When you’re looking for a reliable, consistent Web host, quite a few seem to be names that pop up frequently, and Arvixe is one.
Since 2003, when it began, Arvixe started growing rapidly, and by 2014, was hosting more than 150,000 domains in more than 70,000 accounts.
They started in San Luis Obispo, Calif., where they also have a data center, but added another in North America, one in Europe, and one in Asia. They started to get great reviews of their hosting, which included multiple hosting packages, and of the service from more than 80 employees and contractors.
And then, in 2014, they were acquired by Endurance International Group, a Web hosting company that owns many of the market’s most popular and recognized brands.
Shortly after the acquisition, some of the outstanding reviews and conversation around Arvixe started to shift, so I decided to do my own investigation, and this is what I found.
Arvixe Plans and Pricing
All shared plans, including personal, business and reseller, are Linux-, Mac-, and Windows-friendly, regardless of whether you choose Linux or Windows hosting.
Personal
Arvixe offers both Windows and Linux shared hosting, with personal class and personal class pro plans in both.
Linux personal class ($4/month): You get unlimited disk space, monthly data transfer, and and six different domains.
Linux personal class pro ($7/month): You’ll get the same unlimited plans from the personal class plan, but this plan gives you unlimited Web sites, as well.
Linux plans cPanel control panel, unlimited MySQL5 and PostgreSQL databases, and many other security and development features. The Linux plans also include unlimited secure POP3 and IMAP e-mail.
Windows personal class ($5/month): You get unlimited disk space, unlimited monthly data transfer, and one Web site, with five MSSQL 2014 databases.
Windows personal class pro ($8/month): Again, this plan includes the same features as the personal class plan, but gives you five domains. You’ll get 25 MSSQL 2014 databases.
Both Windows plans include dedicated application pools, Plesk control panel, unlimited secure POP3 or IMAP e-mail,
Business
Again, Arvixe offers Windows and Linux hosting plans.
All plans include free domain name and free SSL certificates for life. Priority support can be added to any business class plan for $20 per month.
Linux business class: ($22/month): Unlimited disk space and monthly data transfer, six Web sites.
Linux business class pro: ($35/month): Unlimited disk space and monthly data transfer, unlimited Web sites.
Windows business class ($27/month): Unlimited disk space and data transfer, 10 Web sites, and dedicated application pools.
Windows business class pro ($40/month): Unlimited disk space, data transfer, Web sites, and dedicated application pools.
Reseller
These plans include almost everything you need, with only slight differences between the regular and pro class plans. In addition to unlimited emails, many different security features, and management, you get free domain names and SSL certificates for life. The plans make additional pro-level support available for an extra $20/month.
Reseller class (Linux: $20/month; Windows: $25/month): 50GB disk space, 500 GB monthly data transfer.
Linux reseller class pro (Linux: $50/month; WIndows $60/month): 200 GB disk space, 2000 GB monthly data transfer.
VPS
Virtual private server hosting includes two different fully-managed plans for Linux and Windows hosting. The plans feature many different add-ons, including priority support, extra space, R1 Soft Remote Backup and additional RAM.
VPS class ($40/month): 50 GB dedicated disk space, unlimited monthly data transfer, 1.5 GB memory, 4 CPU cores, 2 IP addresses and cPanel/WHM Control Panel on the Linux plan. Add on RVSiteBuilder Pro for $5/month
VPS class pro ($70/month): 100 GB dedicated disk space, unlimited monthly data transfer, 3 GB memory, 8 CPU cores, 2 IP addresses and cPanel/WHM Control Panel.
Windows VPS class ($60/month): 50 GB dedicated disk space, unlimited monthly data transfer, 2 GB memory, 4 CPU cores, 2 IP addresses and WebSitePanel control panel.
Windows VPS class pro ($100/month): 100 GB dedicated disk space, unlimited data transfer, 4 GB memory, 8 CPU cores and 2 IP addresses. You also get WebSitePanel control panel.
Dedicated
They offer two different dedicated hosting categories, with Cloud hosting for smaller Web site starting at $108 each month. Cloud hosting is available either for Linux or Windows, and includes Hyper-V Technology.
The extensive dedicated class plans include 24/7 dedicated support, with your servers stored in a redundant power datacenter. Centers are in Dallas or Hong Kong.
You can choose whether or not you want Linux or Windows software, with either cPanel or WebSitePanel control panels. The plans include non-stop, everyday full managment. start at $128.70 per month for a single processor XEON E3-1220 V2 3.1 GHz, Turbo 3.5 GHz CPU with 4 GB memory and 128 GB SSD in RAID 1 storage up to a multi-processor 2x XEON E5-2620 2.0 GHz, Turbo 2.5 GHz CPU with 32 GB memory and 1 TB of RAID 1 storage or $357.50 each month.
Free Domain Name for Life
Most Web companies will include a free domain name when you switch to their company, which is a great savings, especially for small businesses, new bloggers, or anyone looking to cut their costs and save money.
Unfortunately, though, once the first year of your contract is up, you typically are charged for the annual registration fees and costs to renew your domain name. Arvixe, on the other hand, gives you a free domain name for life, which means you can save money and time.
Proactive Security Options
Arvixe has included a wide variety of different security options that allow you to take a proactive step toward your Web site’s security. The company has included different integrations with some of the leading companies to include, standard, on your plans, services from Spam Assassin, SpamCop, Spamhaus, domain keys, SPF for email security, daily backup, and nightly security updates.
