Arvixe Review

Arvixe Web Hosting Review

Agencies like us need a good web hosting provider that won’t let our clients down. In our loooong search for the best service provider out there, we have tried out A LOT of companies and know which ones to use and which ones to avoid.

If you’re looking for a web hosting company for Canada and came across Arvixe, here’s what we thought…

Intro to Arvixe

Arvixe is popular for hosting WordPress websites, and this year it launched a version optimized for eCommerce. Arvixe is a great WordPress host, and we highly recommend it.

Our review covers features, pricing, performance, support, security, and other considerations. We especially like Arvixe’s easy-to-use user interface, its detailed knowledge base, its reliable 24/7 support, its advanced caching features, and its ability to automatically restore websites after a server outage.

Arvixe is a web hosting company that started in California, specifically in San Luis Obispo. Arvand Sabetian found the company in 2003.

It was then acquired by Endurance International Group (EIG) in 2014. EIG actually owns other hosting companies such as HostGator and BlueHost. Data centers of Arvixe can be found in various locations such as Amsterdam, Hong Kong, and Dallas, Texas.

Even though they are acquired by EIG who owns BlueHost and other hosting company giants, we do not recommend you to sign up with them. It’s better to shell out your money on other web hosting providers that provide you what you need. And we have various reasons why we don’t suggest giving Arvixe your money in exchange for their service.

But before you take our word off the bat, we’ll show you the different packages, pros, and cons of Arvixe.

Pricing

Avixe’s packages and features for Linux Web Hosting include the “Personal Class” and the “Personal Class Pro” packages. These can be seen below:

The company’s cheapest Linux Web Hosting Plan is called “Personal Class.” It costs $7.00 a month and automatically renews each month unless you cancel the subscription.

In this package, you automatically get unmetered disk space and monthly data transfer, this means you are not charged for the amount of space or bandwidth you actually use. However, according to Arvixe, “unmetered does not mean infinite.” It is necessary for customers like you to comply with their Terms of Service.

You can host up to 6 domains in the cheapest package. This means, you can have a maximum of 6 websites on one hosting account. For each domain, you have an unmetered number of subdomains. Plus, you get one free domain name with the following extensions: .com, .net, .tech, .space, .online, .website, .store, .site, .club, .us, .biz, .info, .me, .co, and .org.

As with most hosting packages, Arvixe provides you with cPanel access to fully control your web hosting environment. For less tech-savvy persons, the Personal Class package provides you with a one-click website builder. This easy-to-use website building platform gives you the ability to create a website in minutes by choosing through a variety of templates.

Email is a necessity for most website owners and Arvixe gives you an unmetered number of mailboxes. This means, you can create multiple email accounts for multiple persons in charge of your domain or website.

For the development side of things, this package offers unlimited MySQL Databases. This means you get to take advantage of the pros of MySQL including enhanced data security, uptime, performance, and flexibility. The Personal Class package also allows you to take advantage of PHP, Python, Perl, and Ruby on Rails, among others.Pretty handy if you’re planning to start a lot of websites.

If you need an SSL certificate to protect sensitive information, you can purchase it for an additional price of $25.00 per year. This is important for certain sites such as ecommerce shops where sensitive information is necessary to complete transactions.

Support

Arvixe gives you a variety of options to contact them for support:

• Get support by submitting a ticket here.
• Get support by visiting the Support Center/ Knowledgebase.
• And get support through the online live chat customer support system.

Although Arvixe gives you multiple options to contact them, they still lack a robust support system as seen in a variety of customer reviews. It takes about an hour for them to get back to customer questions and complaints. After you get them to answer your initial question, it takes more than 5 minutes for them to respond in between questions.

This is very costly especially when you are running an ecommerce site. If your site is down while you are trying to connect to a slow support system, buyers might look for another way to purchase the product they like. They might be frustrated and avoid using your ecommerce site the next time they try to buy something.

Note: To get priority support from Arvixe, you need to pay an additional $20.00 per month.

Pros

Arvixe’s basic plans provide you with unmetered disk space and monthly data transfer. Plus, they give you at most 6 domains for the cheapest Linux web hosting plan. They also give you vouchers for Google, Yahoo!, and Bing ads. In addition, they provide unmetered number of email accounts allowing you to give mailboxes to multiple persons handling your website.

When it comes to your web security, Arvixe provides a spam blocker called SpamAssassin for emails. For the cheapest Linux plan, you also get nightly security updates, brute force detection, and firewall. Arvixe allows you to transfer or migrate your current site to their own servers at no charge.

Cons

As stated previously, we do not recommend you to sign off with Arvixe. Here’s why:

Poor Customer Support

First of all, Arvixe doesn’t provide customer support through the telephone. They provide you three options to contact them for support: ticket submission, live chat support, and self-help knowledgebase.

Rampant customer reviews regarding Arvixe states that their customer support is below average. It takes an hour to reach them through live chat and takes a lot of time for them to answer in between questions. Other reviews state that they were unable to answer simple questions and gave standard template-like responses instead of answering the specific query at hand.

Plus, they have a really expensive priority support system. Just to get the best support they offer, you have to pay $20 per month.

Misleading Costs

The cheapest plan that costs $7 a month can be misleading or only partly true. As seen in the picture below, the cheapest plan only costs $7 if you pay for 24 months upfront. This means, you have to shell out $168 immediately. It actually costs $10 per month on a monthly basis.

Not Really Unlimited

As with other web hosting companies, “Unlimited” or “Unmetered” doesn’t really mean infinite. The features are still there up to the time when you overuse Arvixe’ CPU. That’s why you have to read their Terms of Service. According to their terms, they can suspend an account if it excessively uses CPU and memory resources and if it exceeds the monthly bandwidth allowance. This proves our point that “Unmetered” or “Unlimited” doesn’t actually equate to its real meaning.

Unreliability

When your site experiences downtime, you lose a lot of traffic, customers, and purchases. Downtimes are too costly for business owners. Thus, it is important for you to choose web hosting companies with a 99.99% uptime.

Users of Arvixe often report that it is unreliable and leads to sites that often crash. A lot of reviews also stated that Arvixe has major downtimes even after stating they had a 99.99% server uptime.

Conclusion

As with all brands, there are always pros and cons. Arvixe is one of them. The pros include unlimited disk space and monthly data transfer, security features, and unlimited email accounts. However, for the price of the cheapest hosting plan, it’s definitely not worth it.

So as mentioned in our summary, we would strongly recommend you look at HostPapa, they offer a lot better… well, everything is better really, check out our HostPapa review.