Lunarpages Uptime For March 2009

Better late than never but I’m returning with the uptime report for Lunarpages for the month of March.

I didn’t update this site as much as I would have liked to during March, so I didn’t monitor the uptime “manually”, instead I’ve relied on the 3rd party uptime checker that I use to monitor my Lunarpages shared hosting account. It checks to see if this site is online every 5 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week so it’s very reliable!

Here are the statistics:

If you review the chart above, you can see that there server my account is on was up 100% of the time, apart from a period of 3 days. 2 of those 3 outages were for around an hour each, which brought the average server uptime down under 99.9%, it was however still above 99% with an average of 99.8% which is a good average for a shared hosting account, especially considering the dirt cheap prices you pay for an account.

Overall I am still very happy with my Lunarpages account, any outages appear to have been resolved very quickly, within a couple of hours so I haven’t been left without a service for a huge amount of time. I can’t comment on the uptime for the Windows hosting services offered by Lunarpages because I am on a Linux account, so bear that in mind when choosing your package!

Lunarpages Hosting Uptime Report – February 2009

After January’s not so great uptime I have some good news to report – the uptime for this site hosted with Lunarpages for the month of February was 99.9% with just a couple of short outages experienced. Take a look at the detailed report below:

As I always try to point out with these posts is that the downtime (or uptime!) that I report here is for the server that my site is hosted on ONLY. Lunapages have thousands of servers across their network, so do remember that when reading these uptime posts.

As the uptime was at 99.9% for February, I’ve had no problems and nothing else to add to the report. It was a fine February when it comes to the Lunarpages uptime which is great considering the bad results from January. Fingers crossed that March continues where February left off.

I’ll be back next month with another report, thanks for reading

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!

Lunarpages Discount Coupon For Windows Hosting – Save $29.85

Today I bring you my very first Lunarpages Discount Coupon/Special offer. From time time to Lunarpages promote special offers or discounts on a number of their hosting products.

The offer I am writing about today relates to the Windows hosting plans. This special discount offer allows you to receive 3 months of hosting absolutely free when you sign up for a new Windows hosting account with Lunarpages and select the 24 month package.

That’s a saving of $29.85!

You also receive a free domain as part of the offer, and you receive all of the usual Lunarpages support and hosting options.

To receive your 3 months of free Windows web hosting, follow the steps below:

1. Go to the Lunarpages site by clicking here.

2. Click on the “Web Hosting Solutions” tab, and then click on “Windows Hosting”.

3. You should then see the special discount code listed as shown in the image below:

4. If you then click on the big “Sign Up Now” button, you will be able to go through the checkout process and your 3 months of free Lunarpages hosting will be processed.

Remember that all of these Lunarpages special offers and coupons that I post are correct at the time of writing, if you find that any are out of date, please do let me know by using the “Contact Me” link at the top of the page!

Where Is AWStats On Lunarpages?

That’s the question I’ve been wondering about ever since joining Lunarpages – How Can I Access AWStats?

On all of my other web hosting packages with numerous different web hosts, I have been able to use my favourite stats package – AWStats.

AWStats, in my humble opinion is the best stats package out there. Not only does it produce “pretty” stats that are easy to understand, it also provides detailed information on how visitors found my site, specifically which search engine they came from and what keyword they used to find the site.

So I decided to check the stats for this website and I went inside my Lunarpages cPanel, clicked on “Statistics” and got the following screen:

As you can see, AWStats isn’t listed as one of the stats packages to use!

I found this a bit strange as it had been included in my other hosting accounts that used the cPanel, so I contacted Lunar Pages support and asked if it was possible to enable AWStats for my hosting account.

I received a prompt reply, but unfortunately they said that they didn’t provide support for AWStats.

I did a bit of digging around and found some other Lunarpages customers talking about AWStats on the Lunar Forums, the official response from Lunarpages was that “AWStats is too resource intensive and slows the servers down”.

So I guess there’s not much I can do, there are of course other stats packages offered by Lunarpages:

• Analog
• Webalizer

But they both have nothing on AWStats, I guess I’ll just have to use Google Analytics to fill my statistical desires!

The Free $775 Lunarpages Bonuses

As a bit of an incentive to entice people to sign up for a web hosting plan, Lunar Pages have started to offer some “free” bonuses to all customers, if you were to purchase these items on the open market then they would set you back around $775!

And before I continue, please do remember that everything I write on this site is correct at the time of writing, if you find any of my information is out of date then please do let me know

Anyway, back to the freebies! Just take a look at what you can expect to get if you decide to become a Lunarpages customer:

The bonuses do look really tempting, but as with most things there is a catch. A lot of the items that Lunarpages offer you for “free” are actually only free trials for a certain length of time, you would then need to pay to continue using the services.

