Lunarpages and WordPress 2.7 Blog Hosting

I was actually going to write a different post today, but when I logged into the admin area of the website to make the post, I saw a message at the top of the page prompting me to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.

WordPress BTW is a very popular open source blogging/CMS platform and is used to run this website. WordPress is great, but it can be quite resource intensive when running on a shared hosting plan. There have also been problems with some web hosts and the new automatic update feature, so I thought I would test it out on my account here with Lunarpages!

You can see that in the above screenshot there is an “Upgrade Automatically” button that I can push to update to the latest version, rather than having to do it manually via FTP.

So I pushed the button and waited to see if Lunarpages really were a WordPress friendly web host

Here are the results:

As you can see, the automatic upgrade was successful! So that’s a big plus point for anyone who doesn’t want to upgrade their WordPress version manually.

One final thing to mention about WordPress is a point I touched on earlier, and that is the high CPU and memory resources required by WordPress.

This site is hosted with Lunarpages, and is run on WordPress. So far I’ve had no CPU, memory or resource usage problems and as far as I can tell the website loads quite quickly. Although you can judge that for yourself

So in conclusion, if you are looking for a web host to run your WordPress blog on, then I would have no problem in recommending Lunar pages. I’m currently on the basic Linux shared hosting package and this blog runs without any problems.

I installed this blog manually via FTP, but Lunarpages do offer the latest version of Fantastico on all accounts so if you’d rather install using the simple online “1 Click Install Wizard” then you can do that as well!

Lunarpages Review After 6 Weeks

I’ve now been with Lunarpages for around 6 weeks, so I thought I would write a small Lunarpages review looking at my time with the hosting company so far.

It all started off well, I was lucky enough to sign up whilst Lunar pages were offering their “Winter Special” discount coupon promotion. So instead of paying $6.95 per month I managed to get in at the low price of only $4.95 per month. I’m actually from the UK, but even with the current exchange rates, the price worked out a lot cheaper than if I were to sign up with the UK equivalent of Lunarpages.

Anyway, I already reviewed the pricing and the sign up process in earlier posts, so I’ll move onto the actual hosting now!

After you sign up you are given your very own “cPanel” that you can use to manage your Lunarpages web hosting account, from there you can manage pretty much all aspects of your site – emails, addon domains, stats, and so on.

Everything was good until I noticed that one of my favorite cPanel tools; AWStats had been disabled, after contacting support I was told that it decreases server performance and that there was no way to have it activated on my account. I had to say goodbye to my sexy stats

It wasn’t the end of the world as I just used Google Analytics instead, but it was a bit annoying when I’ve been used to having AWStats with all my past hosts.

The other major problem I faced during my first 6 weeks with Lunarpages was the server uptime (or is it called downtime!?!). I think that I got a little bit unlucky as I got placed on a server that was having a few issues.

I did a full review of the uptime/downtime for the month of January and that pretty much sums up the problems I faced, there were a couple of days when the downtime was bad. But I’m pleased to say that since then the downtime has been very good, if not excellent – certainly well worth the measly $4.95 per month anyway!

I don’t really have anything else of note to review as I’ve only been a Lunarpages customer for 6 weeks, but no doubt as my time with them progresses I will have more juicy Lunar Pages gossip to share with you all

I think my task for the coming month is to start testing out the email deliverability and see how I get on. I’ll also be looking at the server status information to see just how much Lunarpages oversell when it comes to disk space – because lets face it, no host has discovered a hard drive with unlimited capacity as of yet, so it’s obvious that they are overselling to some extent, but as long as the service provided remains stable do we really care?

So to conclude, my first 6 weeks have been quite un-eventful. The only real issues I have faced so far was the lack of AWStats in the cPanel, and the downtime that occured on a few occasions. Maybe next month I’ll have something more substantial to review, but I suppose a short review means that nothing has gone disastrously wrong which is always a good thing.

Anyway, that concludes this mini Lunarpages review. I’ll be back again next month with another review so we’ll see what February has in store for us!

Lunarpages Uptime Report – January 2009

I’ve now been a Lunarpages hosting customer for just over 1 month, and in that time I have been using a 3rd party uptime monitoring service to keep a close eye on my Lunar pages web hosting account.

So each and every month I’ll be able to come back here and post my uptime reports! Remember that the uptime report monitors THIS website, so whilst it is a very accurate measure of this websites uptime (the site is hosted with Lunarpages), it is only monitoring the uptime of the server that this site is hosted on – Laima, Lunrpages have thousands of servers so do bear that in mind when viewing the report below!

You can see from the report above that the overall Lunarpages uptime for January 2009 (on the Laima server) was 99.389%.

Whilst still being over 99%, there were some major issues on the 17th January that resulted in 35 failed checks from my uptime monitoring software. The uptime on this 1 day came right down to 87.762%.

Everything seemed to go back to normal after the 17th with only the occasional outage being reported. All in all, there were only 3 days in January when the uptime for my website dropped below 99%.

The monthly average would have been a lot better if it wasn’t for the problem on the 17th January, so we’ll have to wait and see what February brings!