Web Hosting Blog | Lunarpages Lunartics » Customer Service

How to Get Started with an Affiliate Plan

Mitch — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:25:42 +0000

Everybody likes to get paid cold hard cash for giving their opinion on who the greatest web host out there really is, right? The Lunarpages affiliate plan will pay you big bucks, just for referring new clients over to Lunarpages.

Need some help to get you started? Here are six great tutorials that cover just about every aspect of the Lunarpages Affiliate program.

What is the Affiliate Program?

Working as a referral service, the Lunarpages affiliate plan will award you with cash, just for spreading the word about Lunarpages web hosting to your friends, family, clients and coworkers…

Direct Affiliate Traffic to Specific URLs

Through our money making affiliate plan, anyone can send new clients to Lunarpages, and get paid for their efforts. However, many affiliate plan members want to be able to point their unique affiliate links to specific pages inside of Lunarpages.com…

How to Create an Affiliate Advertising Campaign

An affiliate advertising campaign can be a great way to track how successful an affiliate link, a banner page, or a specific page is performing for your affiliate plan. The Lunarpages affiliate plan fully supports campaign tracking…

Payments for Lunarpages Affiliates

Once you have reached the minimum commission limit (or have gone over it) each Lunarpages affiliate plan member will be issued a check send to the address we have on record for your affiliate plan…

Qualified Affiliate Plan Commissions

Each time a new customer signs up through your Lunarpages affiliate plan link, you are awarded a commission for the sale through our web hosting affiliate program. However, some might have questions about the commission process, so I wanted to explain it fully to you here…

Tax Forms for Affiliate Plan Users

Once you sign up for the Lunarpages affiliate plan, you will need to send us the needed tax documentation before we can send payment to you…

Need some extra holiday cash? Referring your friends, family members or business partners is an excellent way to get the job done. For more help with the Lunarpages affiliate program, and how to get started, check out the Lunarpages Affiliate Program web site.

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Free Flash Template Designs from Lunarpages

Mitch — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:29:33 +0000

Want to get a free flash design template with your next web hosting plan? The team over at Flash Template Designs and Lunarpages have teamed up to deliver you an out of this world deal.

If you use the coupon code FTD30 when you purchase a 12 or 24 month NEW hosting plan with Lunarpages and get a $30 discount on your web hosting. What type of template will you get? You can browse around the Flash Template Design web site to get an idea of the type of free flash layouts you will have to choose from. How do you get started?

Simply click here to purchase your web hosting, use the coupon code FTD30 when you purchase a 12 or 24 month Lunarpages Hosting plan.
After your account is active with Lunarpages for 30 days, email them (select the “info” category) and quote the domain name on the new account we are hosting for you.
They will email you your download link for the template of your choice (Up to $60 value) for FREE!

This is by far one of the best web hosting deals you can get your hands on.

Please Note: This promotion is only for NEW 12+ month Lunarpages web hosting plans and excludes Email, Domain and Starter Plans.

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Kings and Queens of the Hosting Cosmos!

Mitch — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:12:03 +0000

The Lunarpages community extends much further than this one blog. Sure, the Lunartics blog highlights an important part of the network, however it is only one cog in the machine that is the Lunarpages community.

So what are the other parts of the Lunarpages community of sites? We have:

Lunarforums.com – Our social stomping grounds where you can get to meet other Lunarpages clients, and share your stories and ask questions that might be troubling you. It is both kid friendly, and mother approved.
Lunarpages Web Hosting Newsletter – Check out the archives of our monthly client newsletter, which is always packed full of helpful tutorials, useful tips and other interesting aspects of the web hosting world.
Lunarpages Web Hosting Wiki – Over 300+ guides and tutorials on every aspect of Lunarpages, web development, and account management.

Last, but not least – we can not forget our social profiles on the Web.

The Lunarpages Community? The Lunarmunity? The Kings and Queens of the Cosmos? You take your pick. One thing though that can be said for sure is that Lunarpages has one of the best communities out there to date, by far.

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Web Hosting Forums Get a New Design

Mitch — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:35:53 +0000

The Lunarpages-based community message boards, Lunarforums.com, got an entirely new design yesterday. From head to toe, this new layout is more visually appealing than the rest, and is by far just one more great addition to an already great set of user forums.

