Japanatron Logo

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.

Related Articles

Linux and NTLMv2 Proxy Authent...

My company's firewall enforces NTLMv2 proxy authentication, which kinda sucks for some Linux hosts since I can't pass that authentication directly on the comman...

Ubuntu 22.04 Nginx Build Outli...

I re-built my LEMP web-server fresh on Ubuntu 22.04 and learned some things along the way. This is my base build outline mostly created for my own notes. INS...

The Hunt for the Ultimate VPS ...

If IT geek-dom were a crime, I'd be on death row by now.  Fortunately, it is not; so I continue my dorky IT pursuits--the latest of which is finding a VPS cloud...

How To Build an Ubuntu Web Ser...

The following is a task outline for building an Ubuntu-based web-server to run Joomla and JomSocial.  I created this for my own notes, so apologies if it's...