Lunarpages In 2021: What Do Lunarpages Client Reviews Say?

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by Dale Cudmore

Last updated: March 13, 2020

Important Announcement: Lunarpages has been acquired by HostPapa as of September 30th, 2019

Lunarpages is one of the oldest web hosts. It offers a wide variety of plans aimed at both hobbyists and businesses.

Being in business for over 20 years is both a blessing and curse, as I’ll show you in this review. I’ll go over the most important aspects of Lunarpages’ hosting services, and help you figure out if they’re a good fit for you or not.

Background

As mentioned, Lunarpages started up back in 1998.

Many hosts that started in those days don’t exist, but to their credit Lunarpages has remained relevant.

The main challenge hosts that old face is keeping infrastructure and hosting packages up-to-date and competitive with newer hosts. Lunarpages has done a decent job, but some areas of decay show themselves in this review.

They boast several big-name businesses as customers, including Sony, CBS, and Verizon.

Screencapture via Lunarpages

Infrastructure

All of their datacenters are located in the United States, in California, Arizona, and Nevada. This tells you that unless your audience is mostly in the United States, or you’re planning on using a content delivery network (CDN), Lunarpages may not be the choice for you.

Lunarpages offers co-location, so the website provides highly technical detail about each datacentre. All except the Hawthorne building are SAS Type II audited to a high standard for maximum security, disaster protection, and uptime.

Lunarpages Reviews by Our Community

Overall Rating from 89 Reviews by Lunarpages Customers

Support
Quality
Features
Value

Filter reviews by: Most HelpfulMost RecentNegativePositive

Most Helpful Reviews

Ralph Curtis militarycuts.com

Oct 01, 2018

This weekend I am a little disappointed in Lunarpages, my site has been down since Friday and no tech support due to the weekend. I didn’t submit a ticket figuring if no one is around then what’s the point. This is the only issue I have with them….

no weekend staff. Honestly I have been lucky with Lunarpages, I have been a customer since 2004 and have never really had an issue with them, the service has always been prompt, spot on, and courteous. I have recommended a few clients to them back in the day so I guess you can say I am faithful to the brand, I just wish they would keep a few people on during the weekend…

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Jose Mellado thelighthousecolorado.com

Jun 18, 2018

Lunarpages is horrible. 4 years ago we called and cancelled both our accounts with this company. Today, we find out they have continued to bill us and will not issue a refund. We became aware of the problem because they changed servers and we started getting billing notices.

Upon looking into the situation, it has been revealed that ipages has taken over $400 of unauthorized funds from a church account! We have begged and pleaded with them. Initially, the said the would refund the entire amount per their voice mail.

Then they sent an email stating they would refund only $230….at the time of this review only $135 has been confirmed. By all means, carrier pigeons would be a better value than lunarpages. Do not use this company.

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George Ouvina ouvina.com

Apr 17, 2018

Had my domain for over 12 years and they managed to get rid of it without any notification. Some Chinese company picked it up according to them They even had my credit card on file for auto renewal. They did manage to renew other sites I also owned… I am beyond pissed and their support department was horrible.

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Types of Hosting

Lunarpages offers multiple types of shared hosting, each with their own packages, plus cloud VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting.

I’ll go over the main highlights of each here.

Personal Hosting (Shared)

This is the cheapest level of hosting on Lunarpages, and you’ll also see it being called “Linux” hosting on the Lunarpages website.

There are 2 plans to choose from, here are the main features on both:

The “Basic” plan includes everything in the “Starter” package, plus everything else listed.

They cost a similar amount, so the “Basic” plan is usually the best choice if you’re looking for cheap shared hosting.

There’s a few caveats I should mention though:

• The free domain: this is an offer that Lunarpages has on many plans. You get the first year of domain registration for free, but only if you pay for 12 months or more upfront.
• cPanel is not free: there’s a small monthly fee if you’d like to use cPanel, otherwise you’re stuck with Lunarpages custom control panel.
• “Unlimited” is not unlimited: as with most hosts, unlimited means that you have enough resources for most types of websites. If you use too many resources, according to the acceptable use policy, your account will be suspended.

Business Hosting (Shared)

There are 3 business hosting plans that are all shared hosting:

• Premium
• Advantage
• Enterprise

The three plans are all the same except the amount of storage and bandwidth available.

