LunarPages Review – Reviews and Coupons of Lunar Pages Web Hosting

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.

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.

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.

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.

Happy new year to everyone! Me and the other authors of this lunarpages hosting review blog wish you healthy, prosperous and happy new year. I hope that this year will be better than 2009, the economy to get better and our lifes. This a great time to sign-up with lunarpages if you have not done so. They have an ongoing new year and Christmas promotion on their hosting plans – $50 off coupon code 2010 valid for all plans except starter, email and domain plans . So hurry up and sign-up with lunar pages now because the coupon offer may expire! I haven’t been updating this blog for almost two weeks because of the new year and Christmas, and haven’t had much time to update this review blog. Thanks for reading and have a good time!

There are several hosting plans on lunar pages, enough to satisfy everyone’s hosting needs. All plans have lots of features.

Starter Plan

The starter plan (the cheapest) is for newbies to websites, blogging and/or hosting. You can host only one domain on this plan (great for bloggers). Includes PHP, MySQL support, 5gb storage and 50 gigabytes of bandwidth. This is the best plan for personal blogs. The price is $2.95 per month if you pay annually.

Personal Website Plan

This is the best plan if you want to host multiple websites on one account. Features included are: PHP, MySQL support, free domain name, host unlimited domains and sites, unlimited storage and bandwidth, python support, ruby on rails and much more. The plan is available at $4.95 monthly if you pay annually for 12 months.

Linux and Windows VPS hosting

Virtual private servers hosting available Parallels and Xen servers. There are several plans available depending on your need for processor speed and memory: Linux VPS, Windows VPS, Linux Starter, Linux Pro and Windows Pro. All com with free domain name.

Business Web Hosting

This plan is for businesses. It includes all the features of the personal website plan, plus 2 more free domains, dedicated IP address, SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate, merchant services and more.

Dedicated servers

Dedicated servers are best for websites who have many visitors or web services. Price starts at $99. Intel processors are available, Celeron, Pentium and Xeon. Included is free domain name, free setup, free dedicated IP, free backup and more.

Other plans available are e-mail hosting and quicksite. For these plans check the lunarpages hosting solutions page. Lunarpages is unique among other hosts because it have plan wizard where you answer few questions and lunarpages chooses the best plan for you.

- WordPress -

WordPress is a blog and content management system written in PHP, using MySQL database for data storage. It is distributed under GNU General Public license and can be downloaded and used free of charge. It is one of the most popular publishing systems (CMS) on the market and installed on thousands of servers worldwide.

Besides blogging, which is mainly used for, it is also suited to handle all sites. Since the contents of all pages are accessible via a login page, you do not have an FTP client to edit and update the pages on the website.

WordPress is also possible to adjust freely through various extensions and themes. These can either create yourself or download from, say, WordPress’s own website.

In WordPress you can add functionality using plugins, and it’s possible to change the visual appearance through themes. In addition, the user can modify the code like XHTML, HTML and CSS of their pages using the wysiwyg editor that is included.

- LunarPages WordPress -

WordPress runs just fine on lunar pages as you can see (this wordpress blog is hosted on lunar pages). I installed wordpress with lunarpages’s one-click install script web apps which besides wordpress have many other popular scripts avaiable for installing (joomla, phpbb, drupal, galleries and many more).

I signed up with lunarpages yesterday and the process was simple. I had my account setup in 30 minutes, with login details send to my e-mail address. I chose the starter plan (the price is $2.95 a month) because I only needed one domain on lunarpages to test them and post reviews here. Let me outline what will this blog be about:
* Lunarpages unbiased reviews from me and reviews from forums, blogs etc.
* User reviews
* Lunar pages tests
* Lunarpages support, features, hosting, uptime (with monitoring reports), page speed loading time, servers, network and more.
I installed this wordpress blog via lunarpages web apps (wordpress, drupal, joomla, phpbb and many others) with one click. So far I am satisfied with lunarpages hosting.