fantasyhoss
01-13-2009, 01:13 PM
Hi, I know many of you are confused with choosing hosting company to work with. Today I'll give you my review about a good company. Hope this helps you.
Lunarpages is one of the biggest hosting companies of the world. The Lunarpages basic plan (now winter special, it costs only $4.95/month) indicated enough bandwidth to drive a starship through (Unlimited) and more disk space (Unlimited) than you can shake a phaser at. One thing I learned from doing research for this Lunarpages review was that big, established corporate web hosts purchase large volumes of bandwidth at discount prices, sort of the Wal-Mart effect. A few standard features for hosting plan are:
* Ruby on Rails 6
* MySQL 5
* PHP 5
* Python
* JSP
* ASP
* 30-day money back guarantee
And some unique features:
* 1 free domain for life
* Free software valued at $775
* Add-On Domains, e-mail accounts, e-mail forwarding, email autoresponders (unlimited)
* Apache 2
* Shell Access
* Online User Statistics
There are also some other features, you can go to their official site lunarpages.com for more infos. Actually, there is nothing bad with their hosting service. Servers are stable and speed is fast. I have been working with lunarpages for 2 years and the uptime is nearly 100%. But I think customer support is also important. So I will say more about this today.
Email Support Test
I decided to find out for myself if Lunarpages customer support was willing to lower their shields for me. I sent an email support request at exactly 2:53 am before I went to bed saying that at I didn’t see Drupal in the Fantastico package and asking if there were some way to install it.
After I woke up the next morning and logged on, I was glad to have received a response in my inbox at 10:31 am with a ticket number kindly stating that Drupal is not currently offered for installation in cPanel’s Fantastico and that I could manually download and install it. A download URL was provided along with encouragement to contact Lunarpages again if needed.
Phone Support Test
My tests had been going well. Now it was time to turn on my communicator and make the dreaded customer support phone call. This is where web hosts always seem to implode. Come to think of it, most hosts probably don’t even offer phone support. If they do, they tend to force the customer to hold a long time and listen to elevator music interspersed with promotional plugs.
On my first attempt, I held for a musicless 17 minutes and was disconnected. I have no idea if the problem was due to my cell phone or the Lunarpages call center. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. On the second attempt, I help for 10 minutes and was relieved to get a very professional sounding and courteous support rep (I think his name was Josh). I basically asked him why I couldn’t install AWStats through cPanel. He explained that this script wasn’t available through cPanel. I would have to visit the AWStats site and upload/install the current version to my site myself. That wasn’t really the answer I was hoping for, but I certainly appreciated Josh’s courteous and confident manner. He further confirmed my suspicions that the reason many scripts were not available for automatic install in the Lunarpages cPanel was due to security concerns.
Was the positive impression I had about Lunarpages customer support accurate? I'd have to say waiting on hold for 10 minutes was not much fun. But then again, by web hosting company standards, I don’t think that 10 minutes is too terribly unreasonable.
Set a course for the Lunarpages star system?
I would have given Lunarpages a 5/5 rating if they perhaps lessened my customer support hold time a bit
Pros: Large, established, experienced host offering huge amounts of bandwidth and disk space at low prices. Knowledgeable, courteous customer support. Unique features like a free domain for life, Free software etc.
Cons: Sometimes customer phone support will hold a little time.
Bottomline: Engage? They’ve got the bandwidth, diskspace, low pricing and support–one of the best hosts I have ever reviewed. Unless you’re picky like me, Lunarpages is a logical choice.
Lunarpages is one of the biggest hosting companies of the world. The Lunarpages basic plan (now winter special, it costs only $4.95/month) indicated enough bandwidth to drive a starship through (Unlimited) and more disk space (Unlimited) than you can shake a phaser at. One thing I learned from doing research for this Lunarpages review was that big, established corporate web hosts purchase large volumes of bandwidth at discount prices, sort of the Wal-Mart effect. A few standard features for hosting plan are:
* Ruby on Rails 6
* MySQL 5
* PHP 5
* Python
* JSP
* ASP
* 30-day money back guarantee
And some unique features:
* 1 free domain for life
* Free software valued at $775
* Add-On Domains, e-mail accounts, e-mail forwarding, email autoresponders (unlimited)
* Apache 2
* Shell Access
* Online User Statistics
There are also some other features, you can go to their official site lunarpages.com for more infos. Actually, there is nothing bad with their hosting service. Servers are stable and speed is fast. I have been working with lunarpages for 2 years and the uptime is nearly 100%. But I think customer support is also important. So I will say more about this today.
Email Support Test
I decided to find out for myself if Lunarpages customer support was willing to lower their shields for me. I sent an email support request at exactly 2:53 am before I went to bed saying that at I didn’t see Drupal in the Fantastico package and asking if there were some way to install it.
After I woke up the next morning and logged on, I was glad to have received a response in my inbox at 10:31 am with a ticket number kindly stating that Drupal is not currently offered for installation in cPanel’s Fantastico and that I could manually download and install it. A download URL was provided along with encouragement to contact Lunarpages again if needed.
Phone Support Test
My tests had been going well. Now it was time to turn on my communicator and make the dreaded customer support phone call. This is where web hosts always seem to implode. Come to think of it, most hosts probably don’t even offer phone support. If they do, they tend to force the customer to hold a long time and listen to elevator music interspersed with promotional plugs.
On my first attempt, I held for a musicless 17 minutes and was disconnected. I have no idea if the problem was due to my cell phone or the Lunarpages call center. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. On the second attempt, I help for 10 minutes and was relieved to get a very professional sounding and courteous support rep (I think his name was Josh). I basically asked him why I couldn’t install AWStats through cPanel. He explained that this script wasn’t available through cPanel. I would have to visit the AWStats site and upload/install the current version to my site myself. That wasn’t really the answer I was hoping for, but I certainly appreciated Josh’s courteous and confident manner. He further confirmed my suspicions that the reason many scripts were not available for automatic install in the Lunarpages cPanel was due to security concerns.
Was the positive impression I had about Lunarpages customer support accurate? I'd have to say waiting on hold for 10 minutes was not much fun. But then again, by web hosting company standards, I don’t think that 10 minutes is too terribly unreasonable.
Set a course for the Lunarpages star system?
I would have given Lunarpages a 5/5 rating if they perhaps lessened my customer support hold time a bit
Pros: Large, established, experienced host offering huge amounts of bandwidth and disk space at low prices. Knowledgeable, courteous customer support. Unique features like a free domain for life, Free software etc.
Cons: Sometimes customer phone support will hold a little time.
Bottomline: Engage? They’ve got the bandwidth, diskspace, low pricing and support–one of the best hosts I have ever reviewed. Unless you’re picky like me, Lunarpages is a logical choice.