Wiz's Computer and Website Security Blog

After having my websites hosted by Bluehost for two years I have had to make a business decision and change web hosting companies. Note, this decision was based solely on price, not any problems with the service. My web hosting renewal date is fast approaching and as it turns out the cost of renewing my annual hosting contract had gone up, rather than down. Despite contacting the sales department at Bluehost they were unwilling to negotiate with me, so I looked around for a while and decided to switch my websites to LunarPages, on their Basic hosting package. Instead of having to pay out almost $108 for another year at Bluehost, I am paying just under $60 to LunarPages; almost half the annual price! Normally, this hosting would cost $6.95 a month (still $2.00/month cheaper than Bluehost's 1 year renewal rate), but I got this deal because LunarPages is running a Fall Special rate of only $4.95 per month, annually, for new accounts. In these tough economic times I had to get the best price, along with excellent service, and that's what LunarPages offers.

Let's get to the specifics and compare LunarPages hosting to Bluehost. Both now offer unlimited disk space and data transfer (a.k.a "Bandwidth"). If I would have had to rewrite my entire website to accommodate the new host I wouldn't have made the change, even to save the $48.00. But, I didn't have to change a single script, or file location. Everything works on LunarPages exactly the same as it did on Bluehost! There is a slight difference between the cPanel features on LunarPages, but nothing monumental and nothing I require for normal operation. In fact, get this, after recreating just the POP3 email accounts, Using the "Backup" icon on both cPanels, I was able to export my email forwarding accounts and spam filters from Bluehost to G-zipped files on my computer, then import those same files into my new account on LunarPages, and voila, my 50+ email forwarding (alias) accounts and custom mail filters were loaded and ready to go! Uploading all of my website files and folders took a bit of time (at about 40 KB/sec. max.), but went smoothly and flawlessly. In all there was just under a gigabyte uploaded to the new server. Then, I recreated the database and super-user for my MovableType blog, exported the database from Bluehost, imported it into LunarPages (using the Backup page icon), and Bam, there was my blog! Then I went back into cPanel and inputted my "add-on" domains and they became separate websites. My parked domains similarly became parked on my main site at LunarPages, just like they were on BlueHost.

I am an activist Webmaster and spam fighter and I don't tolerate log or blog spammers at all. I have developed some really advanced spam and exploit detection and blocking rules that I apply in my .htaccess files and all of those rules work exactly the same on LunarPages as they did on BlueHost. These rules include certain ip based blocklists that I publish for others to use to protect their websites from spammers, scammers and exploiters in various unfriendly countries. Each blocklist is available in both .htaccess and iptables formats. If you have an Apache server based website and are being troubled by Exploited Servers, Nigerian scammers, Russian spammers, or Chinese hackers, take a look at my .htaccess, or iptables blocklists.

I use a CGI hit counter and run the counter script in a special directory, not the cgi-bin. Both BlueHost and LunarPages allow CGI scripts to run in any directory you want, after you CHMOD the Perl scripts to "755." Oh yeah, "XBitHack Full" in .htaccess works on LunarPages, if you set the X bit to executable (744).

LunarPages supplies a means of accessing your website before it goes live, so I was able to test all functions to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything. Of course I did forget to CHMOD a few miscellaneous executable files, which took a couple of minutes to locate and correct. After everything tested correctly I logged into Dotster, my Domain Registrar, where I changed the primary and secondary Name Servers from BlueHost to LunarPages. I changed the last modified date in the JavaScript include file used in the footer of every page then uploaded that just to LunarPages, leaving the last modified date as it was on BlueHost. Within a half hour my website was loading from LunarPages, showing the new last modified date! It took two days for the DNS change to traverse throughout the Internet, after which the entire World was seeing my new web host location. I left the files up on BlueHost for the couple of last stragglers that were still being routed there. They can serve as an emergency backup mirror, in case LunarPages was to suffer an outage before my BlueHost account expires next month.

That's pretty much it. I am totally satisfied with my decision to make the switch to LunarPages as my website hosting company. I still get all of my mail, to all of the accounts I had before. All forwarding accounts work, as do the site-wide cPanel spam filters I wrote. My CGI scripts do what they are supposed to do, the counters count, the includes are included. The only thing that is really different is that I am paying almost half the price for the same features, with the same 99.9% uptime guarantee. Don't let anybody fool you about uptime; all shared hosting servers will eventually suffer downtime because of any number of reasons. Sometimes the server I was on went dark due to the failure of the RAID cards, sometimes due to overload of the CPU, or due to DDoS attacks on one of the hundreds of websites hosted on that server. Shit happens! I can't afford to pay for dedicated hosting for my websites, so I accept a little downtime here and there. Time will tell if LunarPages servers are any more resilient than BlueHost's servers. If not, I will certainly let y'all know about it on my blog.

I wrote a web page describing the LunarPages hosting packages and features of the Basic hosting account and invite you to read it. Right now they are still running the Fall Special price of only $4.95 per month, for one or two year contracts. If you need a new hosting company and want to save money, but still get real telephone support, please give them a try. They have a 30 day full money back guarantee if you aren't satisfied. I had one chance to call support with a question about the server I was on. The phone was answered by an automated routing machine. I pressed the key to route to technical support and somebody in the USA picked up the phone after two rings. Just call 1-877-LUNARPAGES if you need phone support for USA and Canada. For the United Kingdom, call 0800-072-9150 instead. If you live outside of these countries, you cannot dial the toll free number. They provide another support line for their international customers: 1-714-521-8150.