LunarPages for bad uptime and FTP Problems

I normally do not bash webhosts unless they really stink.  I could use other four letter words but I choose to be a statesman about this.  This is the worst host I have ever had with any of my sites.  Although, I have subscribed to some shady ones that are not so mainstream.  I will share with you my irritations with this host.

1. FTP is horrible.  I use WS FTP and for some reason half of the time it just gives up in the middle of transfers or blanks out.
2. 90% Uptime Would be giving them the benefit of the Doubt.  They claim it is 99.9% uptime but that is a lie.  Their shared hosting is definitely not 99.9% uptime as they claim on their site “We experience 99.9% uptime on all servers and network equipment over a 12 month period. That 00.1% is equal to approximately 9 hours of downtime in a year, not even a full day. We are well within this limit.”  My uptime is so bad that I get emails at least once a month from my uptime monitoring services that my site is down for HOURS during peak load times.
3. Customer Service problems – Try and reach them at 1am when they have your site offline or rebooting for some reason which happens a lot and you will be out of luck once again unless you are a dedicated or virtual customer.  The shared hosting customers have to wait until the next day to get the issue resolved or fill out a form online.  I will talk about this irritating form online here in a minute.
4. Lunarpages requires you to remember another password and username for their support.lunarpages.com login.  This is something that I have not remembered once and to fill out a ticket or respond to a ticket you must sign into this mess.
5. Duplicate Content - If I go and type in mail.mysite.com it brings up a page that has no reason to come up as mail.mysite.com.  That page should not exist.  It should redirect in the browser URL to www.mysite.com or give a 404 error.

Lunarpages webhosting is based in Southern California but whois shows up for New York owned by Add2Net. 

More on the LunarPages FTP problems:
I seem to have this problem with the FTP at least two or three times a week.  Something needs to be done about this.  Can you please look into the underlying issue that keeps causing the FTP to not connect from various connections, various computers, and various FTP clients during certain times of the day or days of the week.

They claim you must have the FTP set to passive.  I switched it to passive and it connects but it blanks out on the right side panel where it shows your server.  I am not sure what could be causing this.  I use WS_FTP Pro .

I am having problems once again using my FTP.  It seems to connect then times out every single time I get on FTP.  I have to sign on and sign off the FTP to use it and it still does not work.  I use the WS_FTP program and for some reason cannot access your servers like I do all of my other sites hosted elsewhere.  Please look into this and let me know what I my doing wrong. 

First of all I want to know why I cannot log into my FTP.  I would like to know why it is not working for some reason when I just logged in a week or so ago.  I log into my FTP all the time so it must be something on your side that I cannot log in.  I asked to reset the password because thats what the phone attendant said to do and said it needed to be given to higher support.  I need something done on this soon as it has now been 3 days of me not being able to access my ftp. 

There is a delay and it keeps timing out and will not even connect to FTP.  The problem is not the active or passive in the FTP but there is some kind of problem on the server keeping me from accessing it off and on during the day.  Maybe some kind of firewall or over-subscription of the server?  I am not sure.  Something is wrong!

I am currently hosting with LunarPages and not impressed at all.  The shared platform is down at least 2% of the time and 4% of the time during peak hours.  That is unacceptable.  FTP is a problem most of the time and the downtime is significant.  I can say I am not a very happy customer right now and do wish to speak to someone who can address these issues soon.

Major Outages:
5/18/08 AC Power Unit in LA Datacenter “air conditioning units failed in the cage at the One Wilshire building”.  The LA Datacenter is one of 4 of the centers they use for their hosting.

Pricing:
I pay around $7.95 a month for hosting with LunarPages with a year pre-paid.  You may get it cheaper if you pay more than one year.  You also get your own dedicated IP address which is one advantage of their hosting if you pay extra.  If you have an ASP enabled site you must pay $12 a year extra.

I noticed I have another account hosted with LunarPages that charges $9.95 a month and no charge for the ASP enabled site.  But the Lunar folks charged $35.40 for the dedicated IP address.

Billing can be reached at 1-714-521-8150 extension 6 or billing@lunarpages.com.   You get a full 14 day window before renewals so that is semi-convenient.  Although, I never have problems with the billing it’s the uptime that I worry about.

Other Consumer responses:
Someone some how got into my account or used some sort of script to hack my default.asp page on Lunarpages.  I had not logged in my ftp for a few days and noticed that someone else has and re-uploaded my default.asp page. I looked all over the site and found nothing. Then I looked over the source file. The source file near the bottom of all the coding showed complete changes of what I had posted online.