Here is what a few Lunarpages customers and forum members have had to say about the new design on Lunarforums.com:

“Ditto from me. Much ‘cleaner’ – and the subject lines stand out better. Good job, folks!” – RickJ
“I like it. Looks more professional than the old one.” – Matthew Alan
“thumbs up from me!” – bryantrv
“ahhhh Very pretty, I like.” – EJ
“I think it’s a great improvement over the past themes.” – Lord High Warlock

Even though it has a new design though, it is still the equally as helpful resource it always has been. You can get web hosting news and information, learn more about Lunarpages hosting, web hosting guides, advice and so much more.

Don’t be left out, be sure to check out the feedback thread and leave your own comments or review of brand new Lunarforums.com. Also, if you haven’t signed up yet – you can do so here, then introduce yourself to the Lunarforums community. We work really hard at keeping the Lunarpages Web Hosting Forums a family friendly, safe for all ages, useful resource for all of our outstanding and exceptional web hosting clients.

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Better AdSense Optimization with WordPress

Mitch — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:22:25 +0000

Looking through Google AdSense advice and suggested places to put your advertisements, I often see it suggested to put the ads between your posts on the index page. Having searched around for ways to get it done, I found none that were easy – until I found this page.

This is the guide I followed from tamba2.org.uk’s page on this issue. I hope this comes in as handy for you as it did for me, because it took me forever to find a code combination that worked exactly like I wanted it to.

Copying from above, you would use this instead:

$postnum = 1;
$showadsense1 = 1;
$showadsense2 = 2;
?>

which would go at the top.
Again copying from the above, you already have this:

echo ‘
Your adsense code goes here
‘;
} ?>

and you would add another block below the first ad, but above the counter at the bottom. Here it is all together:

echo ‘
Your adsense code goes here
‘;
} ?>
echo ‘
Your adsense code goes here
‘;
} ?>

The first bit says the values, then the values are checked each time WP goes through The Loop. If the counter matches what your value is, the ad is shown. Changing the numbers lets you change the placement.

Hope that helps, and many thanks to the tamba2.org.uk site. Be sure to check out this page for more help on AdSense optimization within WordPress.

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10 Spring Cleaning Tips for your Web Site

Mitch — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 13:14:23 +0000

By Mitch “Mr. Organization” Keeler

Not many of you might of realized that yesterday was the first day of Spring. That means that soon the birds will start chirping, the grass will turn green and summer will be coming up pretty quickly. So as with any other Spring tradition, it is now time to start thinking about Spring cleaning.

How do you do spring cleaning with your web site though? Well here are ten spring cleaning tips for your web site or online business that might help you get started.

Update Any Scripts and Plugins – Look at WordPress, Joomla and any other scripts or services you have installed and see if it is time to give them an upgrade. You should be doing this more often than every spring but now is a good time to check and make sure.
Do Your E-mail Addresses Work? – I recently got an e-mail from a friend who told me, “Sorry I didn’t get back to you I just figured out I had major problems with my e-mail account”. Send yourself a dummy message to make sure you don’t fall into the same boat.
Clean up Your Sidebars – This ‘bit of advice would be mainly for blogs. I have seen some people become really addicted to having sidebar widgets and gadgets. If you have more than five per sidebar, might be time to ditch some or at least make them look pretty again.
Review your Terms of Service – Make sure your terms of service and acceptable use policy are up to date and include everything you wish to include there. You may have made some changes to your web site and business since the last time you reviewed it so check it out now to make sure all your bases are still covered.
Check and Update your Sitemaps – If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, it might be a good time to login and check to make sure Google didn’t find any errors, which would keep them from indexing certain parts of your web site.
Is Your Contact Information Correct? – Check out your contact page and make sure that the numbers, e-mail addresses and postal addresses listed there are up to date and show the correct information.
Renew Your Domains – When does your domain name run out of date? Might need to check and also be sure that you have all your hosting bills paid up too. This also makes for a good time to upgrade your hosting account to one with a few more perks.
Test Your Web Site Links – Are all your web site links working? Check your error logs in your various stats packages to see where people are finding 404s and try to fix all the broken links or non-existent pages you can find.
How Out of Date is Your “About Us” Section? – Checking out my own about us page on one of my other web sites I see I pretty much haven’t updated it since the launch of the site. Always good to keep this up to date because well, this is how people lean more about you and what you do.
Spellcheck Your Web Site Content – How many grammar errors can you find on your web site? If you don’t want to read through everything you have posted – you might try just going through a few of the most popular ones and making sure they are correct. Bad spelling really peeves some people, so best not to get on anybody’s bad side.