These plans are very expensive for shared hosting packages when compared to other hosts.

However, on top of everything in the personal shared hosting packages, they come with 4 differences that may influence your choice:

1. An SSL certificate
2. A dedicated IP address
3. PCI compliance
4. cPanel with no monthly chart

The feature set is reasonable for small business hosting, but the price is especially high for shared hosting. Your site will be affected by others that are sharing your server, and for these prices, you could get a basic VPS on other hosts with similar features.

Windows Hosting (Shared)

There are a few common reasons why you might need Windows hosting:

• To use ASP or .NET
• To use Sharepoint
• To use MS SQL or MS Access.

These aren’t common reasons, which is why not many hosts offer Windows hosting, especially reasonably cheap shared hosting plans.

Lunarpages offers a single Windows shared hosting plan, which is close to twice as expensive as the personal shared hosting plans.

It comes with many of the same features, like a free domain name and “unlimited” storage.

Additionally, there are a few Windows-specific features like:

• Plesk Control Panel 11.x
• Windows 2012R2
• MSSQL 2012 Standard Edition

Cloud VPS Hosting

The next level up from shared hosting is VPS hosting. It’s a bit on the expensive side for an entry level VPS offer compared to competitors.

Only one plan is offered at a base rate. If you scale up the number of resources you’d like, it costs more.

Here are the highlights of the VPS plan:

The basics are there, but having to pay for a control panel that is included for free on almost every other host is strange. Another potential dealbreaker is that you are not able to add an SSL certificate to sites on your VPS (only available on certain shared and dedicated plans).

Dedicated Hosting

Lunarpages offers dedicated hosting plans for both Linux and Windows.

The Windows version is Windows Standard 2016, which is more up-to-date than the version available on a VPS plan.

There are 3 plans to choose from that all have the same features. The only differences besides the price are the CPU and RAM in each.

The CPUs are modern, comparable to the ones used by high-end hosts like LiquidWeb.

There are a few important things to note about these plans:

• There’s a $99 setup fee if you cancel within the first 30 days
• They come with 2 IP addresses
• All have 10TB of bandwidth
• All have SSD storage
• Addons (extra cost):
  • cPanel
  • SSL certificates
  • Additional IP addresses
  • Managed hosting services (3 levels to choose from)
  • More bandwidth.

Some of these addons are essentials. So while the base price is comparable to other hosts, expect the price you pay to rise significantly by the time you get to checkout.

Hosting Addons

Lunarpages offers a lot of upsells.

They provide barebone plans, and then if you’re willing to pay extra, you can get extra features. The main problem is that most of these paid features are available for free on other hosts.

Still, you should be aware of the addons that are available with the hosting plans:

1. Managed hosting: Lunarpages will do basic upgrades and fix any compatibility issues.
2. Premium email: integrate Microsoft Exchange 2016 email, which is commonly used in business.
3. Baruwa spam filtering: advanced spam filtering for email to prevent viruses and spam. However, there’s no public price on the site, you have to contact Lunarpages for more details.
4. SecureLive Security: an active protection service for a monthly fee. It works with WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Magento.

Control Panel

Throughout the packages above, I’ve mentioned 3 control panels that are available on different plans.

LunarPanel (LPCP)

LunarPanel is a custom control panel developed by Lunarpages.

It comes free with most packages. You can see a demo version on their site.

Screencapture via Lunarpages

Other than the dated design, it does offer most of the basic functionality that you’ll need for hosting.

However, compared to cPanel, which is the most popular modern control panel by far, the functionality and user interface is lacking.

cPanel

Almost every host offers cPanel as a free control panel.

It’s simple to use, and because other hosts offer it, learning it once will likely come in handy in the future. This cannot be said for custom control panels like LPCP.

On Lunarpages, cPanel comes with Softaculous, a popular script installer that lets you easily install open source software in a few clicks. This includes WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and hundreds more.

It’s good that Lunarpages offers this, except that it comes with an added monthly fee on almost every plan. Most hosts include this for free.

Plesk

Plesk is another popular control panel and is the go-to control panel for Windows hosting.

It is available on Windows hosting as well as Linux VPS plans. However, Plesk on VPS plans comes with an added monthly fee, just like cPanel.

