With the purpose of unraveling the secrets of the hosting services from Lunarpages, we carry out this comprehensive Lunarpages review with a careful eye to its price, feature, performance and technical support. This company has been providing diversified web hosting solutions since its establishment in 1998. Below, we initially show an overall rating chart of this company.
To ensure objectivity, we have worked out the below chart based on our personal hosting experience for more than 3 months and hundreds of customer reviews we have collected. View the following table to get a general understanding of the service.
About Lunarpages
At a time, about several years ago, Lunarpages was a famous web hosting company utilizing the most cutting-edge technology in the industry. But the company would not continue to invest in the technology and infrastructure. As a result, it started to drop the market share and lose the credit of the customers from 2009. Based on the estimated data, the domains hosted with Lunarpages were 114,180 in Dec 2009, but there were only 70120 in Nov 2012. Things even become much worse with the passage of time. Lunarpages lost 39% of the customers in the past years approximately while the total number of websites and domains have been increased by 108% since 2009 over the Internet.
In April 2012, it’s said that Lunarpages was suffered from the Google Penguin updates for the web spam, and its organic search traffic dropped by 70%. Then, Lunarpages had to re-brand the main site from lunarpages.com to lpwebhosting.com with the new modern UI.
Based on the in-depth analysis, Lunarpages is no doubt a failure who oversells shared servers, provides very poor technical support, and sets lots of hidden fees.
Lunarpages Review > Excessive Price
Lunarpages develops a total of 4 upgradeable hosting services of different levels, including Personal Plans, Business Plans, Scalable Cloud Hosting and Enterprise Hosting. Respectively, the starting price is $3.95/mo, $22.95/mo, $44.95/mo and $99/mo. In this Lunarpages review, we would like to focus more on the Linux-based shared hosting which is often the first choice for our readers.
Among all the hosting solutions, the Starter Linux Hosting is the basic one. It appears that the price is affordable. Nonetheless, there are various hidden fees included in each hosting package. With those extras, the final price is far higher than the marked one.
Lunarpages Review > Unreasonable Refund Policy & Hidden Fees
Lunarpages states over the website “Realizing your dream of having web presence is not expensive. An advertisement is an advertisement. The 2 biggest costs for getting your websites online are a hosting plan and a domain name. With Lunarpages, a domain name is priced at $19.95/yr no matter how long you subscribe to the service. In the market, however, there are some good web hosts who provide a 1-year or lifetime free domain name.
Besides the payment for the Lunarpages web hosting plan, customers have to pay additional $2/mo for cPanel, $2/mo for Shell Access, $4.95/mo for dedicated IP, and $1.5/mo for backup/restore service. Universally, all of these charged by Lunarpages are the free services with many web hosts. Take InMotion Hosting as an example. The Business Launch plan includes a free SSD drives, free cPanel, secure shell access, free automated backup service, and free $250 marketing credits. As a whole, Lunarpages is actually not an affordable web hosting provider.
| Billing | InMotion | LunarPages |
|---|---|---|
| 10 years | – | $3.95/mo |
| 5 years | – | $3.95/mo |
| 3 years | $2.95/mo | $3.95/mo |
| 2 years | $3.49/mo | $3.95/mo |
| 1 year | $4.49/mo | $3.95/mo |
Lunarpages Review > Bad Performance
When Lunarpages had over 100,000 customers before 2009, it didn’t invest to develop its own dedicated data center but still chose to co-locate servers with some cheap data centers, and continued the profit-oriented strategy as when it’s a small web hosting company. Lunarpages had been a well-known overselling web host since 2009 that it could host over a thousand customers on one shared server with a single processor & 32 GB memory only, as result to the bad web hosting performance and reliability. In 2009, it’s heard that Lunarpages had 4~5 serious accidents due to the overloading network equipment and servers, which affected the massive customers that lead the 10% of the customers to choose to end the contract and transfer the sites & domains elsewhere.
To verify whether Lunarpages has successfully carried out its promise of 99.9% uptime, we have monitored its uptime during the past 30 days. The outcome indicates that it delivers 99.90% uptime on average. To tell the truth, the uptime is not very stunning in the industry. For detailed statistics, please check the following chart.
Our editors had compared the web hosting performance by hosting the same WordPress site with Lunarpages and InMotion hosting. The WordPress site hosted with InMotion is approximately 252% faster than Lunarpages in a performance test, including MySQL database query, WordPress page creation and rendering.
Lunarpages Review > Poor Technical Support
Lunarpages declaims that the technical support is 24×7 available via live chat, phone and email, but it doesn’t work realistically. The support staff on phone and live chat almost only help the customers create a ticket, put it into the queue, and ask the customers to wait for their email feedbacks. The customer service is virtually non-existent that it could take tens of days to reply or address a simple issue and get it fixed.
Look at how their customers reviewed Lunarpages negatively. Stephen Voorhe, commented Lunarpages in May 2018:
Their 24 hour support is not existent virtually. The call center can’t help my problems at all. I called them and waited for 10 minutes to talk with a real people, but as soon as he found out I’m a web hosting customer and he said that it should be a different department and routed me over. I had an issue about domain parking and it took me 6 days to resolve. I had to keep calling and sending emails. It was really painful!
In fact, if you smartly search the keyword “lunarpages scam” in Google, you could easily get answers about how Lunarpages overheads the customers.
Lunarpages Review > Customer Voice
We haven’t collected too many Lunarpages reviews by ourselves, but there were 196 negative Lunarpages reviews found in another famous web hosting review site WebHostingGeeks.com. Take a look at how the Lunarpages customers wrote for the web hosting services.
- May 23, 2018, Gene Harvey, reviewed: “I tried multiple times in the past 6 months to make sense of Lunarpages. Help has been lacking. When I finally gave up, I was astounded to find there was no refund after 30 days. I surmise they are more interested in money than customers. I originally signed up for 1 year on May 1, 2017. I guess this makes me a member, although I won’t be utilizing the site.”
- June 1, 2018, an upset customer reviewed: “horrible on all fronts! The security setting is so strict that their customer support suggests not to check the email more than once every 15 minutes! But… it is not only email, you use ftp, bang your machine is blocked; use an online form twice, bang, blocked. Then I needed to spend 2 hours on the phone to get that unblocked. AVOID! I seriously think they are trying to get rid of the customers!”
Conclusion – Not Recommended
From what we have explored above, Lunarpages has not shined with its hosting services for the limitations in features and technical support, together with the slow server response speed. Considering all these factors, we think it is not worthy recommending.
If you are in search of reliable providers, the following table of recommended companies may help you for they come with credible hosting with affordable prices, rich features, outstanding performance and responsive technical support.
