Author: Tiara Rea

Lunarpages Web Hosting offers a lot of additional features for all of our web hosting plans. Upon signup, you are faced with choosing from a few of them, some are free, and others may be unnecessary for your specific situation, and others may be imperative for your website.

So how do you know when you need add-ons?

Some of the most popular add-ons offered by Lunarpages are as follows:

• JSP
• ASP
• IP Address
• SSL Certificates
• Domain Name Registration
• Anonymous Domain Name Registration
• Premium Restore Service

This article will go in-depth to these add-ons and offer some advice towards if these add-ons are necessary for your web hosting account.

JSP & ASP

JSP and ASP do similar tasks for your website, even though they are different. JSP stands for Java Server Pages and ASP stands for Active Server Pages. Both are simply HTML pages with embedded scripts.  These scripts can and are used to perform various tasks, such as accessing information from databases. For example, a designer could embed a script that accesses the site’s database, finds out who just logged in, and simultaneously offers a personal greeting to the visitor.

Most websites can run without JSP and ASP, but some web designers prefer to use one or the other to help websites load faster or in order to use specific scripts they may have written in one of the languages. So if you are building the website using templates or other web tools, odds are you probably won’t need to add this. You can always add them later as well, whenever you need to.

E-Commerce Tools

Lunarpages offers a variety of free e-commerce tools for your website, like shopping cart scripts and links to payment gateways. However, if you are taking credit card payments directly on your website (not through PayPal), you may run into the issue of requiring a Dedicated IP and SSL Certificate.

A Dedicated IP is an address that is not shared with any other site on the server and corresponds directly with your domain name.  In a shared hosting environment, this is very important to e-commerce security.  Without a Dedicated IP, you won’t be able to secure your site with an SSL Certificate, and without that, no client is going to put their credit card in your hands.  At Lunarpages, we offer a Dedicated IP as an add-on to any hosting plan, or you can get one for free with your Business Hosting Plan, VPS, or Dedicated Server purchase.

An SSL or “Secure Sockets Layer” Certificate is used to identify the merchant who owns the website, as well as to encrypt the credit cards and payment data being processed on the website.  Without an SSL Certificate, the information viewed and sent via the website could be intercepted by just about anyone.  At Lunarpages, we offer two different SSL Certificates; both come fully validated with 99.3% browser coverage. On the Business Hosting Plan, the installation and SSL Certificate itself are both free.

Domain Names & Anonymous Registrations

Did you know that on many of our hosting plans, you can host Unlimited Domains? That means for example that you can literally have 10 different websites running, all from one web hosting account. So instead of purchasing 10 hosting accounts, you just purchase 10 domain name registrations, which is a much more affordable option.

There is also an add-on option of anonymous domain name registration for any/all of your domains. Normally when you purchase a domain name, your name, address, telephone number, and email are all visible via a WhoIs search online. But by adding anonymous registration to your domains, we will change the visibility from your information to Lunarpages information. This can be a valuable add-on if you are concerned for the privacy of your domains.

Premium Restore Service

The premium restore service deserves its own article, because there are a great many reasons why we recommend it to our new hosting clients! But to keep it simple, the premium restore service is an add-on that can help you save lost information on your website. By default, Lunarpages backs up every single server every night, but if you need to recall any of the backups, it takes time and resources from our staff, so we charge $75/hour to retrieve any backups. However if you have the premium restore service added, you can retrieve backups from us at no charge at all!

We hope this helps you understand the add-ons we offer, but please let us know if there are any other services you are unsure about. Our friendly and knowledgeable staff are always happy to  assist.