Arvixe VPS Review
They currently have 3 data centers located in Chicago, New Jersey and Dallas. If you need to go from VPS to a dedicated server, Arvixe has cloud hosting and bare-metal solutions available to you. In this review, we will focus on their VPS plans specifically with a full price comparison, feature review and report on all of our findings.
Make sure to claim the discount made exclusively to Top Five Advisor visitors. With that offer, you will save 10% off their normal pricing using a coupon code.
Arvixe VPS Pros
Unlike several companies we’ve reviewed, Arvixe offers both Windows VPS and Linux VPS plans to choose from. All plans offered offer at least 1GB RAM.Arvixe VPS Cons
The entry-level “LITE” VPS plans are stripped of the bare essentials. Their managed solutions are more expensive than the VPS competition.Arvixe VPS Packages Review
As mentioned in the introduction above, they offer both Linux and Windows VPS versions. In this section, we’re going to take a look at the features you get with either package to help
About This Arvixe VPS Review
If you are unaware of what a VPS is or whether you need one, you may be at the wrong place since this review is strictly for their Virtual Private Server plans. If standard web hosting is all you need, then be sure to check out either:
- Arvixe Hosting Review – This is the cheapest web hosting that is offered by this provider. Most applications such as Joomla or WordPress work fine on this platform, especially for lower traffic sites.
- Arvixe Windows Hosting Review – Need ASP.NET or MS SQL databases? You’ll need Windows hosting. Our review for their Windows-based service is available on this page where Arvixe received our DIAMOND award.
As you can see, there’s whether you choose Linux or Windows, all six plans are fairly comparable in features. