Today we’re going to take a look at one of the oldest hosting providers out there, Lunarpages. Our detailed review aims to help users decide whether this is the right choice for their needs. Let’s dive into the
Table of Contents
Is Lunarpages Web Hosting Service Good: The Bottom Line Up Front
Pros
- 30-day money back guarantee
Lunarpages offer a 30-day money back guarantee but the thing is they won’t refund your set up or domain registration fees and that’s a downside.
- They offer great uptime
If you host your site on their servers, you can an uptime that’s close to 99.97%. Of course, nowadays most web hosts offer something similar since it has become really crucial for small businesses to keep their websites online.
- Free website migration and domain name
This is also a common feature you can find among other competitors. If your website is hosted elsewhere, they will transfer it to their servers for free.
- They offer automatic backup services
Lunarpages will automatically backup your website for free so that you can restore it anytime if something goes wrong. This is a very handy feature especially if you encounter a problem with a plugin that doesn’t work or your site gets hacked for example.
However, the thing is that it’s not free so you have to pay an additional fee to get this feature which is kind of annoying.
Cons & Problems
- They take a setup fee
This is a big downside. While most other hosts will set-up your site for free, Lunarpages will take a set-up fee for your website so you can see how this is an extra cost that you normally shouldn’t pay for.
- They charge your for the cPanel
They do offer a custom cPanel that has the basic functions you’ll need. However, it’s essential that you have the full control over your website so having a cPanel for free is a given considering that almost all web hosts out there offer it free of charge.
- Slow customer support & support ticket process
They offer a ticketing system if you need their support team. Their support isn’t bad, but the thing is that it’s too slow compared to its competitors. They say that their support team is available 24/7 but it’s not really true when it comes to
Waiting 12 hours or more may cost you a lot of money depending on the type of business you’re running so that’s another con.
- Pricing tricks
If you go to their pricing page, you’ll find a bunch of hosting plans with a monthly price for each one of them, which pretty standard right?
However, the thing is that the price you see on some of these packages is actually applicable only if you pay for 60 months upfront, and that’s crazy. They do this on their “basic plan” where they tell you that it’s $4.95/month, but you’ll quickly discover that you’ll have to pay for 5 years in order to get that price.
- Their “basic plan” is a bit expensive
Considering that other hosts offer the same features for a lot less money,
- Their website is confusing
What I mean is that it’s not that easy to find reliable information or a good tutorial to help you set something up or fix a small issue with your website.
Real Customer Reviews: What People are Actually Saying
Good Things People Are Saying
I think Lunarpages rocks and is really far better than any other hosting company I’ve tried. Why? Am I biased?
Only by their awesome support team. Here’s what I mean. I have 4 websites hosted on Lunarpages, and they get 200-300 visits a month as a whole, so I don’t have a lot of resources.
One day, my sites were the victims of an attack and the result was that they were now using more CPU, database, and RAM. They used up so the server resources so much that the Lunarpage support team reached out to tell me that I have exceeded the limits of my shared hosting plan.
I’m a programmer myself but I don’t know a lot about WordPress hosting solutions and all that stuff so I was pretty scared.
After that, I went back and forth with their support team for 3 weeks to solve the problem with them giving me suggestions, explanations, and general support. Eventually, I decided to add some new security features to prevent anything like this from happening again, and they were right there to help and monitor the effectiveness of my newly added features.
I would recommend Lunarpages to anyone looking for a new host or not 110% happy with their current one. Their support staff is kind, well-informed, and willing to work with me to make my sites a success.
Try them, you won’t regret it.
Bad Things People Are Saying
I’ve been a loyal customer at Lunarpages for 6 years now. In the first year, It was the best value that I could find. Six years later, it’s a different story.
Recently, I signed up a client for their shared hosting plan. The hosting was slow and unusable, 2-3 minutes page loads and completely unhelpful support. Support asked me to optimize my database (basically do a defrag) but that didn’t help.
This was a Drupal core install, out of the box, and they continued to point the finger at our application.
After doing some digging, I spoke to an honest tech guy, and he told me that they outsource the database end to a 3rd party and that it’s really slow. This was really embarrassing for my business considering that I recommended them.
On a second encounter with support more recently, I got a hacked script on my website. Without even telling me, Lunarpages’ admins changed my email password. This caused my desktop email client to try to log in with wrong password which resulted in an IP ban on my ISP so now I can’t even login to my website’s email account.
Because of this, I was unable to get the support emails which contained the details about what scrip needs to be removed or updated. As a result, they suspended the entire account.
Awful customer support!
And finally, they were threatening to permanently disable email from my hosting account.
So in conclusion, I’ve had 1-2 good years with Lunarpages, and 4-5 years of crappy customer service. I started recommending GoDaddy to my clients instead, and I have a personal contact who’s been 1000X times more helpful than anyone at Lunarpages.
Website Set Up and Development
Does Lunarpages Offer WordPress Hosting Specifically?
No, but you can install WordPress with one click on all their shared hosting plans.
Do You Get a Free Domain Name When You Sign Up?
Yes, but not for all of their plans. For instance, they do offer free domain name registration for all of their business plans and their ‘basic plan”, but not for the starter plan.
However, you should also know that you only get it for free during the first year. After that, you’ll have to pay an extra cost to keep your domain name.
Do They Have Nameservers or Offer DNS Services?
Yes they do. Considering that DNS is basically a must-have if you want a website that people can actually visit, it’s not very important.
Just know that each and every hosting provider must have a DNS service in order to work.
Migrating a Site To Lunarpages (and Transferable Installs): How Easy Is It?
It’s very easy because they take of it for you, free of charge.
Lunarpages cpanel control panel : Do They Offer One To Manage Your Hosting?
Yes, they offer a custom cPanel for free, but it’s pretty limited in terms of the things you can do with it. If you want to get the full cPanel on Lunarpages, you’ll have to pay an extra $2/month which is crazy, especially when you know that other hosting companies provide it for free.
FTP & SFTP: How Easy Is It to Connect?
It’s pretty easy and not very different from other hosts. Basically, all you have to do is get an FTP client like FileZilla, get the details of your website including the host, the username and the password, enter them in FileZilla and you’re ready to go.
Like any other host, Lunarpages offers tutorials and guidelines that will show you how to do this stuff in detail so don’t worry about it.
Do Their Hosting Services Offer Staging Environments and Temporary Urls ?
No they don’t.
Templates & Blueprints: Do They Offer Site Setup Templates?
Yes, whether you use WordPress, Weebly, or any other content management system, you’ll get to choose your template.
PHP Versions: Do They Support Legacy and The Latest Versions?
They don’t mention anything about the latest versions of PHP on their site. However, I did manage to find that the version they’re currently using is 5.3.27 so they’re not using the latest versions.
Do They Support Git or Command Line Tool Integrations?
No.
SSH Connection: Do They Support It?
Yes but you’ll have to pay an additional fee of $2/month to use it.
Lunarpages Speed & Load Time
They offer decent page load speed, but it’s definitely not enough. According to Pingdom, the average page load speed for Lunarpages is 954 ms, so almost a full second.
That’s a biy slow compared to its competitors. If we take Blue host for example, the same website indicates that it has an average speed of 225 ms .
It’s a big difference. You can obviously see that Lunarpages doesn’t offer the best speed, especially if you consider that you can get a lot more speed for less the price.
Services and Goodies Offered With Hosting
Uptime, Outages & Down Time
They offer great uptime that’s close to 99.97%. It’s worth mentionning that according to Pingdom, their uptime was 100% in the last 7 days at the time of writing this article.
Do They Offer a CDN With Hosting?
They offer cloudflare CDN but only on their business plans.
Does Lunarpages Offer Shared Hosting and Dedicated Servers?
Yes, they offer both.
Https: Do They Offer SSL Certificates or Letsencrypt?
Yes. They offer free SSL certificates on all their business plans but if you want to go for the basic plan (which is very likely), then you’ll have to pay extra to get it. It will cost you $109/year to get a dedicated SSL certificate.
How Do Site Backups Work?
Backups are not included for free in any plan, but you can get automated backups if you pay for an addon.
Redirects: Do They Support Server Level Redirects?
Yes they do. That’s a useful feature that can come in handy especially if you have deleted some old content or moved a blog post to another Url for example.
Do They Support Multisite & Subdomains?
Yes. The Basic and Business plans comes with unlimited free add-on domains, which can be set up if you have purchased the new domain name through Lunarpages or an external company.
They also subdomains.
Security & Past Hacking Incidents
Does Lunarpages Offer Email Hosting?
Yes they do. They offer 5 email accounts for the starter plan, and unlimited accounts for all the other ones.
Lunarpages Pricing, Plans & Money Back
Pricing, Packages & Plans
They offer 3 hosting categories: personal, business and windows hosting. The most suitable category for newbie bloggers is definitely the first one. It offers the basic features you’ll need to start a blog without all the additional tech stuff.
The “personal hosting” category offers 2 plans: starter and basic. Here’s an overview of what each one of them offers:
- Starter plan
You get a custom cPanel, 5 GB of storage, 50 GB of bandwidth, 1 FTP account, 1 MySQL database, 5 email accounts and softaculous web sdcripts (a tool that helps you install web apps on your website)
- Basic plan
This plan also includes a free domain name, a Weebly website builder, unlimited bandwidth, storage, FTP accounts, MySQL databases and email accounts. So basically, unlimited everything.
You also get a bonus $25 Facebook ad credit. This is the best plan in the category because it gives you much more features for a bit more money compared to the starter plan which is obviously there just to make you buy this one instead.
You can see what each package has to offer for yourself here.
The more advanced business plans give you more features like SSL certificates, free site migration, CDN and a bunch of additional features but they’re more geared towards businesses who receive more traffic so they’re really not for beginners and that’s why I won’t get into the details.
Do They Have a Monthly and Annual Plan Payment Option?
Yes, and as usual, it’s cheaper if you pay for a whole year.
Do They Offer Unmetered or Unlimited Bandwidth Plans for Hosted Websites?
Yes, for some plans. They offer unlimited bandwidth for the basic, the Windows and the entreprise plan.
How Does Canceling a Plan Work?
All you have to do is send an email to their customer support team containing your username and other details about your account. You should also know that if you cancel your plan while you’re on the 30-day money back guarantee, they won’t refund the domain registration and the set-up fee that you paid at the beginning.
Promo Codes & Discounts: Do They Have Special Offers?
Yes, you’ll find a bunch of discount codes when doing a simple Google search. This is one of the websites that offer promo codes for Lunarpages.
Does Lunarpages Have a Satisfaction or Money-Back Guarantee?
Yes, they have a 30-day money back guarantee but they won’t refund the set-up or the domain registration fees.
Customer Service and Tech Support
Lunarpages Phone Number: Do You Get a Real Person?
They don’t offer phone support, like many other web hosts by the way. Their support consists of a ticketing system where you fill in the details of your issue and after a while (usually 12 hours) someone from the support team will respond back to you.
The verdict: should you signup on Lunarpages?
I don’t recommend you do, and there are a couple of reasons why:
- Their servers are slow
The loading speed is just too slow compared to what you could be getting for less the price.
- Their customers are not happy
From what I could find, there are tons of customers that are not very happy with the way they handle things, especially their customer service. I found tons of bad reviews complaining about poor customer service.
- You don’t get what you pay for
For the same price (or even less) you could easily get a hosting plan at one of their competitors and get better speed, customer service, and security features. In other words, you get better value for your money.
So why should you choose Lunarpages when you could get something better for less money?
Lunarpages Alternatives: What We Would Recommend Instead
For the same price, you could honestly get much better quality. If you’re just starting out or wanting to switch to a better hosting company, you should try Blue Host. Their starter plan costs $2.95/month, so less than the basic plan at Lunarpages but they’re much better.
Sign Up
Choosing basic web hosting or something more advanced according to your needs (say, if you have need e-commerce hosting or like unlimited e-mail) is important. Based on our web hosting review, Lunarpages is a pretty good and provides many solutions. If it sounds right for you, you can sign up by clicking here.