I also appreciate the SSH access and SSL support, while their incorporation of brute force detection and firewalls help to add extra levels of protection.
Free Website Transfer
It’s become nearly industry standard, but Arvixe includes free Web site transfer; when you choose to bring your business to their company, they’ll make sure that your business is up and ready to go in no time. Their terms of service note that the transfers are a courtesy, and they don’t make any guarantees about the quality of the transfer, or the length of time it might take to complete.
They also warn that there are accounts that might not transfer, and that the free transfer is for site files and databases. For e-mail accounts or application reconfigurations, there will most likely be an extra cost you’ll be responsible for the transfer.
Speed
Arvixe used to be regarded as a highly competitive choice when comparing Web hosts, and while their speeds aren’t the fastest, they certainly aren’t the slowest, either. Their load times are around 1000 ms; the industry standard is a couple hundred microseconds faster.
Those two hundred microseconds are only a fraction of a second, but can have a drastic effect on your company’s Web site. Google has said that page speed is valuable, and every second counts when it comes to your Web site.
Cloudflare integration
I am a big fan of CloudFlare — I love that Arvixe includes CloudFlare with a very easy-to-install integration of the application. The app is great for helping to make your Web site faster and more secure. Arvixe notes that with two clicks, the CloudFlare application is activated.
The app helps to improve the Web site’s performance through a global CDN and enhances security to keep your site safe from a variety of different online threats.
Resource Allocation
Arvixe offers a great deal of unlimited features. Like many other hosting companies, unlimited isn’t truly unlimited, but they are very generous, especially for the prices.
The amount of space they give you is more than enough for a new and even growing Web site; as long as you follow their terms and conditions, you shouldn’t have any problems with their unlimited offerings.
SSD Storage for MySQL
Solid-state drives are incredibly stable options for hosting your databases. Servers are kept up-to-date with the newest versions of MySQL databases. The drives help to improve your Web site’s performance because the SSDs have greater endurance and durability.
Some Negative Sides Too:
Uptime is too low as 93.38%
At the risk of sounding obvious, one of the keys to having a successful Web site is having traffic to your Web site — and that can’t happen if your Web site is down. Industry-standard for Web site uptime is 99.9 percent, which means that each month, your site is down for less than 45 minutes each month.
Arvixe has some of the worse uptime rates on the market, with an average uptime of 99.38 percent, which is nearly four-and-a-half hours of downtime each month. In only two months of data did Arvixe have an uptime that exceeded 99.9 percent.
The benefit for you is that Arvixe provides a money-back guarantee for the times your site is down beyond the .1 percent difference between 99.9 and 100 percent. They’ll take the percentage of downtime above the .1 percent and will multiply it by your downtime. And you’ll get the money back.
Customer Support Response is very Slow
Customer support used to be another area where Arvixe shined, but the response now is very slow. Many customers report waiting minutes, but others have found themselves waiting days or weeks for an answer from the company. When there is a problem with your Web site, you need it fixed now, especially if it’s down, and Arvixe’s support and response times are far from adequate.
They state in their TOS that they provide online technical support and limit it to their technical support areas of expertise. They have a knowledge base, which they recommend checking before creating a ticket via email, live chat and e-mail.
Pros and Cons in a while [Only short form of sentence, bullet points]
Pros:
- Arvixe provides a great number of applications, integrations, and features for the price, which isn’t the cheapest but isn’t unreasonable, either. Even in the cheapest Linux shared hosting plan, you get up to six domains or Web sites with unlimited monthly data transfer and disk space.
- A 60-day money-back guarantee for personal, reseller and business ASP and Linux shared plans means that you can join with peace of mind. There aren’t refunds on dedicated server plans and money paid to outside parties for things like SSL certificates, domain registration, and more.
- Arvixe offers Google AdWords and Yahoo! Bing vouchers for clients in certain countries.
- There are plenty of integrations with popular CMS, offering plans specific to Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and Concrete5. You can also find Movable Type and ExpressionEngine hosting plans, as well as ClipBucket, PHPMotion, and e-commerce plans for nopCommerce and Magento. They also have plans for forums and social networking or community Web sites.
- Arvixe offers a blog with more in-depth information that administrators and Webmasters will find helpful, and the appear to keep in fairly well updated.
Cons:
- Arvixe has slower speeds and little consistency in uptimes, both numbers that you want to be able to count on working on a regular basis to ensure your customers get the best possible experience on your Web site.
- The company’s customer support is not very fast or responsive.
Arvixe is another “Modern Day” hosting company. Founded in 2003, this hosting company shattered the records by becoming America’s fastest growing private company by getting into Inc. 500 list TWICE in 2011 and 2012. Arvixe is founded by Arvand Sabetian and bases in San Luis Obispo, CA.
Sabetian started Arvixe at a young age. Back in 2003, he was in Junior year at High school, and he and his friends started a hosting company that would change history. By the time he graduated from university at 2008. Arvixe was making 150M in profits a year.
Arvixe refers to itself as a “Turn-Key” hosting service. Meaning, the services it offers are quick to get around and equally easy to use. It provides “Low Hanging” services and superior customer care. Also, Arvixe is one of the best when it comes to providing shared and Business Class Hosting services.
The USP of Arvixe is quite simple; it believes in hard-work and operates through “Employee Driven Initiatives” where the employees at Arvixe come up with innovative features and add-on support.
Other Hosting We Reviewed: