Interview with Lunarpages.com

Basic Company Information

Lunarpages Web Hosting
http://www.lunarpages.com
http://blog.lunarpages.com
http://www.lunarforums.com/forum/

California (Corporate Headquarters)
Add2Net, Inc.
100 E La Habra Blvd
La Habra, CA 90631
1-877-586-2772 Toll FREE
0800-072-9150 UK Toll FREE
714-521-8150 International
sales@lunarpages.com
support@lunarpages.com

Two Data Center Locations - Los Angeles and Las Vegas
100+ Staff - No Outsourcing
Providing Web Hosting for more than 6 years

General Questions

Who is your targeted audience?

Our extensive customer support along with our easy to use tools allow us to target every demographic from the novice all the way through to advanced webmasters. Our range of web hosting services and platforms allow us to cater to bloggers, personal sites, small or home offices, mid sized businesses, adult websites and high volume, high traffic sites requiring VPS & Dedicated Plans.

Our easy to use tools like $700 of CoffeeCup Webmaster Software (free with all 1 & 2 year plans) allow less experienced webmasters to get their sites up quickly and hassle free. In addition, our friendly community forum (25k members) is always available to help or teach those who want to learn how to use the more advanced systems we provide.

We support most major dynamic script languages, (Ruby on Rails, PHP, JSP, ASP & Perl) we provide E-commerce solutions and offer a variety of plug in scripts to add content and functionality to a website. Our reliable uptime and award winning customer service provide the stable environment our most demanding customers are looking for and come to expect.

Where do you see your company two years from now?

In the past six years, Lunarpages has seen tremendous growth in our community base and retention. Everyday more webmasters are experiencing the Lunarpages difference in quality, features, uptime and unbeatable customer service. We have a number of initiatives planned for the next 12 months and two years from now we expect to not only be the preferred one-stop-shop for webmasters but we also expect that the Lunarpages brand will be recognized as the world's foremost customer friendly web services provider.
We recently launched Windows Hosting, VPS Web Hosting and Dedicated Servers and we are looking into offering Exchange Servers and a new custom plan very soon.

What significant changes have you seen in the web hosting marketplace over the last 12 months?

Remarkably, we feel that most web hosting companies have completely missed the demands of the market over the last year and a half. Web hosting customers are much more sophisticated than they were just a few years ago and they are increasingly capable of finding reviews and information, both good and bad, about practically any host's service reputation. Many providers have cut their service investments and have outsourced to overseas support firms, rarely with any formal training on the services provided, costing webmasters valuable lag time in support queues. Many of these same providers have had to resort to overselling their packages to entice less informed webmasters into buying their services despite their poor reputation. The outsourcing of support and the overselling of services are two areas of change and concern we have seen over the past 12 months.

We feel strongly that by focusing on our price to value for the last few years and constantly striving for 100% uptime as well as the industry's best customer service, have solidified Lunarpages position as one of the world's top quality web hosts.

How did you come to choose your company name?

The founders of Lunarpages always have an eye to the future to provide the best technology available at an affordable price. The company vision is to be the best web hosting solution in the universe... Thus, Lunarpages was formed.
That and a late night episode of Star Trek ;)

What advice do you have for someone who is just starting a hosting company?

The best advice would be to make sure this is what you are passionate about. Too often we see people start hosting businesses thinking it's an easy industry with little work and a lot of reward. This is far from the truth and unfortunately, this has damaged the industry as a whole. Technology and customer support are essential in providing a solid, reliable hosting solution. This is a 24/7/365 job and it takes dedication and commitment.

If unwilling or unable to put the time and effort into making it a quality service, let the professionals who are passionate about it, like Lunarpages, continue with what we know and love.
Oh.. and a BIG budget. It costs millions of dollars to keep up to date with advancements in technology, additional servers, DDOS protection, multiple data center locations etc.

In the next five years, where do you see the web hosting industry taking us?

As customers become more sophisticated and websites become more essential to all industries, we see a trend toward increasing our customer base. It is already unusual for a business not to have a web presence. Over the next five years it will be virtually unheard of. Because of this, we feel it will be essential to provide a reliable service so customers sites are available at all times. This means keeping abreast of the latest technology. Additionally, websites will need to have more functionality. Webmasters want content and functionality that is easy to set up and maintain. Lunarpages continually adds features to their hosting packages to provide just that.
We also have a team that review feedback from our customers to ensure we are researching and developing the tools our customers need and want.

How do you walk the fine line between growing to meet the anticipated needs of new customers and growing too quickly?

We are constantly looking at customer support statistics to gauge growth patterns and trends. We have high expectations for response time and response quality and continually evaluate and train our personnel. This allows us to have trained professionals in customer support to easily handle the demand of our customers. Our goal is to have skilled support personnel ready and available before an increase occurs. This ensures our customers are always supported in the quality they come to expect from Lunarpages.

Technologically, we have an extensive research and development department designed to evaluate and test new products and features. When the demand for these increases, we have already done the leg work and know how it will fit into our environment. This allows us to have the most stable and up to date equipment and software available.

You And The Competition

What are your company's three key success factors?

