Before buying the Lunarpages basic hosting plan customers often ask which sites it is best  suited for. The purpose of this post is to tell you about some of the important technical features that go behind your decision to buy Lunarpages basic hosting.

After some research and comparison with other providers, I zeroed in on the Lunarpages basic hosting plan (Linux). The following specifications made me decide upon the purchase:

- Unlimited disk usage (Yes it’s true, hard disk storage with no limits).

- Unlimited bandwidth (No bandwidth limit exceeded errors!).

- 30 day money back guarantee (Try and see if it suits your hosting needs).

- Unlimited – MySQL databases, Add-on domains, Sub domains and parked domains (999 display in cpanel is due to server display restriction and can be increased by Lunarpages when needed by you).

- 99.9% uptime (Almost very close to 100%).

- Free 24-7-365 hours online support via email/web interface (No worry about support issues! Normal low response time of 30 minutes to 4 hours. Free telephonic support too during office hours!).

- 2,000 Mbit connectivity (My, that’s huge!).

- Protection against DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks (Another factor for downtime avoided).

- All at a price of just $ 4.95 per month!

So if you are looking for economical yet proven hosting with great hosting features, go for Lunarpages basic hosting.

Deciding if the Lunarpages basic hosting is the right work environment for your site? Here is the checklist:

- Personal, small or medium website or blog with most of the dynamic content as text

- Typically less than 90,000  hits/month (Shouldn’t have 1000 HITS/second, 90,000 HITS/month is just a broad measure, not a hard and fast rule)

- Less demand for hosting server resources, i.e, RAM, processor and MySQL queries etc.; suitable for non Images and non Videos hosting.

- Simple Machine Forum (SMF) software support for forums site via Fantastico (automated installation).

- ASP (Active Server Pages – Microsoft Server side script engine) support is built in for free in Windows hosting plan but for Linux hosting plans, $2.95 per domain or subdomain is needed.

- Support for addition of dedicated IP address at $ 2.95 per month. Dedicated IP is commonly needed for dedicated SSL certificate and anonymous FTP access. Dedicated Basic SSL certificate is provided at $ 99 per year.

- Addition of JSP (Java Server Pages) at $ 4.95 per month per domain or subdomain.

- Apache 1.3 (available by default) Or Apache 2  addition (upon request)

- Shell access to the account at an extra fee of $2 per month

- Premium Restore Service at $ 1.50 per month (In case of accidental deletion of any of files at yours Lunarpages basic hosting account, Lunarpages will restore the files if you are a Premium Restore service member. Restoration of files dated up to 3 days previously).

- Supports upgradability and scalability with addition of new features

* Prices written are applicable at the time of writing this post
* For server resources monitoring, i.e. point 3, unfortunately there is no accurate monitoring tool. However, you can request Lunarpages support to monitor your site and warn you in advance if you are reaching the basic hosting plan server resources limit!

These separate payment options mean you only end up paying an extra amount for the features that you need. As most of the sites don’t need all of these features, the charges remain reasonable.

Kindly note that Videos and Images hosting sites demand huge server resources (depending on the volume of traffic). Lunar pages basic or shared hosting is not designed to suit these type of sites, as with other providers. If you are anticipating high resource usage for your site, you should choose Lunarpages dedicated or VPS hosting plan.

Lunarpages has been hosting websites from 1998 and hosts over 1,50,000 sites. Their basic hosting pack provides all the features needed for small and medium sized sites.

If you have some queries related to Lunarpages basic hosting purchase, let me know. I would be glad to help!!!

In this post, I am writing about the email facilities that you get when you buy the Basic Hosting pack from Lunarpages.

First, some explanation of email and why people take paid email accounts.

Email is certainly the most popular way of online communication nowadays. The reasons behind the popularity of email are – Ease of use (setup and usage), economical (almost no cost) and quickness (deliverability in few seconds if everything is fine). I have seen even small school going kids communicating via email. Using email is great! Isn’t it?

There are plenty of free webmail service providers, such as hotmail, yahoo, gmail etc. But, the real charm of having an email address is on your own domain as you can use any emailname@domainname.extension. While you might have to struggle to find the right domain name, but once you get it, you can easily configure the email usernames and their quotas etc. from the Hosting Control Panel.

The biggest reason why people go for paid email accounts from hosting companies is the professional look of the email addresses and their setup, control, management, and email account features.

Enough background of why it really pays to go for a paid email account from a hosting company. Now, I can sense that you are getting somewhat interested in a paid email account. If you are planning to run an online business Or you currently have one, then you must go for paid email accounts.