Here’s a breakdown of what you will actually receive if you want to take advantage of the special deals:

Parallels®  Workstation

Run Windows, Linux, and more with Parallels Workstation

Free Trial

Ratepoint

Manage your online reputation with RatePoint

60 day free trial

Filestream

Back up your most important photos with Photo TurboBackup and maintain maximum performance of your Windows PC with WinSettings.

Free if you fill out an opt-in form

Visitorville

Give your website great statistics tracking

3 months free

Logo Creator

Create amazing logos right from your PC or Mac with The Logo Creator’s Sports & Entertainment Editions

Possibly free, possibly paid – hard to tell!

Gafana

Stop your spam with up to 15 DNS Level accounts thanks to Gafana

Free

DMXReady

Update & manage your Contact Form from anywhere in the world using DMXReady’s Contact Us Manager

Free if you fill out an opt-in form

DeepTrawl

DeepTrawl checks your whole site for technical & content errors with one click. Scan for broken links, invalid html, spelling mistakes & many other issues.

Free if you fill out an opt-in form

LinkWorth

Get $100 credit from Linkworth by signing up and spending $125.

Bidvertiser

Get your get $20.00 in FREE advertising clicks from BidVertiser

So there you have it, a full breakdown of all the free bonuses that you are entitled to if you sign up for a Lunarpages hosting account, you are entitled to the freebies if you sign up to any of the following packages:

• Linux hosting
• Linux business hosting
• Windows hosting
• Reseller hosting
• Dedicated servers

If you are already a customer with Lunarpages, you can find the special offers section by logging into your client management area and clicking on “Specials”.

Signing Up With Lunarpages

Before I could get started on my Lunarpages Review I needed to first sign up to a hosting package with them!

I already had a website that needed moving to a new host, so I decided that I would use that website as my primary domain and then add any additional domains to my hosting account as “Addon Domains”.

The website I wanted to move used a couple of PHP scripts so I went with a Linux hosting account rather than Windows.

At the time of signing up, Lunarpages were offering a “Winter Special” that would give me:

• Unlimited Disk Space
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited MySQL Databases

And much more, for only $4.95 per month.

Although in reality, the price only worked out at $4.95 per month if you paid for 12 or 24 months upfront. If you wanted to sign up for a shorter contract then the options were:

• 6 months @ $8.95 per month
• 3 months @ $9.95 per month

The above plans also needed to be paid in full, there was no option to pay on a monthly basis.

The plan I signed up for also came with a Free Domain name, but as I already had my domain name registered elsewhere I didn’t take advantage of the free registration offer.

The actual signup was very easy, it was just a case of entering the domain name I wanted to host with them, and then filling in my personal information. They of course offered me a range of upsells as you can see in the screenshot below, but I didn’t bother with any of them!

When I had completed the checkout process, and completed my credit card payment I was presented with the following screen:

I think the reason they ask you to fill our the customer survey is actually a smoke screen just to make sure your order is genuine. I know from my own past experiences that hosts are very vunerable to spammers signing up for hosting accounts using compromised credit cards. So asking the customer a few questions goes a long way to proving that they are indeed genuine customers!

Anyway, what happened next?

Well, a few minutes after I had completed my order, my Lunarpages welcome email arrived in my Inbox, this welcome email contained my Lunarpages account username and password, as well as other important information such as:

• Nameservers
• Email Settings
• FTP Settings
• Affiliate Details
• And so on…

Shortly after another email arrived from Lunar Pages, this time it contained details of how I could access my free bonuses, valued at $775!

To tell you the truth, I haven’t had chance to review them yet so I’ll make another post about the free bonuses when I’ve had more chance to look through them

But I think that brings to an end this section on the Lunarpages web hosting signup process, all in all it was a good experience and I didn’t have any problems with the process!

Welcome To My Lunarpages Review Website

Hello everyone, thanks for stopping by on what I hope will turn into a very useful resource for any current, or potential Lunarpages Hosting customers.

The aim of this website is to collect as much information as possible about the popular web host “Lunarpages” and then document my findings on this website.

To do this, I’ll be signing up with Lunarpages as a “real” customer. This will allow me to monitor the uptime of my website, as well as being able to discover the Lunarpages “vibe” first hand

As I mentioned above, I’ll be monitoring the uptime of my Lunar Pages site, and to do that I’ll be using an independent 3rd party uptime monitoring service that will check the status of my website (this one!) every 5 minutes, it will then log any down time and give me a nice pretty report at the end of each month that will be published on here.

And I think that is pretty much it…I’ll really be making it up as I go along, each time I find something interesting I’ll document it on here, so who knows what could be in store for this site, only time will tell!

Hope you enjoy the site, and do feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Regards,
Dan Thompson

http://www.lunarpageshostingreview.com