My Experiences

Uptime

My last uptime evaluation of Lunarpages basic hosting was till 24th March, 2009 with details at:

http://lunarpageshostingreview.com/lunarpages-uptime-for-march-2009/

I checked from my serviceuptime.com (independent server monitoring service) account today and found that the total uptime from 25th March 2009 to 21st June 2009, i.e. 89 days is 99.96%. For my new readers, I want to inform that I have Lunarpages Linux basic hosting on Laima server.

Email

I don’t have an online automated monitoring tool like serviceuptime.com to constantly check the Lunarpages basic hosting email servers but in general, I have not faced any problem with sending and receiving of emails.

Ease Of Use and Some Time Saving Tips

I have explored and used almost all the tools and features of my Lunarpages basic hosting plan in last four months. I didn’t find any problems in tracking and using any of the features.

However, for new customers of Lunarpages basic hosting, who are new to hosting, I want to share some time saving tips:

Tutorials: To make user conversant with Lunarpages basic hosting, video tutorials are available. After logging to your Lunarpages basic hosting account,the link to the Tutorials is located at the middle top. Some of the important tutorials are of Working with cPanel (Control Panel – Control of your hosting space craft), FTP (File Transfer protocol- for uploading and downloading your site/blog files) and Setting Up your Email Client (e.g. Eudora, Outlook, Pegasus etc.).

The tutorial video display window size cannot be increased and if Zoom In is used (after right clicking on the video), the video somewhatgoes out of the monitor. However, to remove distractions from the tutorials window, click on the video window at right and then press F11 on keyboard. This way, only the video tutorial window is displayed and your browser title bar, menu bar, address bar and status bar etc. are removed.

cPanel: Reaching Lunarpages cPanel is important as you can see the detailed status and do the entire management of your Lunarpages basic hosting account. The shortcut URL that you can use to reach Control Panel, i.e., cPanel is:

https://account.lunarpages.com/control_panel.php

The general account information and the hyperlinks in Control Panel are self explanatory and easy to use, you can very well understand where they are going to lead you before clicking.

File Manager: Management of your hosting files (uploading, downloading, deleting, renaming and changing file attributes etc.) is done by the File Manager utility in cPanel. You won’t have problems in using File Manager like me when I was new to it, if you remember the following two rules:

• Click on a folder icon or picture to navigate or explore (find what is inside it).
• Click on a name or text to view its properties (Delete, rename, move and copy)

A common mistake is to click on the text of the folder and then expect its content to be displayed. Click on the picture (icon at the left of the name in text form) of the folder to see its content.

Note: File and folder management is easier via FileZilla freeware FTP program. I have used it and found it OK. The download page for FileZilla FTP freeware for various operating systems is at:

http://filezilla-project.org/download.php

Suggested Improvements

There is always scope of improvement in even the best of the services. Some suggested improvements that I see Lunarpages should presently make to improve the user’s interface are:

• Sharing of the monthly uptime log with their customers along with reasons for the same.
• An option to increase the video display size of the tutorial window.

Coming back, I am really happy that my Lunarpages basic hosting account on Linux Laima server has an uptime of 99.96%, close to 100%, in last 89 days. That’s all in this 23rd week review of Lunarpages basic hosting. More of my Lunarpages hosting experience, tips and suggestions in my later review posts.

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!

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

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!