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.

Like it or not, the world of Internet is expanding fast.

Sooner or later, every business will need to have their own websites – just like phone and fax. In case you’re planning to start off a new website, here’re the consideration points to go thru before making any purchase.

1. Website Domain Name

First, you’ll need to pick the right domain name. A website domain name is crucial for your website/business branding. Also, a keyword-riched domain name helps a lot in term of search engines optimization (SEO).

2. Web Hosting

Trust me, you don’t want your visitors to get a blank page or a down site. Your website has to be live 24/7 thus you will need a good web server that offer great server uptime. As for my recommendation, Lunarpages is one of the top rated hosting company that offer stable web hosting with affordable price. They are currently having Fall Promotion thus it’s good for you to check them up.

More details about Lunarpages Fall Promotion.

3. Server OS

Basically your main choice with server operating system will be Windows or Linux. Most hosting companies offer both type of server hosting. However, unless you need to run Windoes applications on your website, it’s crazy to not go with Linux. Linux’s the open source OS and they offer a lot more plugin and web applications for free. Further more, the OS is much stable than Windows.

4. Web Platform/Structure

Another points to run thru would be the content structure on your web platform. Will your website runs on static web pages, or dynamic elements that requires database connection. MySQL is the usual database used for web database; while PHP, ASP, DHTML, AJAX are some of the programming languages used for coding dynamic websites. For the convenience to maintain, you might want to check out some of the CMS software like Joomla, WordPress, or Drupal.

5. eCommerce Features

You’ll need to consider more if you’re planning to process online transaction on your website. What are the necessary application needed for your website? Shopping cart systems? Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and secure sever certificates perhaps? As for Lunarpages, users get a shared secure certs for free but in case you need a private SSL, a dedicated IP and a private certifications are needed!

Wrapping things up

Well, that’s five main thing to consider before starting your website. It’s definitely not an easy job to deploy a web project. To be honest, unless you’re familiar with the technical issues, if not the learning curve down the road is pretty steep.

Fortunately, hosting nowadays are normally equipped with easy-installation scripts like Fantastico. With the help of Fantastico, you’ll get all the web features installed within seconds. Shopping cart, CMS system, photo gallery, wiki addon – it’s definitely the most convenient web tool ever implement online.