Arvixe

About

Hi. Thanks for checking out this WebHostingGeeks video review. Visit our website, at WebHostingGeeks.com to see more reviews, and to get the latest information on all the top web hosting services. Today, I’m reviewing Arvixe Web Hosting.

Arvixe Web Hosting was founded in 2003 by Arvand Sabetian. They’re HQ’d in Calabasas CA and have datacentres in the US, Hong Kong and Amsterdam. They were acquired by Endurance International Group in late 2014. Now, Endurance is a huge presence in the web hosting world, with popular brands like HostGator and iPage to name just two. It will be interesting to see what effect their management and support strategies have on Arvixe over time.

Interestingly, founder Sabetian says Arvixe has no centralized office. Each employee works remotely with a management team coordinating tasks. This has allowed Arvixe to expanded to a world wide operation with support techs all over the world.

Arvixe offers basic personal, and business-grade shared hosting, as well as virtual private and dedicated servers. As of this review they host just over 193,000 domains for more than 100,000 accounts. This is an increase of about 30% over the last 12 months.

 

Products and Features

Arvixe offers a comprehensive range of products that include four levels of shared service: two Personal plans and two Business Class plans. There are three levels of Virtual Private Server support, as well as customizable Dedicated servers, from bare bones to fully managed environments. All plans offer web hosting on your choice of a Linux or Windows ASP.net platform. For this review we`ll keep it simple and look at the basic Personal Class service. This is what most people choose to host their day-to-day websites and blogs.

Personal Class is shared hosting. That means you`ll share hardware and processing time with other accounts, but don`t worry; your website or blog is secure and completely independent from the rest; and by sharing resources, you pay a much lower price than you would for your own, private server.

Let`s look at what you get with an Arvixe Personal Class plan. First, there are two Personal hosting plans: Personal Class, and Personal Class Pro. The only difference is the number of websites you can host. With a Pro account there’s no limit to the number of sites you can create; with a regular Personal Class you can host up to six sites. If you use ASP.net hosting, Personal Pro gives you unlimited application pools, while the regular personal account lets you have six.

Each plan gives you an unlimited amount of shared storage for your website or blog contents. You can also transfer as much data to and from your site as you like, without restriction. However, Arvixe does enforce some guidelines on how much bandwidth those transfers can use.  When you sign up, you can register your first domain name for free, and it stays free for as long as you stay with Arvixe. Their Terms of Service states that your free domain remains the property of Arvixe; however when I asked support through Live Chat, they said that you own the domain and that you can transfer it away from Arvixe at any time by paying the current year’s registration fee. If you’d prefer to transfer in an existing domain instead of creating a new one, that’s free too, for the first 60 days.

Whether you transfer a domain or create a new one, you can have it hosted on your choice of servers in the US, Europe or Hong Kong.

The Linux plans support WYSIWYG website building using a tool called RVSiteBuilder from RVGlobalSoft. With it, you can build websites starting with hundreds of professionally designed templates, or start from scratch and create your own templates. Of course, you can also use your existing web building tools too, like Dreamweaver and Adobe Go-Live.

All Linux accounts also get the Softaculous app installer, with more than 280 apps, many of which install with a single click. The apps include WordPress, Joomla, PrestaShop, Drupal, Moodle and hundreds more to help you create websites, blogs, shopping carts, image galleries and all the other great stuff you see online every day.

Also exclusive on Linux hosting, your site and domain management is handled through the industry standard cPanel app. This makes it easy to manage email accounts, backups, databases and all the routine tasks of running a web domain. And cPanel now includes the Attracta suite of SEO tools. These free utilities will help optimize your pages, and get you the search engine visibility you need.

And finally, and again exclusive to Linux accounts, you can optimize your website’s speed and protect it from attack with CloudFlare, a free, cloud-based service that helps secure and accelerate your website.

If you’d like to use WordPress to create a blog or website, Arvixe has servers that are optimized for it. You can install it with just a few clicks from Softaculous, or let Arvixe install it for you when they set up your account.

