
to some extent. You might get your account suspended due to “high resource
usage.” Although only giant websites can achieve
this, the mild thought of waking up to your account suspended is mind-blowing.
How many data centers does
LunarPages own?
LunarPages relies on its three
peerless data centers located across the
US. The data centers have redundancy
measures to ensure that your site never goes offline. Currently, the firm has data centers in the following locations:
Las Vegas, NV. Irvine, CA. and Hawthorne, CA.
Do they have a refund
policy?
Yes, LunarPages has a 30-day money back guarantee. Of course, this
service is subject to terms and conditions so be sure to go through their SLA
before filing for a refund.
Will I get a free SSL
certificate?
Yes, LunarPages is offering free SSL certificates on select plans
such as the business hosting plans. It's
important to note that the company only covers the cost for up to one year
after which you have to pay for the certificate to extend usage.
Can I host an email
account?
Yes, LunarPages offers unlimited email hosting with the majority of their hosting plans. Take advantage
of this service to create personalized email addresses that customers can
associate with your brand.
Is there a limit on the
number of visitors per month?
No, LunarPages does not limit the access to your site. Instead, the company measures bandwidth
consumption which is limited or unlimited depending on your plan of choice.
Is LunarPages recommended
for developers?
Yes, from supporting multiple operating systems such as LAMP stack
Linux and Windows to private cloud LunarPages is all about dev support. The
firm even named one of their products under the reseller package to developer
reseller hosting.
Does LunarPages offer a
content delivery network (CDN)?
Yes, LunarPages relies on Cloudflare CDN which is one of the most
advanced content caching and DDOS blocking service on the internet. Having your
site cached on their multiple CDN servers will significantly
improve its response time.
How is LunarPages customer
support like?
Apart from the 24/7 online chat support the firm has also invested a
lot in their help center that regularly updates blog posts, guides, and tutorials based on the most frequent
queries they face each day. Support inquiries and questions can be sent via email
or on phone whereby the working hours are Monday through Friday 7:00 am to 5:00 pm
Pacific time. It’s important to note that
dedicated and VPS support is available 24/7/365.
Does LunarPages offer a
website builder?
Yes, LunarPages includes a free copy of Weebly website builder with
every account. Weebly on its part is an
easy to use drag and drop builder that features hundreds of professionally
built themes.
What payment options are
supported by LunarPages?
LunarPages currently supports PayPal, credit cards, money order,
Alipay and checks. You can always change your payment method on your customer
account page under billing and contacts information.
Who created LunarPages?
The firm was founded in 1998 in California and is a subsidiary of
add2net Inc. which offers affordable website hosting all over the globe.
Does LunarPages offer an
uptime guarantee?
Unfortunately, no, LunarPages has an entire page dedicated to its
uptime logs but doesn’t offer any financial commitment on maintaining the indicated
uptime. On the brighter side, the firm’s
latest uptime count is above the industry average and seems they aren’t that
many complaints about the lack of a
guarantee.
Do they offer any bonuses?
Yes, LunarPages offers up to $100 worth of Google AdWords credits
and up to $50 Facebook AdWords credits which will go a long way in easing your
advertising budget.
Is LunarPages recommended
for e-commerce?
No, the firm does not offer any customized plans for the perfect
e-commerce experience. While you can manually configure your site to access the
Mojo market place, the firm fails to
include such on the stand hosting packages.
Will I get a control
panel?
Yes, LunarPages includes two control panel solutions for their
hosting packages. These are cPanel and LunarPages Control Panel (LPCP). These
offer similar functionality and capabilities.
What makes LunarPages
different?
Unlike other firms, LunarPages
does not offer an uptime guarantee. Instead,
the firm directs all is energies into ensuring that the clientele never experiences unmitigated downtime. While the firm has been in existence for the
last 20 years, they have managed to stay relevant even without an uptime
guarantee this goes to show just how committed they are in delivering quality
hosting services with minimal to no downtime at all.
Can I use my favorite CMS
with LunarPages shared hosting?