Web Hosting Lab

Page 2 - LunarPages benchmark results

LunarPages has significantly expanded over the last few years. I see them on various top web hosting sites more and more frequently. I see good words about them even on sites, which they themselves are hosting. And because I begin to convince myself that the big companies are not as good as they actually advertise themselves to be – I decided to test them. After all, they are among the bigger companies and I wanted to see what they are offering in reality, the speed with which they operate and whether they are worth the money in general.

When I visited their site I was impressed by their plan, which includes more or less everything – beside the standard features, it includes also JSP, ASP, IMAP (I’ve been on the look-out for this feature since I found out that IPowerWeb didn’t have it), Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, MySQL 4 and 5, PHP 4 and 5 and free web templates. I was fascinated with the features. There are plenty of them and everything looks reassuring so far.

After I had had a good look at the plans I decided to sign up. Here, I was pleasantly surprised as well – a rather quick signup procedure without annoying ad pages, which took me only 2-3 minutes. After I signed up, and while I was examining the email, which they had sent me, I received a phone call from them at the number I had given as a part of my contact information. LunarPages obviously makes phone verification – a procedure, which has become quite popular lately, and which seems to become even more popular in the near future. I confirmed the order and they told me they would send me the welcome email immediately.

3 minutes had hardly passed since I hung up the phone when I received the welcome email with the instructions, which turned out to be quite good and detailed and contained full info and links. Unlike other hosts, LunarPages demands all kinds of contact info, including a valid telephone number. The majority of the hosts avoid this (I assume they do so in order to receive less phone support requests). The only disappointment I experienced was when I saw that their phone support is available Monday - Friday during business hours only. In compensation, they have US and UK toll free numbers. Cool.

Their billing software (into which I logged from their home page) is apparently a custom one. It looks like neither ModernBill, nor AWBS or Clientexec. It’s a pretty and an easy-to-navigate one and comes with very detailed information. There you can find all the info you’ve received with the welcome email.

LunarPages relies on the classic combination - cPanel control panel + Fantastico, and also offers the whole CoffeCup Software package (worth around $700) for free – a very attractive offer. The cPanel control panel is a standard one and so we won’t go into details about it. I will only say that the cPanel works quite fast.

I decided to open a ticket, but didn’t know for sure what to ask them. Everything works just fine and all the questions I had to ask were already answered in the welcome email or were easy to find in the FAQ section. I wasn’t able to come up with something good enough and whose answer could not be found in the FAQ, and decided to pretend to be a client who doesn’t fall for reading much and asked them whether they support SSH or not. But here I reached a stage where I became surprised. Although they have such an easy order procedure – the opening of a ticket is a quite complicated procedure. In order to open a ticket and describe your problem you have to provide them with full info - username, server, email, phone, alternative email, the last 4 numbers of your credit card, the domain, etc. At first, I thought that it applies only for the opening of the 1st ticket, but I was wrong – it applies for all the tickets. Quite boring, definitely. Anyway – after 3 hours and 11 minutes they answered that they do not support SSH on shared hosting accounts. I answered one more question to test the reply time again. I received the next answer exactly after 4 hours. Obviously, their reply time is 3-4 hours.

Pros:
+ they offer many extra features with their plans - jsp, asp, ruby, psql, mysql 5, php5, etc
+ friendly support
+ stable company
+ they offer free web templates
+ easy-to-navigate control panel
+ easy-to-use billing system
+ very fast servers that aren’t overloaded
+ free CoffeCup software

Cons:
- it takes time to open a ticket
- the support team replies after 3-4 hours
- they don’t offer SSH support

Page 2 - LunarPages benchmark results