All plans get $100 worth of free Google advertising; US accounts get an additional $100 towards Yahoo! or Bing. They also get unlimited IMAP and POP3 email and daily backups, ‘though it’s highly recommended that you backup your own websites regularly, since the supplied R1Soft backup and restore tools are used more for Arvixe’s own disaster recovery.

If you want to find out more about any of these features, just go to www.arvixe.com and hover over any of these question marks. They’ll give you all the details.

Before we look at the performance numbers, I want to mention one more important benefit from Arvixe, and that’s their 60-day, money-back guarantee. You can cancel your account within the first 60 days, for any reason, no questions asked. Naturally, they don’t refund any charges for domain names, since you still own the domains.

 

Performance

Now let’s talk about performance.

Well, according to uptime.besthostratings.com, Arvixe has an overall uptime average of 99.97%, beating the industry benchmark of 99.9%. Since October 2012, Arvixe has dipped below the 100% mark only once. Going back to 2006, monthly uptime has routinely exceeded 99.9% with only a few exceptions.

The people at Arvixe are so confident in their service reliability that they guarantee your server will be up at least 99.9% of the time. If server availability falls below that, they’ll refund a portion of your monthly hosting fee.

 

Customer Reviews

What do Arvixe customers say?  For the past four years, customer satisfaction has averaged 3.77 stars out of 5, or 75.3%.  For the most recent 6 months, Arvixe customers have been quite satisfied, giving the company an overall rating of 4.14, or 82.8%.

These ratings are derived from 125 customer reviews where 82 users gave Arvixe 5 stars; 18 gave them 4 stars, 7 rated them 3 stars, and a total of 17 gave them 2 stars or less.

The vast majority of customers give very positive comments about Arvixe service, including the quality of customer support they receive. Most agree that they would continue using Arvixe and would recommend them to others.

Negative comments focus mainly on website availability and support. Some clients claim their sites have been down repeatedly, and for extended periods. This is hard to verify, since Arvixe’s server logs, as well as independent 3^rd –party monitoring services don’t show these outages. A little later, I’ll give Customer Support a call, and ask them about this.

 

 

 

Purchasing the Hosting Plan

Now we’ll put Arvixe Web Hosting to the test. I’ll go onto their site, sign up for a personal hosting plan and register a new domain name.  I’d also like to have them preinstall WordPress for me.

Then we’ll see how long it takes to complete the transaction and what kind of confirmations we receive. Let’s go.

Remember, Web Hosting Geeks is the biggest hosting review site out there and hosting companies always give the best specials online to Geeks visitors. To get the current special, simply visit https://webhostinggeeks.com/user-reviews/arvixe.  Let’s go.

This takes us to the Arvixe landing page for Geeks visitors. Here’s your Geeks coupon code. Press the big green button to start the 4-step sign-up process.

Step 1 is to select a hosting plan.  On this page  can see both the personal class plans—regular and pro. Notice that the WebHostingGeeks code has been copied in for you. You still have to click the Use button to get that discount.

The dropdown lists plans from one month to two years, with two years being the best deal. For now, I’ll pick six months and click Add to Cart.

This takes us to step 2, where we either sign up for a new account or log in to an existing one. Here are all the details you’ll need to fill in. I’ve already done this so I’ll just log in and move on to step 3.

That’s where we get to register a new domain name, or transfer in an existing domain, or neither, though we can still do it later for free if we choose. I’m going to register a new domain for a fair salon, so I’ll just enter the domain name here, and select a top level domain, in this case .ca. Check the Private Registration box if you want to hide your private information from registrar searches.

Scroll down the page to enter a username and password for the new hosting account. You’ll use the to log into your control panel and manage your hosted websites.

You can select whether to have your plan renew automatically at the end of your tern. You can also choose which data centre will host your websites and blogs.