That is very easy to sum up for us: quality, integrity and customer service. Without those three core principals we would not be as successful as we are today. Our hardware, bandwidth providers, primary and ancillary services are all researched and selected as the best of breed technologies available. The integrity of our staff and our commitment to excellence never waivers. Every one of our staff are formally and continuously trained and are instilled with our core values that our customers must and will always come first.

How has your company kept up with changing technology?

Our Research and Development Department subscribe to numerous industry periodicals, newsgroups and forums to keep an eye on upcoming technologies. Our quality assurance and upper management teams review feedback and customer surveys to determine the needs of our customers.

We develop and test systems in our test environment to gauge how well they will work in our live production environment before they are released. We strive to always have the best technology available to our customers to ensure the best possible uptime, to maintain the integrity of our customers' data and to supply the latest user-friendly tools to our customers.

How are your services and pricing levels better than those of your competitors?

Our package pricing is highly competitive allowing Lunarpages to compete effectively in the budget web hosting market. Unlike other budget hosts however, we do not price ourselves out of being able to acquire the latest and best of breed technologies or offer a stable hosting solution with true 24-7 in-house customer service. In addition to this, we offer more services than other hosts including one of the lowest JSP hosting rates available anywhere. We are constantly looking to offer more value for our customers' hard earned money.

Your Hosting Plans

What do your lower price point hosting solutions include and at what price?

Our Basic (Unix) Web Hosting Package at $6.95:

$700 CoffeeCup Design Software FREE
1 FREE Domain Name for Life
250 Gigs Storage
2500 Gigs Data Transfer
24/7 Award Winning Support!
Unlimited Databases Email/FTP Accounts
Blog, Forum & Photo Gallery
Fantastico (Over 35 Scripts)
JSP/ASP Available
Spam Protection- IMAP Support
Microsoft® Frontpage® & Dreamweaver Compatible
Includes 1 FREE Add-on Domain
Ruby on Rails 6, PostGReSQL
MySQL 4+, PHP 4+
MySQL 5 & PHP 5 Available!
Free Web Design Templates
Webmail (Horde and Squirrel)
Loads More!

Our Dedicated 1 Web Hosting Package at $99:

$700 CoffeeCup Software FREE
FREE Domain Names for Life
2 months FREE + 500MB extra Transfer! *
Multiple servers to fit your needs
80 to 200 Gigs Storage, additional available
1,000 to 2,000 Gigs data transfer
24/7 Award Winning Support!
24/7 Live Chat Support
Linux CentOS**
Windows 2003 Web Edition, MSSQL ***
Dedicated IP and your own Nameservers
Root & SSH/Shell Access
Clustered, load balanced servers available
FTP Backup included
Custom Dedicated Plans!
Loads More!

Which services and features do you offer as part of your hosting agreement at no cost (i.e., free domain name registration, real-audio video server, Web statistics software, etc.)?

Free domain names for life, $700 of CoffeeCup Webmaster & Design Software, Free Templates, Web Stats etc
All our hosting plans come with extensive features you can view at http://www.lunarpages.com/solutions.php

If you offer user control panels, for which platform(s)? Briefly describe their functionality.

CPanel for UNIX
Plesk for Windows

Connectivity & Data Center Specs

Describe your back-up and emergency power systems.

Because uptime and integrity of our customers' data is extremely important to us, we have thoroughly researched and implemented an emergency backup and emergency power system. We have a gas powered generator that has enough gas to last for one week. We also have dual incoming power from separate power sources for all of our servers. Additionally, we have tape backup and all our servers are backed up nightly.

For redundancy we run two data centers, one in Los Angeles and one in Las Vegas.

What types of servers do you use for your primary virtual NT hosting and primary virtual Unix hosting clients?

We use Dell Power Edge 2650 and 2850 servers with 4 to 8 GB of RAM and dual Xeon 3.0 Ghz processors with redundant power.

Support & Customer Service

List the types of support your organization offers (e-mail, telephone, chat, trouble tickets, etc...).

Customer support is our primary focus and we constantly evaluate our means of providing support to ensure our customers are getting the best possible service. We have the following options available:

TELEPHONE SYSTEM

Live reporting to see hold times and number in queue

Live reporting to see grade of service

Quotas on supervisor monitoring of calls for quality assurance testing

Telephone support is in one building so we have a network of people who can assist one another

Supervisors and above use PDAs to keep in constant contact for emergency notifications

Ability to change options, messages, categories, languages to be more helpful

EMAIL SYSTEM

We use a customized version of DeskPro software

Supervisors and above are alerted via email & phone of urgent and/or escalated requests

Real time reporting to track response times

Quotas on supervisor review of emails for quality assurance

FORUMS

Staffed by Lunarpages personnel and customers for extensive discussion and support for design and development which is beyond the scope of "official" support

Monitored for responses to ensure all threads are addressed

LIVE DEDICATED CHAT

Live chat 24/7 for dedicated web hosting customers

This can be done privately, one on one

DEDICATED SERVER STATUS LINE

24/7 separate phone line to check server status

CUSTOMER ACCOUNT PAGE

Live server status and announcements

For more information regarding Lunarpages please visit us at http://lunarpages.com and see our complete Terms of Service at http://lunarpages.com/legal.htm