Just in case you don't want to read this entire artcle, Lunarpages:

• Intentionally notifies you about major issues over the Holidays with insufficient notice.
• Uses random configurations from server to server where scripts and mods may work fine on one and shut the entire site down on another with no claim to responsibility for breaking these scripts.
• When these random configurations cause problems, their tech support staff was entirely incompetent.
• More concerned with penalizing me than helping me.
• Killed RecordingReview.com -WITHOUT ANY ATTEMPT AT COMMUNICATION!

Insufficient Notice Over The Holidays
Just last fall, it was the biggest shopping day of the year. I was expecting to do well pushing my Musiciansfriend.com affiliate program. I was excited. I had been away from the computer (a very rare thing!) for the Thanksgiving holiday. I found out on Saturday that the night before Thanksgiving Lunarpages had emailed me to let me know that they would be moving my site to a new server and that if I did not respond before Friday they would proceed with this server move. Essentially, I had no say in the matter. I would have immediately requested that they wait until Monday before moving the server.

Uses Random Configurations From Server To Server
The long story short is their new server had different configuration settings that totally crashed my site. I had php include pathways that were now busted. This led to a dramatically long set of problems that took me 4 days and close to 60 hours of work. The nature of the work made troubleshooting much more difficult than it should have been. (If vbSEO is turned off, the htaccess file needs to be temporarily renamed! Knowing that would have saved me about 59 hours of work!)

Totally Incompetent Customer Support
When I called customer support, I did the usual sit on the phone for two hour bit. When someone answered the phone, it was clear that he had about 5 minutes worth of training and didn't know a server from the hole in his head.

More Concerned With Penalizing Me Than Helping Me
Mr. Tech Support has no interest in solving my problem. He, however, did notice that I was using quite a bit of resources on the server (which were caused by the error from moving me to a server wtiha different configuration). I explained to him that I could not fix the server usage issues until I had my site functional. He did not care. He immediately put a hold on my account that a manager would have to lift causing RecordingReview.com to be down several extra day and costing me money.

To Stay With Lunarpages Or Give Them The Middle Finger???
A part of me said “Screw Lunarpages” after they dismantled my livelihood for nearly one week. I wanted to get even. Of course, my tactics would not be legal, so I chilled out and decided that the site was back up and running and it would be best to not deal with tricky server stuff if I didn't have to. I knew that if my forum grew, I would need to upgrade to a larger account. I decided not to jump the gun. Up until 6 days ago, that was a smart move. I saved about $800 on hosting charges alone. Not bad! Most of those savings are now gone.

Killed My Entire Site WITHOUT COMMUNICATION!
It turns out that one day some employee got bored and decided to check out whatever server RecordingReview.com was located on. RecordingReview.com was using too many server resources. He panicked! Instead of trying to solve the problem in a manner that is compatible with goodwill, the Geneva Convention, or human decency he acted like a sick coward running Enron. It was the equivalent to shooting a baby in the face to quiet her. The only problem with this (besides the sick notion of shooting a baby in the face in the name of comfort) is there is now a pissed father. Yes, I'm pissed!

It appears that I was over my CPU usage limit. This is tricky. After the Thanksgiving situation, I. I knew that I was going to require an upgrade soon. Time went on and I expected to get an email that said “Brandon, you exceeded your resources by X amount. We need to come up with a solution for this in 14 days.”. I never received this. I just went along thinking everything was fine.

This past Wednesday I was getting ready to go to bed. As I lift my heavy eyelids, I look up to see a nice pretty error message. This is clearly a LunarPages imposed error and not an issue with my code. I figured that I needed to renew my account or something. No, this one was much worse. It turned out that my CPU usage was too high.

Someone, without even taking the time to call or even email me, decided to simply kill my website! Let me repeat that! They took myself offline without even a phone call or email! For a site that is big on this 99% uptime, it appears beyond disgusting that one of their employees intentionally reduced my uptime to less than 99%. For a better part of the day, I had ZERO% uptime.

Wait a minute!!! They essentially killed my account, shut down everything that I've busted my tail over the past 2.5 years because I was using too much CPU power! Let's think about this for just a second. When I go to a tire business and say “I want to buy 4 tires” they say “okay”. When I say “I want to buy 400 tires” they “ALRIGHT!!”. It turns out that I, as the owner of a website exceeding resources, was running a successful site. The worst possible thing you can do to a site that is successful is turn it off! It's reasonable to assume that a site that is this busy makes a little bit of money (not much!). They could have immediately upgraded me to their $100 a month plan and kept me on as a customer.

I want to know why on their main propaganda page it says “99% uptime” when they will intentionally pull the plug on you if you grow too large. Lunarpages should have had an automatic system to announce it that I was over my limit and we need to come up with a solution in the next week or two. I'm aware of the fact that I was using a shared hosting where I have neighbors I was the guy being too noisy in the apartment. But if you have a soundproofed option that costs 10x as much, the loud guy is THE guy you sell to.

Conclusion
Even though Lunarpages puts on a professional appearance and can handle any website with modest needs, the second that things go wrong, they illustrate how they are a bunch of second rate amateurs. If they had set up each server to a consistent manner I would have never needed to deal with their useless, and even vindictive customer support. If they had a system in place to watch out for excessive server usage, they could have easily caught my situation before it was an issue and actually profited from me.

It will be one week as of tonight that my site is down. I feel demoralized! I've worked way too hard to give business to people who want to bring me down. If you are looking for web hosting, I would HIGHLY recommend that you do not go with Lunarpages.