What is your name and position with Lunarpages.com?
Amy Armitage. I head up our Business Development and Sales & Marketing Team. I have been working with Lunarpages for over 6 years.
Please tell us the year established and brief history of Lunarpages.com?
Lunarpages was established in the summer of 2000. We started out giving away free web hosting and as business started to boom, we created additional paid plans and services. Today we have over 1500 servers housed in two data centers (Las Angeles & Vegas) with over 100 employees.
What do you offer your customers that are unique to your company?
Customer service and retention is a huge focus for us. We believe that if a customer is set up and educated/supported correctly, they will remain with us for as long as they need web hosting services. We also have multiple options to allow for the growth of a Website so that we can accommodate all hosting requirements.
Recently we teamed up with CoffeeCup Software to provide their entire library of webmaster and web design programs free with any 12 or 24 month plan.
We also offer a free domain name with our plans and for those customers who need additional domains we make these available for only $2.99 each. The unique aspect of this is that when it’s time to renew those domains, we honor the purchase price and will do this for as long as the customer is hosted with Lunarpages.
Lunarpages opened community forums back in 2000 and today we have a thriving and friendly community of customers and staff who provide additional support to each other. We believe that honesty and openness is the best way to communicate and assist potential and existing customers. We don’t censor our boards and if a customer has an issue and they verbalize negative feedback we work candidly and publicly with them to find a resolution. The strength of this is that the real issues encountered with any hosting company are highlighted. The difference is we actively work with our customers to provide a mutually beneficial outcome and the process and the reality of hosting issues & challenges are not hidden from people.
Due to our amazing success and our community conscience we wanted to give back to our community in a charitable way. As most of us are parents of children who attend public schools our CEO initiated an Education Program at Lunarpages where we provide free web hosting to ALL USA PUBLIC SCHOOLS K-12! We are very proud of this project and the interest and appreciation from schools, parents, students and teachers has been overwhelming.
Lastly I think it’s important to note that our employees are passionate about our company. Our core team has been with Lunarpages since the beginning. When you contribute to building and growing a company a sense of pride and protectiveness prevails. As a result we work tirelessly to make sure our customers are nurtured and happy, our servers are online and reliable and the rest of our team and partners are ensured a bright future as a result of our successes.
What is the most challenging aspect to offering Budget Hosting?
For me it’s watching other web hosts virtually destroy the value of the services we all offer by over promising space and bandwidth they are unable to deliver and at prices that are certainly not profitable. Many new companies come into our line of business and run at a loss by reducing our industry standards, selling under priced and under supported plans, and then they are gone. Where does that leave the customers or the rest of us?
What is it that makes Lunarpages.com a competitive company in the Budget Hosting market?
We support and also educate our clientele. We listen and implement their feedback and requests and we always look after our existing customers first when increasing our offerings. Our prices have never increased, we are profitable and stable and we don’t have an exit strategy. We’re not going anywhere ;)
What new features have Lunarpages.com added for its customers in the past year?
We increased our space and bandwidth, $2.99 domains, $700 of CoffeeCup Webmaster and Design Software free with all 12 and 24 month plans, live chat, Windows & Dedicated Hosting, an additional datacenter and around 50 more staff to optimize our support services.
What would you say is Lunarpages.com #1 asset to its customer base?
We answer our phones! Real people..
Where do you see Lunarpages.com and the web hosting industry in three years?
I don’t necessarily believe we will be the largest leading web host out there, but then our goal is to maintain our high level of support and retention. I think we will see consistent growth, additional data centers, the introduction of VPS, most likely additional offices in other parts of the world and hopefully a company jet for those shopping sprees in Paris ;)
I think over the next couple of years due to the reckless decisions of many of the current web hosts, a huge percentage of our competitors will go broke and the stable and solid companies who have been servicing webmasters for years will rise again.
How many customers do you currently have?
Around 100,000
Do you own your own datacenter?
Not at this time. We operate 2 data centers and we have plans to purchase our own shortly.
Where are your servers located?
One Wilshire in Los Angeles and marquisnet.com in Las Vegas.
What kind of back up power do they provide?
Both of our datacenters provide battery backup and gas generators.
Do they have multiple backbone connections?
Yes, One Wilshire is the third most connected building in the world, mzima and Marquis have multiple backbones.
What connections do they have?
Redundant OC3 fiber links
Do you offer 24/7 support?
Absolutely!
Do you have technicians present 24/7 or 9-5 M-F?
Yes. We certainly do.
What is your average turn-around time on a support ticket?
It depends on how busy the day is. For example if we are seeing routing issues with a specific ISP it might be 2 hours. Generally, around 30 minutes to 1 hour on email support tickets. If an issue requires escalation or specific installations or server side changes, it can take longer.
Do you charge your clients for support? If so, please explain.
NO WAY! Our support is included with their hosting plan.
Do you offer a money back guarantee?
Yes we offer a 30 day money back guarantee and for our customers using our transfer offer (http://www.lunarpages.com/special_offer.php) we increase that to a 90 day money back term.
Thank you!
FindMyHost.com
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