Click here to select an application or content manager that will be pre-installed during setup. There are a lot to choose from, but the most popular ones are at the top. I’ll choose WordPress.

And finally, Arvixe will offer you a few add-ons if you’re interested. I’m not, so let’s move on to the next page, which just confirms what we’ve done so far.

Still in step 3, this is where we place our order. If everything on the right id correct, click the big blue button right here.

Now we’re at step 4, payment, and I’ll do that with aa credit card and just click through to the next page, where we get payment confirmation. Then we’re taken to the Billing Panel where we can check that everything is set up properly…and it is. In addition to this page, Arvixe will also send you emails with all your login details, a copy of your order, and any special setup instructions for additional apps that were installed, like WordPress.

 

Customer Support Call

Now it’s time to make a call to Customer Support. I’m going to ask them why some customers seem to have problems with server outages that don’t show up in the availability stats.

[ringing – getting into the phone queue]

Arvixe: Thank you for calling Arvixe technical support. This is Tasha. How can I help you?:

Geeks: Hi Tasha, my name is Rick. I have a quick question. You guys advertise a 99.9% uptime guarantee, is that correct?

Arvixe: Yes. That is correct.

Geeks: I’ve been reading reviews online, and about a quarter of the reviews I’ve read talk about repeated server outages and problems that people have had with their websites’ downtime. Can you tell me why there seems to be some difference between what your reported uptime is and these customers’ experiences?

Arvixe: I can set up a ticket for you for our server management—they would know more detailed information to give you about that.

Geeks: About actual outages and actual downtime that Arvixe has had over the last six months or a year?

Arvixe: Yep.

Geeks: Okay. Why don’t you do that.

Arvixe: Okay, and you just want information from about the last six months regarding the uptime and server outages?

Geeks: Yeah, if I could actually get twelve months’ worth that would be good.

Arvixe: We’ll forward this over to our server management department and have them send you an email.

Geeks: Alright. Thank you very much. What was your name again please?

Arvixe: My name’s Tasha. T-a-s-h-a.

Geeks: Okay great. Thank you very much Tasha.

Arvixe: You’re welcome. Have a good day.

Geeks: Thanks, you too. Bye bye.

 

cPanel Demo

I will show you one more thing though, and that is the cPanel demo right here. Actually, this is the cPanel for my own domain – it shows a lot more detail than the demo that this links to.

cPanel is the web’s most popular website control panel. It lets you manage all aspects of your website and its data from one convenient portal. If you’re new to cPanel, the first time you start it you might want to use the wizard view to help guide you through it, or even some built-in tutorials to learn how to get the most out of it. For now we’ll just take a quick tour of the interface, but I encourage you to explore more deeply.

cPanel is your one-stop interface to everything Avixe, from billing and account functions to user forums and support, it’s all here at the top. You can also change the look and feel of cPanel itself.

Within cPanel, you can setup and manage email; work with files and backup and restore your websites; access leading SEO and marketing tools to get you sited noticed; manage all aspects of site usage and access with comprehensive logging and security features; you can boost performance, create your own subdomains, and manage databases for all your apps. You can build and optimize robust sites and content with tools like RVSiteBuilder. Finally you can add hundreds of pre-written, industry-standard apps to your web sites and blogs, to make them functional and user-friendly.   So that’s it. You can log into your cPanel any time to administer all your domains and see your changes almost immediately.

 

 

 

 

Conclusions

Overall, Arvixe web hosting seems to offer good quality and decent value for the money. They have a full range of plans and features, which include cPanel, a 60-day guarantee, and servers optimized for WordPress.

Server availability has been strong, with very few outages since 2012. Overall, they have met or exceeded the industry average of 99.9% since they started in 2005.

The majority of customers are very satisfied with Arvixe’s service, and give them an 83% approval rating.

Buying a hosting plan was easy and only took a few minutes.

Our call to Customer Service -

We feel that Arvixe delivers quality web hosting services and good value and we can recommend them to you.

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