Generally speaking, Arvixe isn't too bad, especially considering the price and included features. Here's my quick review:
The Good
- Excellent price
- They have ffmpeg installed on their servers, which is a feature not often found on other hosts.
- They're generally responsive to emails and reasonable to work with.
The Bad
- You get what you pay for. Their server performance can really suck at times.
- The shared SSL doesn't work, and that's really what separates the men from the boys when it comes to quality hosting. ICDSoft is the only host I know of that pulls it off relatively well. Sure, there's a certificate error since the hostname doesn't match, but at least it works for personal use. In Arvixe's case, I got SSL working after upgrading to their business plan and installing my own SSL certificate.
- Their after hours support is terrible. They obviously outsource it to some cheap company in India. The following example is a chat session I had with Arvixe support after I noticed my site was down. At the time I was using their $22 / month business hosting.
You are now chatting with Rohit P (Support)
David: Hello
David: I was wondering if server Falcon is down at the moment?
David: All of my sites are down along with email.
Rohit P: No
Rohit P: root@falcon [~]# w 06:22:20 up 3 min, 1 user, load average: 9.73, 3.55, 1.28
David: just came up?
David: says up time is 3 minutes
Rohit P: Yes
Rohit P: 3 minutes
David: what happened?
Rohit P: Not sure
David: Ok. Well thank you for rebooting
Rohit P: Is there anything else I can assist you with today?
David: No, thank you.
I would expect the occasional unexplained outage using the cheaper personal hosting, but for $22 a month I expect a least a basic explanation of what happened.
Summary
Arvixe is appropriate for personal websites or low-traffic corporate presence sites, but not solid enough for business or highly-monetized websites. If they fixed their after hours support and improved server performance, they'd be a top web host.
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