Why Arvixe is a piece of crap?
My experience using Arvixe web hosting for 3 months.
My experience using Arvixe web hosting for 3 months.
Note: If you are reading this article is because I moved my site from Arvixe to another web hosting. If I would have kept this site in Arvixe, you would have had 50% chances of finding this site down.
In 2011 I started building websites for relatives and close friends. For many of reasons I chose different web hosting services for each site and results have been quite different. I haven't accurately measured the performance of each web hosting however I want to share my personal experience with them. Today I will talk about Arvixe.
At a certain point I wanted to move all websites I'm in charge of to one web hosting company to simplify management and also to save a bit of money. I did an online research and I thought that Arvixe would be a very good option. I couldn't have been more wrong.
Around mid 2015 I bought Arvixe Personal Class plan because features were OK and price was reasonable considering that it allowed me to have up to 6 domains. I built 2 Wordpress web sites and I uploaded them to their server. The first thing I noticed was a slow FTP communication. However it wasn't too bad so I didn't make a big deal of it. After the sites were up and running the second problem I found was speed. Websites in Wordpress are in general a bit slow, however Arvixe was slower than other server I've used. Sometimes it took a few seconds just to connect to the server and then more time to download the content. For instance, home pages of my sites were 1MB and 4MB and they were loaded in aprox. 4 and 8 seconds respectively. For me that is very slooowwww... Not sure if the problem was in the PHP interpreter, server connectivity or something else.
Even thou sites were slow they were up for the first 2 months. During the 3rd month real problems arose. At least once a week my sites were down and sometimes for many hours. During the down time my email accounts and FTP service were not working either. I contacted Arvixe's customer service many many times. They were polite but useless. Sometimes it took 4 to 5 days to get a reply from them. Their replies looked like:
"... I wanted to reach out and apologize for the extremely delayed response to your inquiry for support. Over the past two weeks, we have seen a much higher than average volume into the support desk, and we realize this has impacted your ability to get timely support from us.
We have made many changes to address this issue, including expanding our phone system capacity to meet incoming volume, upgrading our chat system to ensure that it can handle incoming volume, and most importantly training additional staff and resources to assist you as well as address systems issues.
Due to the temporary rise in tickets numbers, addressing already resolved tickets is having an impact on our ability to help customers in a timely manner that are still having issues that need our assistance to resolve. We are also facing some challenges due to multiple tickets being submitted by single customers for the same issue into multiple departments, or repeatedly to the same department... "
From these kind of emails I inferred that I was not the only one having issues with my pages. It seems that Arvixe's servers were not reliable and they were facing problems all over the place. It's OK having problems every since in a while but I had problems every single week for a month. That's a bit too much. Their chat system worked only some times and technicians were extremely slow to reply my messages.
The most annoying problems was unreliable email hosting. Every single time I sent an email with Thunderbird I got a timeout message:
After the popup appeared I had to press "send" button again. Now, when I sent emails using my Android phone they always remained in the outbox until I refreshed it. I had many delayed emails because of this. The very same day I wrote this article I changed my web site and email hosting to another provider and the problem with my email disappeared :-)
So, my recommendation is STAY AWAY OF ARVIXE. Do a better research that the one I did and find another web hosting service. Today I moved my site and email to A Small Orange hosting and so far it's working quite well. I can quickly say that ASO have amazing customer service.
If you have any questions or comments don't hesitate to contact me below.