Lunarpages nameservers are sent to you in the welcome email address where also the login information for your control panel is sent. If you did not get the nameservers address sent an email to support@lunarpages.com . Your domain name needs to be pointed to those name servers in order to show the website hosted at lunarpages.
Namerservers
Nameservers are part of DNS (Domain Name System) and are used to resolve domain names to IP address. Once you hit the enter button on your browser then the process of resolving domain name begins. The browsers asks these nameservers where the domain is actually hosted (the IP address). Once it gets the IP address of the server it connects to it and request the web page in question. Once it gets all the contents of the page it renders them and the page is showed in your internet browser. You may ask yourself how the browsers know for which domain which nameservers are. They ask your internet connection dns servers (assigned from your ISP internet provider), and if they don’t know they ask the root servers who are authoritative (one and only) servers who hold all domain information.
On shared hosting usually your hosting account shares the same IP address with many other accounts. If you purchase dedicated IP address it will be assigned only to your account (it will be shared only with between your web sites). Having a dedicated IP address is not mandatory, but it is good because it may help you get better rankings in search engines, or if you want to install SSL certificate for your websites. SSL certificates required dedicated IP address and allow secure transfer of data between the visitor(client) and website server(host). Also your primary website will be accessible by just typing the address in your favorite browser(firefox, opera etc). To buy dedicated IP address from Lunarpages (available on every hosting plan), login in your control panel at https://account.lunarpages.com, and go to upgrades/addons page where you will find an option to buy. Price is $4.95 monthly and it will take few days to be assigned to your account.
phpBB software
phpbb (PHP bulletin board) is a popular internet forum software written in PHP web programming language, open-source and free licensed under GNU GPL license. Uses MySQL or other database system(MS SQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL and others). With phpbb you can create online community where users can register and post threads/posts in forums. Subforums are also supported and there is a powerful permissions system for users/usergroups, moderators, administrators. The look of the forum can easily be changed with style manager (there are tons of free templates available for phpbb). New features can be added by simply downloading mods(modifications) and installing them into your phpbb forum. For preventing auto registrations there is a captcha (optional) visual confirmation code. There are many other features included: categories, acls (access control lists), bans, email confirmation etc etc. Check the folllowing page for list of phpbb features: http://www.phpbb.com/about/features/ .
Lunarpages phpbb Review
I have installed phpbb forum on lunarpages account and it was running great. Installation went smooth, without any problems, and all features worked. I recommend lunarpages for phpbb host. Good luck with your online community!
After three months with Lunarpages I can say that they are very good hosting company. I haven’t had any issues/problems so far. The uptime have been very good (average 99.302% and average response time of 0.466 seconds). I have tested a few scripts on Lunarpages including wordpress (this blog), drupal – content management system – cms, joomla cms and other web applications. All tests passed successfully without any problems. Haven’t test support because I have not had any problems. In the next months I will test more scripts including: phpbb (forum software), mybb, zencart (shopping cart), some galleries scripts and other apps, and will post results here. If you want to submit your own review please submit comment on this page. This lunarpages review blog is hosted with lunar pages.
MySQL is the best open-source relational database management system available and it is the most popular. It is used by many sites for storing data including google, wikipedia, facebook and zillion others. Its popularity, is because is free and open-source, and because is used by the most popular web applications: wordpress (blog and content management system – CMS), joomla – cms, drupal – cms, phpbb – forum software, wikimedia (wikipedia), galleries, shopping carts and many other web scripts. So it is part of the features of almost all hosting companies (I have not met a web hosting company that do not have MySQL included in their list). PHP, Apache HTTPD server and Linux (LAMP) platform is the most widely used platform for creating web sites and it is the most used setup by hosts.
LunarPages MySQL
Lunarpages is no exception to this but they also offer windows hosting. Currently the latest version of MySQL is installed on their servers. To create new databases/users use cPanel control panel. To make it easier to you to install web software (wordpress, drupal etc) you can use Fantastico De Luxe one-click installer.
February 26th, 2010
admin
Drupal is free web site content management script written in PHP that uses storage system like MySQL for storing data and options. It is free, open-source licensed under GNU GPL license. It offers many features to webmaster including content creation, content management (blogs, forums, polls, static pages and custom content types), have powerful user privilege system, template system (separates design from code), extensions (add new features without altering core modules) and many more. Since its creation in 2001 have grown in popularity in recent years. Many websites are powered by Drupal, even large corporate and government sites use it as a backend for their website management and content creation. Drupal provides good interface to developers with many core api functions. The latest version is 6.15 (at the time of writing this).