Let me now show you what is in store for you in terms of email features if you purchase a Lunarpages basic hosting plan (basic and shared hosting terms are the same in Lunarpages hosting terminology).

OK, here are the core email account highlights in the Lunarpages basic hosting plan, costing just $4.95/month at the time of writing, with some brief explanations of email features wherever needed:

- Email Account Creation By Plesk and Cpanel

Various email accounts for your Lunarpages domain can be created with ease by configuring mail name, password, mailbox quota, spam filtering and other settings via Plesk and Cpanel software provided via browser interface.

- Webmail Remote Access From Standard Browsers

The Email account can be accessed from web browsers – Microsoft IE, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Netscape Navigator etc. by using Horde or Sqirrelmail web mail clients. This allows you to access your mail from any location, anywhere in the world!

Examples of URL’s that can used for accessing webmail:

http://yourdomainname.com/webmail

http://yourdomainname.com:2095

https://yourdomainname.com:2096 (secure)

- Email Access Through Popular Email Clients

You can access your Lunarpages basic hosting domain account email through well known email software (also know as email clients). Some of the popular email clients supported are – Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Pine, Lotus Notes, Entourage for OS X, Mac Mail for OS X and KDE desktop for Linux.

These email clients can be configured to use POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3), IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) and HTTP email server configuration. All email configuration details are provided by Lunarpages but sometimes you may have to use your ISP mail server settings.

IMAP will work for Linux hosted email accounts at Lunarpages but not for Windows servers.

Lunarpages email accounts can also be accessed from Blackberry and the iphone.

- Number Of Email Addresses Creation And Message Storage

Unlimited email addresses can be created. After you purchase basic hosting and login to cpanel, don’t feel cheated if you see 999 as the email account limit, as it’s due to display restrictions by the server. I repeat, unlimited email accounts can be created, just contact Lunarpages support if you need more than 999 email addresses. BTW – 999 is still a lot of email accounts, and it’s very unlikely that you will go over that limit.

There are no limits on the number of email messages you can store, however, you have to use the email storage for your own setup only and not for others (no reselling). Kindly note that disk quota limit can be set to a higher limit if you are getting mail box full error messages, but you should not set the mailbox quota to unlimited megabytes, set it above the reasonable limit that you can think of.

- Message Sending Limit

10 MB (megabyte) is the sending limit on the outgoing email including the header, body and attachment. The limit on the number of emails to be sent in one hour is 200-300 and 20 per minute.

To manage the email sending limits well, mailing list programs – DadaMail and PHPList are supported.

- Message Receiving Limit

The maximum size of a received email (including header, message and attachment) is 50 Megabytes, 5 times greater than the sending limit.

There is no limit on receiving the number of emails but the total size of the emails mustn’t cross your inbox quota.

- Autoresponses Setup

On vacation auto email messages can be configured by using Autoresponder feature in cpanel.

- Email Filters

Via Cpanel backup, filter file can be edited to block messages having attachment of one or more particular extension, for example .exe.

- Email Forwarding and Email Aliases

Emails can be forwarded to single or multiple addresses on another host or ISP. The feature of either keeping a copy of the forwarded email or not keeping it is also supported.

Email aliases are forwarding email addresses often used for long or hard to remember email addresses. Multiple email aliases are supported with the replies always received at the real email account.

- Spam Blocking By SpamAssassin And Spam Box

Unsolicited message or Spam can be stopped by enabling Spam Assasin and Spam Box. Spam box keeps the flagged email so that false positives (wrongly judged as spam) can be moved to the Inbox.

- Mailing Lists Support

Mailing list is valuable in contacting several email addresses at once, example a newsletter. One mailing list is provided by default in the basic hosting and you can buy more at $2.95 per mailing list. (at the time of writing)

- NMS Scripts For Email Forms

Free NMS HTML or Perl form scripts can be used to receive email messages from site visitors by getting details filled in using a contact form.

- Addition Of Customized MX Records

For customers interested in setting up their own email servers, the required Mail Exchanger (MX) records can be added by the Lunarpages hosting team in their DNS server.

And much more…..

Frankly, there are so many email features included that I could fill another blog post writing about them all, but I think I’ve covered the main ones for you! At $4.95 per month, the basic email features coupled with the hosting features – unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space etc. it’s an excellent deal!

I hope that this post discussing the Lunarpages basic hosting email features was as useful as the earlier ones!

If you decide to go for Lunarpages basic hosting after seeing the above email features, then please do make use of the discount links in the box below. To Your Success!

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!

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!

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”.

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