General

LunarPages is a well known host which has been operating out of Los Angeles, CA since 2000. After building a solid reputation for reliability and support in the shared hosting market, LunarPages has branched out to Dedicated, Reseller and VPS hosting.

• Datacenter locations: Los Angeles CA, Riverside CA and Las Vegas NV – Datacenter photos »
• Call center location: La Habra, California.
• Customers: 150,000 +
• Created: 2000
• CEO: Ron Riddle
• Parent company: Add2Net

User experience

Our Lunar Pages test site showed to be very responsive. FTP transfers were equaly fast and the control panel did not hang at any time.

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Every now and then we get feedback from a user complaining that this or that hosting company canceled their account without warning. And when checking up on it it always turns out they were hosting "adult content" or something else which is clearly against the Terms of Service (TOS) of almost all hosting companies.

Most of the time it's outright porn...

For those of you who think it is unfair or discriminatory or whatever, here are a few reasons to help you understand why the vast majority of hosting companies will not allow "adult contents" on their hosting plans:

• The hosts tend to get a lot of expensive and distracting contacts from the FBI inspecting on child pornography.
• The sites tend to not publish their content with the appropriate legal disclaimers.
• They tend to generate above average DMCA complaints.
• The resource usage is unpredictable and can go wild at any time.
• Those sites tend to have a short life span and the hosts are statistically left with a lot of unpaid bills.
• And finally, a very important one: as a hosting company, asking your support staff to deal and help debug sites with a lot of potentially offending graphic content may severely impede on your recruitment options.

Now that being said, there are a couple of companies whose staff actually don't mind, let alone enjoy, working on the latest 21st century creative sex trends or whatever it might be. If you want to do adult hosting go with one of them (Cirtex Hosting for example). If you're not sure, read the TOS! Failure to do so is the best way to get your account canceled. And by all means, don't complain to us!

General

HostMonster is a newer sister brand to the renowned BlueHost (since 1996). It is owned and operated by the same team out of their offices in Orem, Utah.

HostMonster is geared both towards professional and individual sites with a slightly lower price point than its direct competition.

User experience

Our Host Monster test site showed good response and uptimes.

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General

InMotion hosting has been providing businesses with web hosting since 2001 from their offices in Los Angeles, CA and Virginia Beach, VA. They do not outsource tech support -- all support is done from their Virgina Beach office.

They are the only host in this price range to give you the option of hosting from two geographically different data centers - one in downtown L.A. and the other just outside of Washington, DC.

Having the option to choose a datacenter near you can save you a lot of time if your business heavily relies on interacting with your website backoffice during the day.

InMotion's position is definitely oriented towards business hosting rather than personal web hosting. They offer the whole range of hosting plans from starter shared hosted plans, to virtual private servers to dedicated / managed servers.

User experience

Our InMotion test site showed to be very responsive.

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When I was in L.A. a couple of weeks ago, I visited LunarPages' data center located in the One Wilshire building. This is just one of Lunar's 3 different data centers. They have another one in L.A. and a third one in Vegas.

Interestingly enough, I learnt that One Wilshire is the 3rd most connected building in the world! A lot of other hosting companies actually have server cages theres...