Lunarpages Unbiased Review

I bet half of the Lunarpages users are now aware that the web host offers a wide range of web tools for webmasters.

These tools, some created in-house by Lunarpages technical personnel while some by Lunarpages partners, are especially useful when it comes to SEO work.

What are the free web tools?

You can check out these free web tools yourself by visiting Lunarpages website.

For reference, here’s the complete list.

• Ping Tool
• Pages Indexed
• Dmoz & Yahoo Directory Checker
• IP Lookup
• Partners
• Link Popularity Checker
• Meta Tag Generator
• Pagerank Checker
• CrazyEgg
• PageMason Web Builder
• Lunarpages Toolbar
• Competitor Analysis
• Position Checker
• Simple Submission
• Deluxe Keyword Density

Are these web tools helpful?

Some of these tools are obsolete nowadays. Simple Submission, for example, is not much needed in current time as Search Engines spiders do not need invitation to visit your website anymore. However, there some of the tools that’s worth mentioning. For example, I found great value in ‘Competitor Analysis’. Competitor Analysis allow you to study your SEO competition closely by checking thru the details, including a website’s word count, image count, link popularity, link count, usage of Flash files and iFrames, as well as keyword density counts. Such metric data is valuable in SEO measures and are useful for any webmasters who wish to rank better in their target SERP.

I’ll be covering more about these free tools from time to time. For the time being, I strongly recommend you to make use of them and build a better search engines optimized website.

There are time when we need more than just some standard hosting features. It can be a special scripts, a special platform, or just some special features – you just need them to run your very own web functions. While offering wide features support in their standard hosting plan, Lunarpages does provide flexibility to their customers. These additional features are not listed in the standard plan (so that average customers don’t pay extra for an unused product) but can be added into your Lunarpages account.

Basic and Business Hosting

For Basic and Business Hosting Plan, additional features available for upgrades are:

• ASP Enabled Account
• Dedicated IP
• Java/JSP Enabled Account
• Premium Restore Service
• Shell Access
• Dedicated SSL Certificates
• Apache 1.3 or 2

Reseller Hosting

Reseller Hosting Plan, additional upgrades are:

• ASP Enabled Account
• Dedicated IP
• Java/JSP Enabled Account
• Premium Restore Service
• Dedicated SSL Certificates

Windows Hosting

Addon features, however, are pretty limited with Windows hosting due to licensing and costing issue. Customers who subscribed to Windows Hosting Plan get these three extra hosting features:

• Dedicated IP
• Premium Restore Service
• Dedicated SSL Certificates

What if I need more?

In case you couldn’t find the necessary features here, what you can do is request directly from the customer supports (email: support@lunarpages.com). I’m sure folks at Lunarpages will be happy to sort things up with you. However, do note that there are additional charges too for these additional features. So in case you do not wish to spend extra on your hosting account, perhaps you should build your website with the usage of standard features.

I am sinful not to post this earlier at LunarpagesSecretRevealed.com. In mid January 2009, Lunarpages launched its new homepage designs and I think it’s great! Here are some quick print screens for you.

Lunarpages’s all new homepage designs

Webpage linking to additional supporting resources

Webpage introducing Lunarpages community profiles (Facebook, blogs, etc)

Lunarpages free webmaster tools

What’s different with Lunarpages new website?

The new design looks much cleaner and professional and I guess the company website converts better after the change. However, I think it’s a waste to remove the flash presentation that shows customers feedbacks. I think that gives very positive image to the company and should be kept in the new design.

Anyway, according to the officials, the new website design is meant for better functionality. It improves on several things, including

• Better navigation and user experience designs
• Inclusion of additional supporting resources
• Better looking community section for web users
• Easier access to Lunarpages free webmaster tools
• Quick overview on Lunarpages latest hosting offers

So, what do you think about their new website? Have a look yourself.

For website owners that are not using spam protection, it’s very likely that your mailbox will be attacked by spammers. Drugs ads, scams trap, get rich scheme, email virus, Trojan files – you name it! It’s therefore crucial to run an effective anti-spam opeartions.

Lunarpages hosting was pretty effective when it comes to spam protection. Generally, email protection are divided into SpamAssassin and SpamBox at Lunarpages.

What are SpamAssassin and SpamBox?

Quoted from their own words, SpamAssassin is an automated mail filter that uses a wide range of heuristic algorithms on email headers and message bodies to identify “SPAM” (unsolicited email). The anti-spam system is specially crafted to identify and mark emails that score beyond your threshold (spam) measurements. An email’s SpamAssassin score is the sum of values given to certain known spam characteristics.

As SpamAssassin uses a wide variety of local and network tests to identify spam signatures. This makes it harder for spammers to identify one aspect which they can craft their messages to work around.

SpamBox, on the other hand, allows emails identified as spam by SpamAssassin to be delivered to a separate mail folder named “spam”. If this folder is not regularly checked and emptied, it may cause your email or filesystem quotas to be exceeded, resulting in a failure to receive legitimate messages. You can easily use IMAP or Horde/IMP to check messages that are routed to this box. If you wish to use pop3 to check the spam box, just add “/spam” (without the quotes) to the end of your pop3 login. (Example: user@domain.tld/spam)

How to enable SpamAssassin and SpamBox in Lunarpages?

The basic setup process is pretty simple as all you need to do is just a few clicks. To start, login to your Lunarpages cPanel. Click in the ‘Mail’ icon and look for the line named ‘SpamAssassin’. The link will lead to a page where you can enable/disable the spam protection system for your Lunarpages hosting account.

Enabling Spam Protection at Lunarpages: Step-by-step guide

Screen captures are shown below for your references.

Step 1: Login to cPanel and get into the ‘mail’ features.

Step 2: Look for the link named ‘Spam Assassin’.

Step 3: One-click activation for SpamAssassin and SpamBox

It should be aware however, further configuration is needed if you’re setting up Spam Assassin for the first time. Input of black and white list for your system is necessary to avoid accidental spam tags; and if necessary, you might want to revised on the default spam scores.

Lots of server migration happening in Lunarpages for the past few months and I guess we are seeing the final transfer early this year 2009.

Server boxes were moving physically from Los Angeles datacenter to San Diego datacenter. I can’t find any reasons for the move but the migration planning and progress can be tracked from the official forum.

Migration of server Isis, Seth, Tsohea, Felix, Deneb, as well as Ez-web-n-mail are reported in late year 2008.

Generally the servers being affected will be offline for 6 – 8 hours (for physical transportation). As the migrations are planned properly, I don’t read much complaints about the users site. There are, however, quite some change on the server IPs, Isis server for example, switch to a new IP as: 67.210.119.235 IN PTR isis.fastsecureservers.com.

Server software upgrades

Folks at Lunarpages are also taking the chance to upgrade their software. Quoting fully from the forum post, these are the list of software being upgraded:

Apache to 1.3.41 if it wasn’t already this version
PHP4 to PHP 4.4.9
PHP5 when applicable to PHP 5.2.6
MySQL to MySQL 5.0.51a
Ruby when applicable to Ruby 1.8.6 newest patched release
Zend Optimizer to 3.3.3
ImageMagick to 6.4.3
IonCube to 3.1.32
ffmpeg when applicable to latest release snapshot

According to Tristan (Lunarpages technical staffs), these updates are for security purposes to update each service to the newest, secure release. Generally there shouldn’t be any effects on Lunarpages users but in case you’re one of the unlucky one, reviewing the php.ini file(s) might helps.