Have any more suggestion? Be sure to leave a comment to share with the rest of us.

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Send Us Your WordPress Questions

Mitch — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:48:33 +0000

By Mitch "WordPress Guru" Keeler

WordPress might be one of the more popular blogging tools and scripts out there today, but there are still many unanswered questions about it. Over the next few weeks I thought it might be a good idea to tackle some of these questions right here. If you have a general WordPress question that has been keeping you up at night, feel free to send it my way to mitch.keeler@lunarpages.com. Make sure you put in the title "Lunartics WordPress Question" so I can be sure to see it and also include your name and your Lunarpages hosted web site (if yo have one).

As an example, lets tackle the question of changing your blog’s title.

To change the name or title of your blog, you will need to login to the WordPress admin interface, usually found at:

yourdomain.com/wp-admin/

From there, click on Options and then the General tab.

To change the title of your blog, find where it says "Blog title:" and put your own title into the text box next to it. You can also change your in the text box under your title box. Once you have done that, hit the "update options" button and you are done.

Remember to keep your questions general if possible, so that way everybody can get something out of the answer. Have a WordPress question? Send it my way and see it answered right here!

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Will the iPhone Work With Lunarpages?

Mitch — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 19:53:51 +0000

Author: Mitch Keeler

Lunarpages is used by one and all for web hosting and e-mail needs. When it comes to the iPhone though from Apple – will it ~~blend~~ work?

Is anyone using an iPhone to send and receive mail from their Lunarpages email account. I’m using the same settings which work fine in my email program but can’t connect. I get a message on my phone “The user name or password is incorrect”. What are the correct settings i.e. server, host. etc.

Then here comes a Lunarpages user to the rescue!

>settings>mail>pop account
Incoming Mail Server:
Host Name: mail.yourwebsitename.com
Username: your e-mail address
Password: your lunarpages password

Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP):
Host Name: mail.yourwebsitename.com:587

Make sure the SSL options are “off” in advanced settings.

So the answer is yes – your newly purchased iPhone will work with Lunarpages without issue.

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affiliates love fairies!!

Tiara — Thu, 17 May 2007 23:20:56 +0000

by Tiara Rea
When I was a kid, Lisa Frank stickers were like, totally all the rage dude. Even though I was a pretty little girl with pink bows in my hair and little frilly white socks, I’d have punched any other kid’s face off if they tried to come after my adorable, big-eyed animal stickers! They are about as much a part of my childhood as pop rocks and bad Chuck E Cheese pizza, and those stickers were as valuable as my Wii is today. I hoarded mine in a clear jar I got from our basement and I think, funny enough, they’re still there. If I’d have wanted to give them out, I think my friends would have done anything I told them to.

Which brings me to the point of this blog – stickers are invaluable. This is what the following dream proves, which my friend and the newest sales rep at Lunarpages Web Hosting, Adriann, just told Amy and I this morning.

The dream involved Amy taking Adriann to some huge affiliate event, where she attempted to convince customers to become affiliates by offering them pretty, sparkly, fairy stickers!! When the affiliates stopped responding to these stickers, dream!Amy demanded that Adriann draw her own fairy stickers so they’d be edgier for our affiliates’ enjoyment.

Amy and I are currently re-thinking our Business Development model to include fairy stickers, as Adriann convinced us they worked out well in the dream.

Adriann is clearly now part of the Lunartic group, I think. ;)

Random Posts

Feedback & Customer Loyalty

Amy Armitage — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 22:12:52 +0000

Author: Tracie Thompson

Recently I purchased a new home and moved. In the process I had to set up new services, cancel old services; all the stuff that comes with moving.

In the process a certain company (I will call them Company A) tried to sell me services I already had with another company (hereby known as Company B). I respectfully denied Company A’s service and told them I already had the service with Company B. Company A acted all shocked. They claimed: “but we offer the same service better and for cheaper!”. I chuckled at this and again respectfully declined. I’m perfectly happy with Company B. Company A asked me for some feedback on why I was declining. I asked if he wanted my honest answer. He said yes.

