#1 Web Hosting – LunarPages Review
“It is not the large disk space or bandwidth that makes us rank LunarPages so high but its superior customer support! Their open community forum is flooded with tons of happy customers.”
Update:
1 May 2007 – Increased bandwidth to 3,500 GB!
28 Apr 2007 – Increased disk space to 350 GB!
9 Jan 2007 – Upgraded to 250 GB disk space and 2,500 GB bandwidth.
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Website: LunarPages Coupon Code
Coupon Code = TakeOff25Add2
Get $25 OFF your hosting bill AND 2 extra months for FREE at the SAME TIME! Valid for all 1-year and 2-year order.
If you order for 1 year, you only need to pay $70.40 and you will get 14 months of hosting! The averaged monthly fee will become $5.02 for 14 months!
| Price Before Discount | $95.40 |
| $25 Off Using Coupon | -$25.00 |
| Total Price After Discount |
$70.40 |
If you order for 2 years, you need to pay $141.80 and you will get 26 months of hosting. The averaged monthly fee will become $5.45 for 26 months.
| Price Before Discount | $166.80 |
| $25 Off Using Coupon | -$25.00 |
| Total Price After Discount |
$141.80 |
Why it is wiser to order for 2 years?
If you order for 1 year, your averaged price is $5.02 but you only get 14 months of hosting. You have to renew your account after 14 months and you will need to pay the normal hosting fee of $7.95/month thereafter.
If you order for 2 years, your averaged price is slightly higher at $5.45 but you actually get 26 months of hosting! This is because the yearly rate is $7.95/month but the bi-yearly rate is $6.95 ($1 cheaper). You will also be able to renew at the cheaper rate of $6.95/month 26 months later.
Take the 24 months order. You will be hosting with them for a long time. This site has been hosted by them for more than 4 years. And because they allow you to host 11 websites in 1 single account, you can always add more websites later without paying a single cent for hosting anymore.
Special Offer For Transfer Clients
Move your website to LunarPages from another web host and sign up for a new annual or bi-annual plan. They will add the time remaining from your existing web hosting account to your new LunarPages account (up to 6 months). Click Here for offer details.
You don’t need to consider this offer anymore because the new coupon TakeOff25Add2 is more favorable. The coupon gives you 2 months free and $25 off. $25 off from the coupon is equivalent to 3 months of hosting. With another 2 months free, the coupon is worth 5 months of hosting. So unless you really have 6 months or more of hosting left with your previous host, take the coupon offer instead of this one.
Overview
This site that you are looking at now has been hosted by LunarPages since the first day! That’s more than 4 years! We also have another eight 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 is currently serving over 100,000 customers in over 200 countries. 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 shared hosting plans – Basic ($7.95) and Business ($22.95). The $22.95 plan is a larger plan with unlimited disk space and 3,000 GB of bandwidth. We will be discussing the $7.95 plan.
Plan Size and Features
350 GB of disk space and 3,500 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 350 GB of disk space, you can store more than 1.5 million copies of this picture! And with 3,500 GB/month bandwidth, this picture can be viewed more than 15,300,000 times a month (That’s 15.3 million)! The most suitable words to describe 350 GB of disk space and 3,500 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 350 GB file if you want and you can finish your 3,500 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.”
Customer Support
It is not the large disk space or bandwidth that makes us rank LunarPages so high 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.
In July 2006, LunarPages launched a 15 minute email response guarantee on pre sales email inquiries. Test it up yourself to know how much effort LunarPages is focusing on customer support!
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 22,100 registered users.
5. Live Chat - Brand new life chat launched in July 2006! Now you can get immediate attention.
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.
Sometime ago, 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 us a voice message! You can click on the ‘Play’ button below to listen to the voice message yourself. They indeed look into SPAM issues seriously to make sure their mail server is not blocked. They make sure you will not miss out any emails.
Important Highlights
Multiple Domain Hosting – Host 10 Websites Under 1 Account!
If you have read our BlueHost Review, you know that multiple domain hosting will be the future of web hosting. LunarPages offers 10 free add-on domain along with the plan. That means you can host up to 11 websites under the same hosting account.
