Lunarpages Basic Hosting Review After 23 Weeks

I am back with another honest review on Lunarpages basic hosting. I’ve had the Lunarpages basic hosting account for 23 weeks now, and I am glad that we are still with each other

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.

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!