I was in this same position last year. I’d been with one host (American Web Hosting) for several years. I’d been happy with them for a lot of those years. But in that last 12 months I was with them there was a slew of problems. My site would go down randomly, my email wouldn’t work, the server I was on got blacklisted so my email wouldn’t even get to the folks I tried to contact. It was a mess. Plus, I was tired of having little space, limited sub-domains, and no ability for add-on domains at a non-crazy price.

When I went looking for a new host I did some research. I looked at rating sites and asked friends for advice. Many people suggested Dreamhost, but I kept seeing so many others having issues with them. One host kept popping up with high ratings: Lunarpages. Lots of space (unlimited!) lots of bandwidth (more unlimited!), as many sub-domains as I wanted and add-on domains included. For a not bad price, either. I signed up, paid a full year in advance, and was generally happy.

Then about 3 months ago something weird happened — I got an email from Lunarpages saying they’d disabled one of my scripts (actually the index.php file on a WordPress blog I had), claiming that it was taking up too much CPU on the server. Like 85%. The day before I’d installed a new plugin and I figured that must have triggered something odd.  I disabled the plugin and asked to have my index page restored — it took them 2 days to do so.

A couple of weeks later I recommended Lunarpages to someone. They Googled and found this page right away: Lunarpages sucks.

Oh crap.

I was alarmed because the situation described on that page matched what I’d gone through, just my scale was smaller. I started to worry because If LP was just making up this stuff about my index page actually causing some problem in order to upsell me and continue to do so until I bought a way expensive package, I was not down with that. But as I was still half convinced that the plugin had been the real culprit I decided to stay on with LP.

Big. Mistake. In the past three months they’ve disabled that same file 4 times. Each time they claim not to know exactly what my page is doing that causes all of these problems, so I can’t diagnose or fix it. They always disabled it without telling me beforehand, which is so professional, right? And it always took them 24 – 48 hours to undo.

The last straw was two weeks ago. Several of Lunarpages’ servers went down over the course of two days. My server plotzed toward the tail end of it all, and I only knew because I tried to access my blogs and discovered that every database on my site was gone — that server had gone down first. 15 minutes after the servers came back up I got an email — they’d disabled by index.php again. How it could possibly have used up 85% of the CPU in 15 minutes they could not tell me. And, of course, it took a day to get back.

I was livid.

So I went looking for a different host, but I was a little unsure of my ability to find one. How can you tell which ones are paying people to write fake reviews (something disgruntled LP refugees often charge) and which are genuinely good? There are a ton of websites out there that claim to rate and review web hosts, but really they’re just making money from affiliate links.

I somehow lucked out and found WebHostingTalk, a forum where they… well, you can probably guess. There are several threads filled with people like me who had the same problem with Lunarpages and other hosts. They asked the same questions I was looking to answer: who, then, should I choose?

I found out some interesting tidbits about web hosts. The ones that advertise that they have unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, etc., completely oversell their servers. They pack in dozens, maybe hundreds of accounts and tell people they have no limit and it’ll all be okay. Most people don’t use that much space or bandwidth. For those that do, or those running small business websites or fairly popular blogs or similar, this kind of overselling is a problem. If your website/blog uses even the tiniest bit more than it “should”, the host has to put a stop to that — there are too many people for you to take up more than 1% of the CPU!  So they warn you and say your site is using too much and perhaps what you really need is a dedicated server. Most people in this situation absolutely do not.

I found two web hosts in the WebHostingTalk threads and one from a friend’s rec that looked like good candidates. I attempted to email all of them and ask three fairly important questions. I wanted to know if they had a similar policy to Lunarpages when a website or page used up “too many” resources on the server. Would they disable the script without telling me first or try to work with me to solve the problem?  Also, would they be able to restore my site from a Cpanel-generated backup? These were essentials, and my choice would depend on the answers.

One host (I forget which) required me to create a login and password before I could even send them email.  Nope!

The second (1&1) forwarded my question to the tech support people from the sales address I originally sent it to, which is fine since I asked some fairly technical questions. However, the response I got was highly unsatisfactory. The person who answered the email did not understand most of what I was talking about. I think that the issue was a combination of English not being their first language (I surmised this mostly from the answers he/she gave, which betrayed an unfamiliarity) and the person in question being first level tech support. There may have been some people there who could have answered my inquires and the person did suggest I call. But I felt that, if I were to have a problem and the first level people were so completely clueless as to not even understand “Can you restore my site from a backup?” I would have to go through tech support hell every time I emailed or called.  So 1&1 was off the list.

The third (MDDHosting) not only answered my inquiries to my satisfaction, but also very promptly. And I’ve seen the person who runs it all over WebHostingTalk being generally helpful. The people there like him. So that’s who I went with.

I don’t have unlimited space or unlimited bandwidth. But MDD doesn’t oversell and takes care to maintain their servers. I can live with paying a little extra in order to have a bit more space and bandwidth than I need right now to give myself space to grow. And I no longer have to worry about my main page being summarily disabled and down for day at a time.

The website transfer was easy and mostly painless, he helped me through it and was patient, and now I’m all sorted.  I’m a little worried that Lunarpages will try to auto-charge me for another year, so I’m taking steps to make sure that doesn’t happen.  They’re already getting a free month since my contract was technically not up until mid-April. But I was determined not to waste another second with those horrendous people.

So yes, add me to the people who say: Lunarpages suck! If you’re choosing a new webhost, do so wisely. Ask them questions beforehand. Don’t believe hosting review sites with a ton of ads and affiliate links. And ‘ware anyone who claims to give you unlimited this and that. So sayeth K T.