Drupal on LunarPages Review
Lunarpages is good drupal host. PHP is up to date with the latest version, and so it is MySQL. Custom PHP.INI is supported on Lunarpages, and there is also .htaccess support for clean urls. I have an account with Lunar Pages (this blog is hosted ther) and on my test drupal was running great, fast without any problems. I recommend them for a drupal host.
February 18th, 2010
admin
When I first setup this blog I also setup a monitoring service with serviceuptime.com. Serviceuptime.com offers free monitor service for your website. They have servers all around the world for their monitoring services. The check interval is 30 minutes. In January 2010 the average uptime for this blog (it is hosted by Lunarpages) was 99.25%. Out of 1467 checks only 11 have failed. Here is a screenshot of the monitoring report:
You can see the live report anytime by clicking here. The uptime is great, and most of the hosts have this uptime. 0.75% is a little downtime., so I can tell that lunarpages passed this test successfully. But we will see in the following months how the uptime will be. Thanks to serviceuptime.com for providing free monitoring service.
February 11th, 2010
admin
PHP the dynamic HyperText preprocessor is free open-source programming language, superb at creating dynamic websites and services (thought it can be used to create desktop applications). Its code can be directly embedded into HTML files or any other files (binary not supported), and the preprocessor will execute every code between <?php ?> tags of the file. This is also configurable via the master php.ini file. PHP 5 introduced many OOP (Object Oriented Programming) features, which made it more attractive to developers. It is very powerful with lots of functions to ease the development, yet simpler than it’s competitors: Perl, Python, ASP and others. But it’s popular mostly because of the scripts that are created with PHP: Worpdress (the most popular blogging tool), Joomla – Powerful Content Management System (CMS), Drupal (CMS), PHP BB (a forum/bulleting board software) and many others. Web sites like facebook, wikipedia, google also use PHP to dynamically create web pages. As of April 2007 more than 20 million websites use it (source php.net/usage.php). There is large community of programmers, users and testers, making it PHP the most popular web scripting language in the world. Lunarpages are great PHP hosting provider (this is wordpress blog powered by php and mysql), and they support custom PHP.ini if you need to customize specific settings that are required by some scripts.
Web Software Joomla is one of the best Content Management System (CMS) around. It is free, powered by PHP and a database engine like MySQL, open-source licensed under GNU General Public license which gives you much freedom. It offers lots of features for creating almost any type of websites. Features like powerful user management system, blogs, text/media management, rss feeds, web link manager, languages, internationalization, menu manager, polls, contact and much much more. It have powerful extension system (modules, plugins, addons called) that adds functions to this powerful script. There are thousands available plugins for Joomla, and there is extension directory on the official website: joomla.org. Also a templating system is supported where you can easily change the whole look of your web site with just one click, and there are many web designers out there that offer free Joomla templates. There is also large community of users contributinig to this software, fixing bugs, suggesting new features and testing Joomla. Joomla is simple to use and manage and there are many tutorials available. For Joomla powered web sites I recommend you good PHP Web Hosting provider like Lunarpages. I have tested Joomla on my lunarpages account and it runs great and it is fast. So I recommend Lunarpages for your Joomla website.
Lunarpages offers cPanel the leading control panel to it’s customers for management of their websites. cPanel is by far the most popular control panel, very easy to use, every serious web hosting company offers as a management panel to its customers. cPanel offers many features: ajax based file manager (I really like it, it’s awesome!) for managing directories and files, have the ability to upload, extract zip files, create new directories or files, copy, move, rename and much much more, MySQL database manager to manage databases, create new databases, new users, add or edit users, change database user permissions, and with phpmyadmin manage tables in databases. Other tool that I like it a lot is the stats tool where you can see the latest 300 visitors that have visited your websites, awstats, options to archive daily logs or monthly. The backup tool which can be used to backup the entire account, or individual websites and/or databases. FTP manager, add/edit new accounts, setup quota (space and bandwidth), permissions. With cPanel you can add new websites and it automatically creates the directories updates their dns servers, so you can immediately point your domain towards lunarpages nameservers, upload website files and create your website. If you have problem installing popular scripts like wordpress, drupal, joomla here is fantastico one-click installer to help you. There are many other features this control panel have, check cpanel.net for more.
