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!

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!