About Lunarpages

It all started back in the late 90’s when Ron Riddle ventured online and wanted a website created. He discovered many people who offered to design and host his site; however there wasn’t much activity going on, and being a “get it done” kinda guy he decided to do it himself.

The name Lunarpages was discovered late one night when our night owl Ron was watching an episode of Star Trek. He saw a moon and some planets and lunar stuff and added the word pages to it. Amazing huh!!! Oh… and the domain was available too.

The Lunarforums.com community was created and he began offering free web hosting, but the Lunar Lovers (our loyal webmasters) wanted help and support and more features on their accounts. Ron and his beautiful wife Helen had very been busy over the years running various successful businesses and they literally had a tribe of children. It occurred to them they could be on to something with this hosting gig and it was about time to exploit their offspring.

Ron asked his son Chad Riddle to help out, so he quit his job at Drug Emporium quick as a flash to work from the recreation room above the house. The Lunar servers lived in a closet next to Helen’s 1974 platform shoes and paid hosting became available that day. Helen still has the shoes but we now have two datacenters, over 1500 servers and a super classy corporate office in California. Chad now handles all of our operations and only stops by Drug Emporium to buy shoe polish and gum.

Lee Coleman had been a longtime friend of the Riddle family and innocently stopped by one day for a coffee and somehow left with a job answering support tickets. We often wonder if she regrets her choice of beverage when she frantically drives down to the LA Datacenter at 2am. Six years later our Lee heads up our Technical & Development Departments and still drinks coffee (just a lot more). She has a crew of over 40 people working with her now lovingly (sometimes obsessively) nurturing our servers.

Around the same time Ron met Amy Armitage from Australia on the Lunar Forums and those who know our Amy are aware of her passion for answers and taking threads off topic. She basically harassed Ron on her quest to become a geek until he finally offered her a job running the forums and shortly after working support so she could bug Lee and Chad instead. She now lives in California heading up Sales & Marketing and Ron still sneaks past her office in the hopes to dodge her incessant questions.

Clay, Elainna and Chase Riddle tried to avoid the Nerdy Factor for a while thinking hosting was dull until endless family BBQs resulted in them feeling like the guy at the prom nobody notices. They united and purchased a copy of HTML for Dummies and today they are major contributors to the continued success of Lunarpages. Ron’s vision to create personal, reliable web hosting and a legacy and a future for his children was on track, but he still hadn’t achieved all that he wanted.

Education is huge for us at Lunarpages. Back in the early days we knew nothing about hosting, email and servers and as a result we are mostly self taught (thanks to Google and hours of slamming our heads against our desks). We had a high level super important meeting in our vault (yes our boardroom is an old bank vault with the thick steel doors) and Ron announced it was time to give back to our real life community. All of us had children attending public schools and it made sense to choose education because, as Whitney would say “Children are our future”. Our Education program was born and apart from Ron’s family, this project is his passion and when he speaks about it we often see a little tear well up in his eye (awwww). All USA Public Schools K-12 now receive as many free hosting accounts as they need, courtesy of Lunarpages!

Recently (handsome) George Natzic crossed over to the dark side not knowing too many of our Lunar and hosting terms and after 12 months he walks the hosting walk and talks the coder talk. He brings a high level of organization and efficiency with him and we are so thrilled to have him as our CFO and incredibly proud of his journey to nerdiness!

Our family now boasts a community of over 100,000 and more than 100 staff worldwide and we really do love what we do. Although Lunarpages is a driving force and we are responsible for some major influences and changes in the hosting industry above all we will never lose our close knit feel and attitude because our connections with each other and our community are the reason for our success.

Lunarpages isn’t simply a hosting company. We are a family.