Great except you need the following instructions

The chief bothers in setting up servlets were information problems. Lunarpages' documentation relating to servlets was sparse, with important information missing. Also, Lunarpages appears to have just one customer service person with detailed knowledge about servlets, who is not there 24 hours every day. However, this shortage of information can be fixed by a good list of relevant information, so here is what you need to know:

1. To get a URL of the form mydomain.com/servlet/classname put your classes in /home/domainID/public-html/WEB-INF/classes. To do this you have to create the classes folder yourself. Something went wrong with the setup of my domain such that I was unable to create the classes folder. Lunarpages' servlet expert fixed this once he got my query.

2. To write a file from a servlet you need to specify the path to your file area. A good way to do this is using the getRealPath method, as in this example of writing a file to a file in a folder within "WEB-INF": fileWriter = new FileWriter(getServletContext().getRealPath("/") + File.separator + "WEB-INF" + File.separator + "files_i_wrote" + File.separator + "my_first_file.txt");

3. You can protect files and folders by specifying read/write/execute privileges. You can also turn off indexes for directories.

There was one other minor non-servlet problem with the Lunarpages setup. The welcome e-mail from Lunarpages spelled out your password twice in the message. This is a security risk and should not be sent in an e-mail. A simple workaround is to save an edited copy of the e-mail and trash the original.

I haven't been using Lunarpages long enough to assess ISP reliability but there have been no problems so far.

DO NOT use LunarPages for a Java account

This week, which was 6 weeks after I just paid for 1 more year of hosting, I got the same email. They gave me 24 hours notice to "upgrade my account or be kicked off".

Seeing that I was being held hostage and not wanting the pain of switching, I sent an email to go ahead and upgrade me - even though it was $480 per year - which is a lot more than the $95 per year I was paying. But I said in the email that I wanted to know what resource I was using too much of - was it memory, disk space, CPU, MySQL connections, or what?

Well, guess what? 24 hours later my site was DEAD! I called their number repeatedly and finally got someone to answer the phone today. I explained my situation and was politely told - Hey look we do not really want your Java account. We have 37,000 accounts and the Java accounts take up too many resources on our servers. There is no chance we will reconnect you unless you upgrade your account. I asked what resource I was using too much of and was told that he could not tell me. He was just sure that I had to upgrade to get reconnected.

How nice! I even emailed the owner Max and he never emailed me back. Guess he was too busy counting the money from the refund he will not give me since I was just past the 30 day refund period.

So let this be a warning to anyone who wants to host a Java account with LunarPages.com - you WILL BE kicked off right when they want more money from you.

Check out notes about the Dagmar server on LunarForums.com and you will see more details of what I am talking about. Just search on DAGMAR which is the name of the new Enterprise server and you will find the posts.

Just so you know, I checked my logs every day and I NEVER got anywhere close to the limit they advertise on disk space or bandwidth. These guys just want to take your money and cause misery when your site gets pulled with no recourse.

Bottom line - look elswhere and save yourself the headache down the road.

Today I am trying to find another ISP to move my account to.

Thanks to this forum on Servlets.com I am getting great info, so I want to share mine with you too so you can know more than I did when I started this whole Java hosting process.

Terrible

Their tech support is even worse than the bug infested features. It is like the people who respond to questions don't even work for the company because half the time, they don't seem to know what they are talking about and seem to show a very shallow understanding of their own features.

The old saying, "you get what you pay for" definitely applies to this company. You wont pay much and you wont get much.

Hosting gets cancelled if you change your contact e-mail address

Their Web interface has a prominent field for managing the domain contact address. If your address changes and you change it in this field Lunarpages does not register this in their separate administrative database, and the Web interface gives no clue there is a separate administrative listing.

Here is how this goes wrong when it is time to renew the service: they send you an e-mail at your defunct administrative address. You don't receive their e-mails at the defunct address (even though you changed your contact address using their Web interface) so Lunarpages cuts off your domain with no notice other than more e-mails sent to the defunct address.

What is particularly irritating is that Lunarpages refuses to send postal mail before cutting off your domain if e-mails to the defunct address bounce. Their explanation for sending word only by e-mail is "we are an internet company". Also, they refuse to send a copy of the e-mail to the new address that you entered in the Web interface.

The only way their system works if you change your e-mail address is if you guess that they have a second administrative listing for your address and you call them up to change that address in addition to the change you made in the address in their Web interface. Otherwise your domain gets shut down because you did not respond to e-mails sent to an address you thought you had changed.

Feature packes, too bad none of them work

It's feature packed, but most of them dont work. I had problems with the control panel, the webmail, the jsps and servlets not compiling. After two months of telling them how to configure stuff on their servers, I resigned my subscription because the version of resin installed is buggy, and they wont upgrade or install workarouns.

Support will not answer your questions if they dont know the answer. Support redirects you to user forums. Email filters make many emails bounce.

Overall, it's a very bad ISP

Watch out-no payflow ssl support

Not Recommended

Terrible... just terrible

I've only been with the company for six weeks and I've had downtime every day, then the send me the "using too many resources" email today and took down my site. Please don't use this company for hosting JSP webapps.

used to be okay - have gone WAY downhill

I received the famous Lunarpages "you are over system resources but we won't tell you what process is running over" message from tech support. Long story short LP deleted my blog even though the installation was up to date and they took days and days to respond (finally, very casually) to my frantic emails about it. They never did bother to get the files back for me, but I had a backup I had made myself after I stopped trusting them and imported it to my new web host on my own. They are horrible.

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