Why You Shouldn’t Host at LunarPages
IndependentSources was hosted at LunarPages from its inception in 2005. As of this week, we’re out of there. For the benefit of anyone researching hosting companies, here’s our tale.
Independent Sources has been running fine on an old version of Wordpress for two years. We haven’t tweaked anything for over eighteen months — no plugins, no templates, no upgrades.
Then something happened. I think the spam logs weren’t being purged properly, got too large, and flaky things started happening. Did LunarPages email us to warn us that we were using too much of the shared server’s resources? No, in the middle of the night last Sunday they moved us to a non-production server and, due to misconfiguration on their end, brought the site down for two days. Oh, and they killed our email for three days, and five days later it still isn’t completely fixed.
Did I mention that if they had sent us an alert, the fix would have taken five minutes? Instead, I’ve spent twenty-plus hours this week dealing with the mess they created.
But here’s the worst part: after taking down the site through their own mistake, they took two days to get back to us! And a day to reply to our followup questions.
By then — Thursday — I’d had enough, and began the process of moving the site to MediaTemple, which I’ve had good experiences with. Yes, they’re more expensive than LunarPages, but when I’ve had support issues, they’ve been on top of them.
This isn’t the first time LunarPages has been lackadaisical about critical customer problems. Last month I had a similar experience with a commercial site hosted there. The site was down (apparently due to a memory allocation issue). We filed an urgent support ticket at 11am. At 11pm we got a response saying it was being forwarded to the technical staff. The first reply was over a day after the initial ticket was filed — and that was to say they didn’t know what was happening. Subsequent contacts 1) identified a non-existent problem with redirection, which sent us off on a daylong detour, and 2) started to take two or so days to respond.
In this case the problem was ours, and the hosting company can’t be responsible for it. Nonetheless, they were slow to help us eliminate possibilities — did they alter the server in any way, for instance? — and wrong when they did venture an opinion.
When we asked and paid for backups to be restored, it took several tries for them to do it correctly. That process took over a day and involved an hour-long phone call as well as emails.
So — two separate incidents, two sites down, two cases of slow and mistake-prone support. Is it worth saving a few bucks a month? Not if you’re serious about your site.
Insider has taken to calling them “LoserPages,” and he’s got it right.
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June 23rd, 2007 at 9:27 am
I was hosting Spin Thicket there….what a disaster. Left two months ago.
June 24th, 2007 at 8:21 am
LoserPages is the hosting equivalent of King/Drew hospital. Their tech support is just like the janitor who mopped around the lady who was dying on the floor in the ER. It’s hard to tell if it is callousness, incompetence, or both. Regardless if you get wheeled into King/Drew or LoserPages with a problem, you’re screwed beyond belief.
June 24th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
You should self-host. I’m hosting off of my own server – I daisy chained a couple of Macintosh Classics through an old Sansui receiver I bought in ‘77 at Pacific Stereo – and its been clear sailing ever since. The only problem is when I start picking up KMET through my scuzzi port.
June 25th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Hey! I think that’s what LunarPages was doing! And I’ve got a 300 baud modem around here somewhere …
June 25th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Maybe Sean is secretly the owner of Lunar pages
June 26th, 2007 at 4:44 am
I hear you on the web-provider woes.
I too, am looking for a more stable place, I’ve got a few insider deals (no pun intended) but I’m wondering if independent third party is the way to go or not.
Then again, being able to reach out and actually throttle your Web Administrator is a satisfying thought.
June 26th, 2007 at 5:16 am
Well dang. Wish I had known you were having all those issues. Me and a friend have set up our own servers and are running the Webdream on it. For those interested ( drum roll please, I gotta spam! ), we’re just charging $10 a month for light blogs. It’s Wordpress based with all the bells and whistles. I’m not gonna get rich from this thing, but I’d like to pay the bills. I basically was having the same problems as you guys with Typepad and decided to go it alone.
June 26th, 2007 at 9:27 am
I’ve thought about hosting ourselves, but the little things you get w/ hosting — no worries about hard drive crashes, hassle-free backup, scalability, security — that make me happy to let some one else take care of it.
June 26th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Plus when you outsource to a third party like Lunar Pages you get to get the occasional email telling you that because of excess CPU usage you’ve been moved to a “production” server. This in fact means that your site is now shut off from the world, you have no recourse, you are not allowed to fix the problem, and you need to be prepared to be down for the next 2-3 frustrating days.
June 27th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Although we moved Independent Sources, I left a personal site at Lunarpages. That’s looking like a mistake — even though they finally moved it back to a production server, no one in my family can access their POP email accounts.
June 28th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
I’m sure they’ll respond to your “urgent” email in 48 hours giving you generally useless information but closing with a cheerful “don’t hesitate to contact us again if there is something else we can do for you.”
Lunar Pages = Loser Pages