My Answer: Company A has provided me with services for several years. In that time I’ve had to make dozens of calls, submit dozens of trouble tickets, and have had nothing but headaches, frustration, and wasted time in my dealings with them. If Company A did not hold a monopoly in my region for the services they provide, I would have long ago sought service elsewhere. Company B on the other hand has never let me down. I’ve had to call only once in the many years I’ve had service with them and they were able to resolve my issue in less than 6 hours. (Company A’s resolution time is about 3 days IF you’re lucky!). I’d rather pay more to have excellent customer service than get a cheaper deal somewhere else. “You get what you pay for!”

I decided to take this a step further. I wrote an email to Company A and gave them my feedback. I felt it was important they know why I would not pay less for their service. I also wrote an email to Company B and let them know how great of a job they are doing and that I plan on remaining a loyal customer for many more years to come. I received a personal reply from Company B within a few hours thanking me for my feedback. It felt good to know that they recognized and welcomed my feedback. It’s been three weeks and I have not heard from Company A other than the auto-response that my email was received. The lack of any type of response proves my case against Company A.

As a customer support manager, I see a lot of feedback. Both the good and the bad. I take this feedback seriously. If it’s good, I let my staff know. If it’s bad, they know this too and I offer ways to improve. If a customer wants something we don’t provide, I make sure this is noted and researched. Sometimes we can offer what they want, sometimes we can’t. Every single bit of feedback we receive is reported to the managers, the director of technology, sales and marketing, and even our CEO. And most importantly, we respond to our customer’s feedback personally. Whether good or bad we let them know we have read it, taken it in, are looking into it, etc. We will even come back to them later to provide an update if applicable. It’s important customers know that a company cares!

I’m proud to work with a company that takes feedback from their customers so seriously. After all, we wouldn’t be in business if it weren’t for our customers!

Random Posts

Password Issues?

Amy — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 01:56:35 +0000

Author: Amy Armitage

I just got back into town around an hour ago. Support staff asked me to post this for any Lunarpages customers experiencing password issues on their hosting accounts.

Over the last few days we have changed the passwords on any accounts that don’t have an updated password as requested by Lunarpages between January 10th – 17th.

The following is part of an email sent to all Lunarpages customers January 10th 2007

Next time you login to https://account.lunarpages.com you will be asked to update your password. We have seen an alarming number of
Lunarpages hosting accounts “brute force” hacked due to poor password choices. When this happens it causes considerable harm not only to an individual account but also to the server (i.e. spam being sent out that may cause black listing, phishing scams,high CPU loads, etc.).

To ensure this security upgrade is affective we will need ALL customers to update their passwords. We realize that you may not check your e-mail or login to your hosting accounts often enough to make this change in a timely manner. Because of this, we will generate random passwords on all accounts that have not updated within the next 7 days.

**Please note: If you are reading this after the 7 day period has already passed please simply e-mail support@lunarpages.com or call us at 877-LUNARPAGES (877-586-2772) and ask to have your password resent to you. At that point you can login and change your randomly generated password to one that better suits you.

Why?

In the email it is mentioned that we had to make the changes to the passwords for security reasons, due to brute force attacks on the passwords for those accounts. Here is a really great article, which goes into detail about a process that is similar to that which has lead to our updates of the process:

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,72458-1.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1

We apologize for any inconvenience as a result of this situation, however, your security, and the server stability are the reason behind these changes.

Here is the quick fix:

To change your password, please login and click the Change Password icon.

Please note, there is now a “forgot password” option available on the login page.

If you have your account username, but forgot the password, you can have it re-sent to the email address on record for the account by doing the following:

1. Go here or here

2. Fill in the Username
3. Place a check in the “Lost Password” box
4. Click Login.

You will see a notice when you do this:

Email with login information sent to email we have on file

The subject reads “Lunarpages Hosting – Requested Information”

That Didn’t Work! I STILL CANNOT LOGIN TO CPANEL!

If you changed your password via the CAP and it has not propagated to cPanel, please read below on what we require from you when you email us regarding this.

That Didn’t Work! I STILL CANNOT LOGIN TO PLESK!

If you have changed your password via the CAP and it is not allowing you to login to Plesk, please try logging into your plesk panel with the old password on your account. Once logged in, you can update the password via the Plesk panel.

That STILL Didn’t Work!

Call us 877-586-2772 (We are open until Midnight) – or email us support@lunarpages.com or please visit our forums

Where is my email with my password info?! Email Support is taking longer than usual! Phones Are Busy!

