Lunarpages Hosting Plans

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.

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.

It’s easy to add additional domain on your Lunarpages hosting account via cPanel.

An addon domain is a domain hosted on the same Lunarpages account but is pointed to a subfolder of your main domain. It works like an independent website where e-mail account and stats reporting can be added separately from the main domain.

To create an addon domain, you’ll first need to login to Lunarpages cPanel. Once you have made your way to the cPanel front page, look for an icon named ‘Addon Domain’.

Click in and you’ll see a series of addon domain already hosted on your account (if there’s any). For the first timer, here’s the screen you’ll be seeing where a simple form is given at the Addon Domain Maintenance screen.

Fill in the form accordingly and click ‘Add Domain’ when you’re done. The cPanel system will setup everything automatically and you should be done within minutes.

In case you need help for the form (which I don’t think it’s necessary), here is a rundown quoted from Lunarpages Wiki Page:

New Addon Domain:

The domain you wish to add to the account (such as example.com). Be sure you do not add the “www” in front of the addon domain when putting in the address.

Username/directory Name:

The subdomain/director in your account you would like to point the addon domain.

Password:

Create a new password for the addon domain. Please make it 6-8 characters and it should not contain the domain name.

The setup process is pretty simple and direcet. It’s, however, worth noting that addon domains will not be functional unless the domain name is registered with a valid domain name register and the domain name is configured to point at the Lunarpages nameserver for your account (something like NS54.Lunarpages.com and so on).

Also, do not confuse addon domain with a subdomain. Sub domains are extensions of your main site. They look like subdomain.yourdomain.com; while add on domains are self standing domains which are simply located on the same account as your original domain.

Yes, Lunarpages currently support JSP and Java Servlets in their hosting plans.

Both JSP and Java Sevlet are available as an additional function. However, note that this offer is not a standard offer, you will need to inform Lunarpages tech support when you first order your Lunarpages service.

Also, JSP functionality does not come free in Lunarpages hosting plan. An extra cost of $4.95 per month is charged per domain or subdomain for JSP usage.