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#1 Web Hosting - LunarPages Review "It is not the large disk space or bandwidth that make me rank LunarPages as #1 but its superior customer support! Their open forum is flooded with tons of happy customers."
Update:
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Why it is wiser to order for 2 years If you order for 1 year, your averaged price is $4.81 but you only get 14 months of hosting. You have to renew your account 14 months later 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 $4.95 but you actually get 24 months of hosting! You will also be able to renew at the cheaper rate of $6.95/month 24 months later. Take the 2 year order. You will be hosting with them for a long time. This site has been hosted by them for more than 5 years. And because they allow you to host unlimited websites in 1 single account, you can always add more websites later without paying a single cent of hosting fee. All plans comes with a free domain name for life and 30 days money back guarantee.
Overview The site that you are looking at now has been hosted by LunarPages since the first day for more than 5 years! Currently, I also have another two websites hosted by LunarPages currently. I used to have eight accounts with them! Thanks to the multiple domain hosting feature, I can now host more websites using less accounts. The discussion below is based on my experience with LunarPages as one of their longest customer. You cannot get more insider information about LunarPages elsewhere :-) LunarPages is currently serving over 150,000 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 are offering two Unix shared hosting plans - Basic Hosting ($7.95) and Business Hosting ($22.95). The $22.95 plan is a larger plan with unlimited disk space and 15,000 GB of bandwidth. They also offer other types of hosting including Windows hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated and semi-dedicated servers but in this review, I'm just going to write about the $7.95 Basic Hosting Plan, which I believe is sufficient for 99% of you. Plan Size and Features
There are many web hosts that offer large disk space and bandwidth, but keep in mind that these web hosts might have funny restrictions such as file size limit, daily bandwidth limit, or even binary files bandwidth limit (pictures, MP3s, Flash ...). LunarPages does not have such restrictions with your disk space and bandwidth usage. You can upload a single 1,500 GB file if you want and you can finish your 15,000 GB bandwidth in 1 day. As LunarPages founder and CEO, Ron Riddle told me, "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 make me rank LunarPages as #1 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 good reply, no matter if you are a current customer or you just need to ask some presale questions. Good replies are replies with the exact answer you need. I 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 my 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. They used to be using a third party support help desk system
known as DeskPro. But because they are so 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. I have called them several times and they have no problem talking to me with my slang. 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 around 35,670 registered users. And LunarForums is also one of the oldest webmaster forums out there. I will surely rate their customer support as 10 over 10, or 11 over 10 if I can :-) Their customer satisfaction speaks for itself. I always stress to my visitors who write to me that if they are web hosting newbie who need 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 my reviews or other web hosts, you will notice that I will state that if you have any unresolved issues with the host, you can always forward them to me and I will take them directly to the officers. Even though I have direct contact with many important officers of LunarPages (even the CEO), I never mention it in my LunarPages review. I 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 me. Sometime ago, I have submitted a possible SPAM issue to them. To my surprise, not only that they reply to my email but they have also called me and left me a voice message! You can click on the 'Play' button below to listen to the voice message yourself. They did look into SPAM issues seriously to make sure the mail server is not blocked. They are constantly making sure that all their customers emails will be sent and received properly. Important Highlights Multiple Domain Hosting - Host Unlimited Websites
Under 1 Account! If you have read my BlueHost Review, you know that multiple domain hosting will be the future of web hosting. LunarPages offers unlimited free add-on domain along with the plan. That means you can host unlimited websites under the same hosting account! And because of this, I no longer need to have many different web hosting accounts as I can host a few websites in 1 account. The good news is that I can save a lot of money. But the bad news is that as a reviewer, I no longer have the luxury to try out many other web hosts. Up to Date Software Compared to other hosts, LunarPages is the most effective in keeping their software up to date. Software that I am referring to include PHP, PHPMyAdmin, MySQL, Perl, Linux Kernel, etc. This is one of the reasons why I rank them so high. It is very frustrating when you realize that your host is not updating their software. CPanel Control Panel (Demo) LunarPages uses CPanel as the web site control panel. Another popular control panel is Plesk. But from my 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 I 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 my 2mbps 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 for FREE. For example, I've created the sub domain webdesigners.10-cheapwebhosting.com for my 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. As mentioned earlier, LunarPages offers unlimited add-on domains so you can host unlimited websites with just 1 hosting account. Flash Video Tutorials You can enjoy learning by watching video tutorials instead of reading boring text tutorials (over 100 video 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. 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, I am using PHP and MySQL extensively in my site. I use MySQL to store all the information about the web hosting plans. I 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! You can choose to use either PHP4 or PHP5 directly in the control panel. My site is using PHP5 now. Server Information LunarPages owned more than 2,500 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. My 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 my 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! :)
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