Yes, they are. We have thousands of customers needing assistance to access their passwords, so as a result, there are extended delays on the phones. Our Email Support staff are doing their very best however to speed things up, please try the above solutions.

If you did not receive the welcome email or the information listed does not work, it will expedite things if you provide the following info:

Primary Domain:
CAP/cPanel Username:
Last Four Digits of the Credit Card on File:

If you cannot supply or do not have a credit card with us on file, please supply us with the following information:

First and last characters of the password on file:
Full Mailing Address on File:
Full Telephone Number on file:

Please also specify the alternate email address you would like your account information sent to or which service you attempted to log into with the credentials provided and the URL you used.

I think that about covers it. I hope this post helps some of you find a quick solution.

Thanks to all of our customers for their patience and for understanding why we must enforce these security changes. Just like our Mother’s always said..

“It’s for your own good” ;)

Random Posts

Overwhelmed with Christmas Wishes!!

Amy — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 00:35:05 +0000

Author: Amy Armitage

I love this time of year. It’s when the good stuff in comes out, feelings of appreciation are shared and a warm flow of love is upon us. The reason I’m bloggin this today, is because we have been literally overwhelmed with greeting and e-cards, phone calls and gifts from our customers this last week or so, and because we are unable to respond to all of your cards and emails personally, we hope this message serves as another way of saying thank you to you all.

I walked out today on the support floor and saw the phones were really jumping and asked our Customer Service Manager if something was up. His response was:

“Yes, people are lovin on us!”

“Lovin? Whatchu mean lovin?” – [Said like Arnold from Different Strokes - i.e. Whatchu talken bout?]

“They are calling in to say Merry Christmas and thanks for the awesome hosting, for listening to their feedback and making changes they asked for, stuff like that”

No Way!

Waaaaaaaay!

Nuh uhhhhhh..

Yah huhhh!!

“Wow.. that’s cool”

“Uh huh.. you’re cool amy!”

“OMG I Know!”

–

OK that last part didn’t really happen.. lol

Thank you, for choosing and trusting us to host your websites and for reaching out at this time of year. It really means the world to us.

Merry Christmas LunarLand ;)

More New Photos Updated!

xxxx

Random Posts

Extended Support Hours & Swanky New Phones!

Amy — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 04:01:32 +0000

Author: Amy Armitage

We are pleased to announce that our phone support hours during the week have been extended until midnight Monday to Friday!

Our NEW phone support hours are:

Monday – Friday – 7am until Midnight (PST)

Weekends – 8am – 5pm PST

For those of you who work on your sites evenings, and also for our international customers we hope this will prove an additional and valuable resource for your support needs.

Tonight we also take live our new phone system!

As some of you are already aware, our existing phone system began to have issues approximately 90 days ago.

It was getting kinda old..

Initially we had some sporadic slowness when accessing the admin panel and the need for an occasional reboot. Over a period of 2-4 weeks it escalated and resulted in some major and irresolvable issues. The admin panel became inaccessible to us and as a result we were no longer able to monitor our phone queues. We could no longer tell how many people were on the phone with Customer Service, how many were on hold, or how long they had been holding for.

Phone calls were dumped, dropped, disconnected, giving out busy signals and calls were diverted to mailboxes that were not able to accept messages. The frustration levels for our..

Customers (btw we do NOT recommend using a spanner to build your websites)

And..

Our Support Crew (our tech support guys are waaaaay more buffed & less geeky than this fella)..

.. were heightened, and during this time we have been unable to deliver the usual efficient and accurate support our reputation was built on.

Our new phones.. aren’t they lovely?

We would like to first take this opportunity to THANK YOU for being part of our community and for choosing us as your web host. We do realize that there are many other hosting options out there, and we are extremely grateful that our company has reached as many people as it has today and that we are able to continue to grow and provide you with upgrades, software, and special deals to optimize your online experience.

Thanks for sticking with us through this trying time. We are..

SOOOOOOOO EXCITED!

.. about moving forward and doing everything we can to prove our commitment to our webmaster community.

Above all we strive to be the best and have many more plans in place so we can continue to provide the award-winning support that DEFINES US as Lunarpages and not just another web host.

As always we welcome your feedback [and adoration ;)] so drop us a line anytime with your thoughts and suggestions to feedback@lunarpages.com