Customer Service

The support options that Lunarpages provides is not top-tier, but it is decent.

First, there’s support provided by live chat, phone, and email.

The email support is 24/7, but all that means is that you can send emails for help at any time. It doesn’t mean you’ll receive an instant response, which is very unlikely.

Lunarpages also has 2 different sources of help documentation.

First, there’s the support wiki, which has over 500 guides. Some of the topics are dated, but most articles are well written.

Then, there’s the knowledgebase. It consists of very simple and brief articles with no images.

I’m not sure why there are 2 sources of help documentation, it’s confusing, and possibly the result of trying to maintain legacy infrastructure while developing new resources.

Payment and Uptime Guarantee

There is no clear uptime guarantee on the Lunarpages website. There’s one mention of a 99.9% uptime guarantee in an old blog post, but that’s it.

Screencapture via Lunarpages

A 99.9% guarantee is on the low side, and there’s no guarantee that you’d be reimbursed if you ran into issues. It’s not reassuring.

Payment Details

Lunarpages accepts a wide variety of payment methods: check, money order, PayPal, AliPay, or credit card.

Screencapture via Lunarpages

All prices on the site are in US dollars.

They offer one of the widest varieties of billing terms I’ve seen anywhere:

• 1 month
• 3 months
• 6 months
• 1 year
• 2 years
• 3 years
• 5 years
• 10 years

You get minor discounts the longer your initial billing period is, but it’s nothing big.

Money-Back Guarantees

Lunarpages does offer a solid 30-day money-back guarantee, which is among the best you’ll find when comparing hosts.

However, note that you won’t be refunded for any domain or setup costs, depending on the plan you choose.

Comparable Hosts

Lunarpages is not a bad hosting company, but I think for most people there’s a better option.

If you are considering Lunarpages, here are 3 other options you may want to consider.

SiteGround

SiteGround is one of the best overall hosts. They offer everything from shared hosting to dedicated servers, and the quality of their service is great. They offer 24/7 support and have very competitive prices. They also have datacenters around the world, not just the US.

Take a look at our detailed SiteGround review for more information.

A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting focuses on inexpensive, but fast hosting plans. They offer 24/7 support and free backups, as well as a money-back guarantee. All plans come with free SSD drives and a free cPanel control panel.

If you’d like to take a closer look at A2 hosting, refer to our review page.

Bluehost

Finally, if you’re looking for low cost and simplicity, Bluehost is another good option. They offer 1 click WordPress install, plus a free cPanel control panel. They also offer a free domain name with similar conditions to Lunarpages, plus a free SSL certificate.

Here’s our detailed Bluehost review.

Pros and Cons of Lunarpages Hosting

We’ve looked at a lot of things so far, which may be a bit overwhelming.

Let me highlight the biggest pros and cons of Lunarpages compared to other hosts to simplify things.

Pros

• Wide variety of hosting types: there’s shared hosting for hobby sites, and VPS or dedicated hosting for business sites.
• No tricky pricing: many hosts offer you a low introductory price, and then raise it up a lot after; Lunarpages doesn’t.

Cons

• On the expensive side for the features offered: while the prices aren’t outrageous, many hosts provide more and higher quality features for lower prices. Lunarpages seems a bit out of date here.
• Tons of upsells: the plans are all barebones, you’ll almost always need to purchase addons with monthly costs.
• cPanel costs extra: you have to pay a monthly fee for cPanel.
• No backups without addon: backups are important if you make a mistake, but they aren’t included on any plan without a paid addon.

Lunarpages in a Nutshell

Lunarpages is far from the worst host. They’re established, and have been operating for over 20 years without any major controversies.

However, although Lunarpages has clearly tried to stay current with a fairly recent website design, many parts of their services seem a bit outdated.

What they offer just doesn’t match up favorably with the other top hosts right now.

If you’d like to go with Lunarpages, that’s fine; there are no big red flags to be worried about. But I’d recommend at least considering some of the alternatives I presented in this review.

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About Dale Cudmore

Freelance blogger by day, developer by night, Dale is a freelance writer who specializes in technology and digital marketing. He studied Chemical Engineering at the University of Waterloo before becoming a freelance writer.

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