LunarPages.com : worst web hosting on the Internet

The LunarPages servers are woefully underpowered. But worse than their servers is their customer service.

I’ll start with what’s wrong with the servers. This blog is hosted at Lunarpages.com on a shared server. About once every 3 months or so I get an email saying that I have exceeded my allotted CPU resources and they disable the site – usually after tech support hours so I have to wait until the next day to call and yell at them. On an average busy day here at polyGeek.com I get about 2,000 pageviews. There are a few other minor blogs hosted on the account which don’t account for more than a few hundred pageviews but lets be generous and say that the others get 1,000 pageviews.

Lunarpages.com can’t handle an account that gets 3,000 pageviews a day. Breaking that down that’s about 2 visits per minute. The visits to polyGeek.com come from all over the world and so are spread out all day long but lets assume that all of the visits come in an 8 hour span. That’s still just 6 visits a minute or about one every 10 seconds. So at the absurdly high end my site averages a hit every 10 seconds. And that’s too much to ask from a shared account?

I checked with many other hosting providers and gave them the same numbers and they said that their servers could handle that many times over for a shared account.

As bad as their servers are their customer service is even worse. When this all started – about 2 years ago – I was emailed by customer support and told that they had taken my account offline because of a traffic spike. I checked my site and instead of seeing polyGeek.com I saw an advertisement for Lunarpages.com hosting. That really pissed me off. They don’t get to have free advertising because by taking my site offline. Now they just disable the index.php file and only they can re-enable it.

I contacted tech support and bitched about the Lunarpages.com ad and then we tried figuring out what the issue was with the traffic spike. Unfortunately neither myself or tech support could figure it out. I kept looking at my Google Analytics and saying that it was an average traffic day. Back and forth we went and I suggested that maybe it was a search engine spider that may be creating lots of page hits but not being registered by Google Analytics. I don’t know much about this stuff and was just guessing. Tech support answered that I should write a robot.txt file and remove everything from being searched. To which my response was, “Are you fucking nuts? I should just disable all search indexing to drive my traffic down so that your pathetic servers don’t get overloaded?” What in the hell kind of dumb ass advise is that?

So this goes on back and forth for over a year. We have no idea what is causing the traffic spikes and they just shut down my site for a day or so and then I’m back up and running. In the mean time I’ve installed a WordPress caching plugin to reduce the rendering load on the server. That helped but not enough.

Then a few months ago it happened again and I kept pushing with questions trying to figure out what could cause this. I always assumed that they had some sort of dashboard that monitored the servers and let them know when an account was running over their CPU limits. But it turns out they only check when a customer complains about their site running slowly. After a little more research I discovered that my site runs over its CPU limits all the time. Even on slow days. In fact Lunarpages.com just yanked my site again today. On a Sunday which is by far the lowest traffic day of the week. I’ve never broken over 750 pageviews on a Sunday – ever!

All along the way I’ve been told that what I need to do is pay for an upgrade to a dedicated hosting account. Right, like I’m going to pay Lunarpages.com more money because their servers suck. I told them to fuck off. They are going to have to put up with me constantly going over on CPU usage until my contract is up and then I’m leaving. I would leave right now if they would give me a refund for the unused time but they have a 30 day cancellation policy. So it looks like we’re both fucked.

The very least I can do is warn people that Lunarpages.com as pathetic servers and horrible customer service.