LunarPages was born out of Add2Net in 2000 and the company thrive marvelously under the management of Ron Riddle.
I used to be a big fan of Lunarpages back in 2004/2005. Unfortunately, things turned ugly a few years back – the customer supports couldn’t keep up, there were too much down time at LunarPages server, and the company switched from cPanel to in-house program. I cancelled my LunarPages account in mid 2010 and have no idea how the web host is doing now.
Looking from outside, there are a lot of changes at LunarPages – price structures and hosting packages are totally different from the past.
In case you were looking for a budget hosting solution like the old Lunarpages, here are some suggestions.
Review from Dennis Badurina
Dennis Badurina The following is rating MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE with the web hosting company called LunarPages.
Back on Dec 17th 2014, a full eight days before Christmas, the webhost company Lunarpages Internet Solutions sent an email stating that they were disabling my website because of “high resource usage”, specifically CPU usage in the neighborhood of 17% – 26% measured on a daily average.
No prior notification. No communication. Simply disabling my online sales portal and sending one email.
Naturally, I called to get the particulars, and had to press them quite hard to get any sort of concrete answer to what the ceiling was for CPU usage on a shared hosting box.
Their answer…no more than 2% DAILY AVERAGE of CPU use was allowed. Well hell, it doesn’t take much in the way of data processing to hit 2% CPU use.
So I asked them for their solution to get the CPU use down to what they consider an acceptable level. I implemented their changes and was still only able to get it down to 8% – 12%. Mind you, during this debacle I had already grabbed a new domain and set up my complete website with another host as a fail-safe to cut over to in case this happened again (my webmaster had been pushing me to leave them for quite some time now.) Literally, within 24 hours (late evening of Dec 18th) my webmaster and I had another copy of the site up and running, fully secured with 256 bit encryption, and the old domain re-directed to the new domain name.
When I did a little research via Google, I stumbled upon many horror stories concerning LunarPages, and they all revolved around folks having their websites disabled due to “high resource usage”, with the fix (according to their techs and sales people) of moving to a hosting plan that costs almost $190 a month. That wasn’t an option I was going to entertain, for sure. Further, all the history about Lunarpages was that they aren’t clear about how they set up their Shared Hosting. Seems that their idea of Shared Hosting is something called Cloud Linux. The $190 per month deals probably get you onto a real bladed server rack, not a cloud service.
Now, to test my theory that the problem was NOT with my website or web code, I’ve been monitoring my site usage every day on the new host, which is GoDaddy.
On GoDaddy, I have yet to break through 1% CPU use measured on a daily average, and have yet to top 35% MEM use on a daily average. The Lunarpages folk were telling me that I was sucking up 26% CPU resources on a 16-core system but utilizing only 0.14% (less than a fifth of one percent) of Memory. As far as I’m concerned, thats a configuration problem on THEIR end, if their boxes can’t properly utilize Memory instead of CPU.
On GoDaddy, on a real honest-to-goodness bladed rack server, I’m on a quad-core shared box with 2 GB of memory allocated just for my use.
Using the exact same codebase from a backup of my website taken THE SAME DAY that LunarPages shut me down, the server is humming along with my website accounting for less than 1% CPU use, and 35% Memory of the 2GB total memory assigned to my site.
I’ve never been a fan of “cloud” anything, and this just solidifies my resistance to anything “cloud” based.
And here’s the kicker…Lunarpages refuses to prorate a refund for the remaining five months of unused time. I hope they see this and read this: for less than HALF of what I was paying LunarPages, I’m on a more-stable platform, with a 256 bit SSL Certificate (the Lunarpages SSL was only 128 bit encryption) with a site that is far more responsive (loads WAY faster than it did through LunaprPages).
Review from Dennis Badurina, Dragon Leatherworks