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Best All-Purpose.
Purpose
The best All-Purpose hosting package is be the best "one size fits all" among the hosting offers. You can almost not go wrong with this plan no matter of the website hosting needs! An All-purpose package will accommodate small discussions forums, e-commerce and business websites, small portals, busy blogs or any other similar websites. It is hard to define specific requirements for a one size fits all hosting package but there are a few things that any package fitting this description should have in common:
What to look for?
- At least 100-150 GB of space. This is the size of your average computer or laptop hard drive, so it should be enough to hold whatever you're deciding to upload to your account.
- More bandwidth to accommodate a busy website. Traffic is expected to grow as the website becomes more popular (200-500 GB of monthly bandwidth) and anyway, even if you don't use all of it, it's better to have a buffer of unused bandwidth to make sure the website doesn't become unavailable or you get charged extra.
- Additional, ready to use software. Although your website now is usually custom made by a team of web developers, it's nice to have access to "one-click install" forums, chats or e-commerce shopping carts.
- Web technologies. Technologies offered in the hosting package become an important factor as they need to be compatible with the technologies used in building your website.
- Extra Features. Different websites have different needs, so features like audio and video streaming for multimedia websites or marketing tools such as mailing lists and auto-responders for selling websites, are definitely an asset.
- Low price. Although you need extra disk space, bandwidth and features, you are still looking for shared web hosting, so you expect to share the price too.
What we found?
The Lunar Pages Basic Hosting plan is their most popular web hosting plan for a reason; it offers a lot of features for a low price and it should be considered one of the Best All-Purpose packages on the web hosting market. This plan comes with priority 24 hour support and service.
| Features | Description |
| Disk Space | - 1,500 GB |
| Monthly Bandwidth | - 15,000 GB |
| Free Additional Software | - SMF Forum - Chat, Polls, Surveys - Different E-commerce shopping carts |
| Web Technologies | - Unlimited MySQL and postgre SQL databases - CGI, PHP, Perl, PHYTON, SSI support - ASP, JSP (available) |
| Extra Features | - E-mail Forwarding - Email Auto-Responders - Video and Audio Streaming - Dedicated IP address (available) |
| Price | - $6.95/month with a 24 months contract ($4.95/month with coupon) |
| Extra Options |
| Email Accounts (POP3) | - Unlimited |
| Mailing Lists | - Yes (1 free) |
| Control Panel | - C-Panel |
| Free Domain Name | - (1) - as long as you host with them |
| Add-on Domains | - Unlimited |
| DDoS Protection | - Yes |
Note: Although the plan offers very large amounts of disk space and bandwidth, most of the websites will only use them in small percents. In order to use them to the maximum your websites will have to engage a lot of traffic and hundreds or thousands of simultaneously downloads that will overload the server's resources (CPU, HDD, etc.). These kinds of websites are more suitable for dedicated hosting, and the web host will warn you of over-using shared resources and might terminate your account in order to protect the other websites hosted on the same server.
About the company
Lunarpages is an U.S. based company, founded in 2000 when Add2Net Corp. expanded its web hosting offerings to include shared hosting. They claim to host over 150,000 customers on over 2,500 web servers in datacenters located in Los Angeles CA, Riverside CA and one in Las Vegas, Nevada. Customer support is one of their strong points; they have a very active discussions forum where you can ask questions or talk with other Lunarpages customers, and besides the standard knowledge database they have video tutorials for almost everything. If you are a public school in U.S their Education Program provides free web hosting for educational purposes to all K-12 public schools.
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