Hosting Tutorial & Guide
Lunarpages VS HostGator – Choose the More Powerful Service
Both Lunarpages and HostGator provide a large variety of hosting services among which the Linux shared web hosting is used by most of their customers. This comparison, therefore, is made between the Linux based shared hosting services from the 2 companies.The compared aspects are mainly pricing, web hosting features, uptime, speed and technical support. Based on the Lunarpages review and HostGator review worked out by our editors as well as thousands of real customer reviews, we have made the following table which presents the unbiased ratings given to the 2 companies. Refer to the statistics for their edges and limitations.
 |  | |
|---|---|---|
| Plan in Comparison | Basic | Hatchling |
| Price | ||
| Feature | ||
| Loading Speed | ||
| Uptime | ||
| Support | ||
| Customer Reviews | 6 | 321 |
| Customer Rating | ||
| Recommended |
About Lunarpages and HostGator
Lunarpages has had a long history in the industry. It started the business in 2000, and with so many years' development, it now offers a wide range of online products including web design services, hosted exchange, web hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated servers. Lunarpages is headquartered in Canada, but it offers the services on a global scale. However, the company is now receiving more and more complaints about the technical support and frequent IP blocking issues.HostGator, established two years later than Lunarpages, is one of the largest web hosting providers around the world. It focuses on the hosting products only and has always been making improvements to the services it offers. As far as we know, HostGator has been receiving numerous compliments from its users mainly due to the outstanding ease of use, excellent reliability and quality support. It has maintained high user ratings.
Plans & Pricing
Lunarpages provides a single Basic Shared Hosting plan for people requiring budget-friendly shared hosting for online presence. The price of the plan starts from $4.95/mo, but this affordable price is only valid for long-term 60 months subscriptions. For 24/12 months billing cycles, the prices are $6.95/mo and $8.95/mo respectively. As for even shorter terms of 6 months and 3 months, there is an additional charge of $30 setup fee. Additionally, cPanel and SSH both are charged extra $2/mo. Combined with all the fees, the service is much more expensive than most other ones in the market.
HostGator has 3 shared hosting plans named as Hatchling, Baby and Business which are priced from $6.95/mo. Now there is a 45% discount available for people signing up with the coupon HG45PERCENT or the promo link below. With the discount activated, the effective price starts from $3.82/mo. $100 credits for Google AdWords are included in all the plans.
In addition, the plans come with a non-contractual 45 days refund guarantee with which HostGator promises that customers with any dissatisfaction are able to request a full refund during 45 days of signup. This ensures the value of the company's service.
HostGator Promotional Link Activation
Features
Both Lunarpages and HostGator offer unlimited disk storage and bandwidth in their shared web hosting plans, but they differ much from each other in many other features like control panel and script installer. Lunarpages uses a custom built control panel by default for the management of website files, emails and other things, while HostGator provides cPanel control panel to all of its customers.As for script installer, Lunarpages utilizes Softaculous and its competitor adopts the self-developed QuickInstall. Both of the tools are easy-to-use and helpful in automating the installation of popular open source projects. The installation and update of WordPress, Joomla, Magento, PrestaShop and more can be accomplished within seconds.
For the availability of some other features packed in the services of the 2 companies, check the table below.
| Feature | | |
|---|---|---|
| Plan | Basic | Hatchling |
| Disk Storage | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Monthly Data Transfer | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Email Accounts | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| cPanel | $2/mo | Free |
| MySQL Databases | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Perl | ||
| Ruby on Rails | ||
| Backups | ||
| SSH | $2/mo | Free |
| Regular Price | $4.95/mo | $6.95/mo |
| Discount | N/A | 45% |
| Current Price | $4.95/mo | $3.82/mo |
| How to Claim | N/A | Promo Link |
Surely, HostGator is the rich-featured option as compared with Lunarpages. With this hosting provider, you can get all the basic hosting features needed for the smooth and efficient running of the website, such as an unlimited allocation of bandwidth, disk storage, email accounts, FTP accounts and email storage. If you are looking for the effortless process of website creation, this web host also offers the 1-click script installer that helps you install more than 75 open source applications instantly. Only a few clicks are required.
In addition, to achieve a safe and secure hosting environment, HostGator offers a long list of security-related features that include SSL, SSH, email spam assassin, password protection, IP deny management, IP blocking and hotlink protection. Even, there are a lot of free extras available, giving you the free theme options for website design, free transfer service for domain and database, free tool for website building and free advertising credits for online promotion.
In order to achieve the ultimately easy hosting experience, this web host includes the user-friendly cPanel into the hosting packages, with which you can effortlessly manage all your files, domains, emails, FTP and many other aspects of your site and hosting account.
However, if you are a professional developer who requires the support for some programming languages to finish the online development, this hosting provider also can meet your needs by offering the updated versions of Ruby, PHP, Python, CGI, Perl and many more.
Uptime & Speed
Being the same as each other, Lunarpages and HostGator guarantee 99.9% server and network uptime to make customers rest assured that their websites are always online and accessible. To ensure that the guarantee is trustworthy, the 2 companies both use first-rate facilities with some of the best servers, networks and monitoring systems.Lunarpages runs several data centers equipped with multiple UPS redundant power, fast servers, well-designed switches and routers, and advanced firewalls. These facilities are under 24x7 monitoring which offers detailed operation data of the important elements.
HostGator uses data centers in Provo, UT and Houston, TX to deliver the best possible performance with the strategic locations. All of the data centers come with multiple layers of power and network redundancy, and the utilization of cutting-edge hardware. By cooperating with large network carriers like Level 3, Comcast and nLayer, the company is confident in the web hosting speed.
In addition, HostGator has integrated CloudFlare CDN with its web hosting services. All customers can activate the CDN for free to deliver faster page loads to their site visitors. CDN not only guarantees much faster delivery of static content, but also saves the bandwidth, so that HostGator customers won't have to worry about the overuse of the data transfer.
We have been monitoring the uptime and server response speed of the 2 companies' services by ourselves to figure out the truth of their performance. Read the following statistics for the results.
- Lunarpages: Averages 99.90% uptime in the past 30 days.
- HostGator: Averages 99.98% uptime in the past 30 days.
Technical Support
In the support portal on the official site of Lunarpages, there are 3 ways to get a solution to problems – support ticket, wiki and community forum. Besides, customers can also find a support phone number and a live chat support button both of which are available methods for seeking help from the support team. However, there are a lot of demerits existing with Lunarpages technical support as the company is receiving an increasing number of complaints about this aspect. Firstly, the support team is sometimes hard to get in contact with. Phones and live chat are responded slowly, while tickets are even slower. Secondly, the phone support for shared hosting is not 24x7, and instead, it is available from 7 am to 5 pm on Monday to Friday. Thirdly, many users have reported that Lunarpages could block customers' IP addresses without any notification or excuse.
HostGator has a massive knowledgebase which includes answers to almost all the commonly asked questions, and it keeps a company blog to offer tips and tricks for marketing, SEO and other advanced topics. A real support representative is reachable via live chat, phone and email 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The quick response and accuracy have impressed us much.