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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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