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. Click here for LunarPages software information.
CPanel Control Panel (Demo)
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 (List All Scripts)
You can install 36 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.
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.10-cheapwebhosting.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.
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.
FREE Domain Name For Life
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.
$700 worth of FREE Software!
You get 22 CoffeeCup software for FREE! They are CoffeeCup VisualSite Designer, CoffeeCup HTML Editor, CoffeeCup Direct FTP, CoffeeCup Web Video Player, CoffeeCup Web Calendar, CoffeeCup Flash Firestarter, CoffeeCup Flash Form Builder, CoffeeCup Flash Photo Gallery, CoffeeCup Web JukeBox, CoffeeCup Website Search, CoffeeCup Google SiteMapper, CoffeeCup Live Chat, CoffeeCup RSS News Flash, CoffeeCup Flash Blogger, CoffeeCup Password Wizard, CoffeeCup PixConverter, CoffeeCup MP3 Ripper & Burner, CoffeeCup Image Mapper, CoffeeCup Color Schemer, CoffeeCup StyleSheet Maker, CoffeeCup GIF Animator and CoffeeCup WebCam. Wow! It will take you sometime to download all of them.
You can get more details about this promotion and software here.
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!
They also have PHP 5 servers ready so you can migrate your site to PHP 5 anytime you want.
Server Information
LunarPages has more than 300 live servers for web hosting. Every month, they will add at least 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 BlueHost review (rank #2) and PowWeb review for comparison! And don’t get too excited and forget to use the coupon code listed on top of this page!
About The Editor (That’s Me!)
My name is James Clark and I am a computer nerd. I like computer so much that I sit in front of the computer 14 hours a day. I am a power web designer and programmer and is currently maintaining more than 30 websites. This gives me the opportunity to try out a lot of different web hosting companies for the last 5 years. I do get screw up by some lousy web hosts before and I know how frustrated it is. That’s why I wrote these reviews to help you. If you do not want to screw up your website or your business, make sure you pick the right web host!
| Price Per Month (Setup Fee) |
LunarPages Basic |
|---|---|
| Currency | USD |
| 1 Month Prepay | - |
| 3 Months Prepay | 9.95 (9.99) |
| 6 Months Prepay | 8.95 (9.99) |
| 12 Months Prepay | 7.95 (Free) |
| 24 Months Prepay | 6.95 (Free) |
| Plan Features | LunarPages |
|---|---|
| Disk Space | 350,000 MB |
| Bandwidth | 3500 GB |
| FTP Accounts | unlimited |
| CGI-BIN, Perl & SSI | Yes |
| PHP | Yes |
| Frontpage Extensions | Yes |
| Raw Log Files | Yes |
| Protected Directories | Yes |
| Anonymous FTP | - |
| Telnet/SSH | - |
| Email Features | LunarPages |
|---|---|
| Email Accounts | unlimited |
| Forwarders (Alias) | Yes |
| Autoresponders | Yes |
| Web-Based Email | Yes |
| IMAP Protocol | Yes |
| Mailing List | Yes |
| Software Used | LunarPages |
|---|---|
| Platform OS | Linux |
| Control Panel | CPanel |
| Web Stats | Webalizer, AWStats |
| MySQL Features | LunarPages |
|---|---|
| MySQL Database | unlimited |
| PHPMyAdmin | Yes |
| Domain Features | LunarPages |
|---|---|
| Subdomains | unlimited |
| Domain Pointers | unlimited |
| Ecommerce Features | LunarPages |
|---|---|
| Shared SSL | Yes |
| Shopping Cart | osCommerce, Others |
| Payment Methods | LunarPages |
|---|---|
| Credit Card | Yes |
| Check/Money Order | Yes |
| PayPal | Yes |
| Support Options | LunarPages |
|---|---|
| Email/Help Desk | Yes |
| Toll-Free Support | Yes |
| Member Forum | Yes |
| Others | LunarPages |
|---|---|
| Money Back Guarantee | 30-Day |
| Allow Adult Contents | Yes |
