Lunarpages Review
Lunarpages got their start in the web hosting business by offering free hosting in 1998. Since then, they dropped the free hosting offer and added in premium web hosting solutions. Currently, they host well over 150,000 clients with a staff of over 100 top-tier members helping their clients.
Lunarpages reached our radar with all of the athletic sponsoring they have done lately. We’ve seen them as sponsors on MMA/UFC trunks, in offroading events and more. They are certainly advertising their company using much different methods of their competitors which is really awesome to see.
Lunarpages Pros
Lunarpages offers a really nice Starter package that offers heavily discounted hosting for those new to running websites and looking for a cheaper way to get started. Lunarpages also offers you a full upgrade path from shared hosting all the way to dedicated servers if needed.Lunarpages Cons
The Basic Hosting plan, for those needing to host multiple domains, requires 5 years pre-pay to get their advertised rate. The actual rate is as much as $6 more per month depending on the term you choose.Lunarpages Hosting Plans Review
As you can see, Lunarpages has a lot of web hosting options to choose from.
The Starter Hosting Plan Review
The most limited of all the web hosting plans they provide, it offers 5GB of disk space but only 50GB of bandwidth on that plan. Also, this plan only allows you to have 1 domain hosted on the account and it doesn’t include a free domain name registration with signup.
The price for this service is $3.95/mo for both 12 month or 24 month prepaid purchase. There is no options to purchase this service for shorter than 12 months.
Basic Hosting Review
The step-up from the starter plan allows you to have unlimited disk space, bandwidth and add-on domains. The pricing is as follows:
- 3 Months: $10.95/mo + $30 setup.
- 6 Months: $9.95/mo + $30 setup.
- 12 Months: $8.95/mo
- 24 Months: $6.95/mo
- 60 Months (5 years): $4.95/mo.
Lunarpages also has other web hosting options including Windows hosting, business hosting, cloud hosting and more.
Our Opinion
All of their hosting plans includes features you’d expect along with many features that aren’t always included on other web hosting services. With Lunarpages you can expect access to easy-setup of WordPress and hundreds of other software scripts, PHP, PERL, PYTHON, Ruby on Raisl, e-Commerce functionality. online marketing and more.
The bad part about their shared hosting plans is the amount of add-ons that you’ll have to pay for to get the standard services we’ve seen the majority of other providers grant access to for free. Joining with the Basic Hosting plan that offers unlimited space and bandwidth, we were presented with a whopping 10 add-ons to choose from.
- Want cPanel? That’s $2/mo.
- Want a dedicated IP? $4.95/mo (normally $1-$2 or free elsewhere)
- Night backups? $1.50/mo
- SSL for eCommerce? $109/year
Lunarpages offers $25 in Facebook Ads credits with every plan. We were unable to find any references to plans that include Google Adwords or Bing/Yahoo advertising credits.
Ease of Use & Quality Review
The current Lunarpages main page leaves a lot to be desired. Before, Lunarpages used to offer all of their options right on the main page to choose from, but these days, you are presented with a 5-icon bar at the top to choose and a large block of text. To us, it would appear you’ve landed on an inner blog page with the way it is presented currently.
Finding access to the support areas is a little more difficult than normal. Usually, you can find all of the support options in the footer of the websites, however, with Lunarpages, you’ll find a support button at the top of the page that offers access to submit a ticket, access to the WIKI, and the community forum from there. They used to have all of these linked directly in the footer, but things change.
Lastly, the website layout changes sometimes, like when viewing the WIKI pages. The WIKI pages also has an error on display, the search navigational element is stuck to the bottom-left of the page in Google’s Chrome browser.
Customer Support Review
We took a look at their customer support options and website content. The good: An active community forum, access to toll-free telephone sales and customer support and access to live chat for sales questions.
The bad: The wiki section only has 52 pages of content, their social media is essentially used for promotions with little done in the way of helping customers (that we’ve seen) and their last YouTube video was posted over 6 months ago.
Hidden Specials
Be sure to check out the footer section for a “Specials” link. Lunarpages is often running specials in there that can save you big money on your web hosting. Currently, we saw this Big Country promotion (a UFC MMA fighter) where they are offering a buy 1 year get 1 year free hosting promotion. Be sure to check this area for discounts that could save you big.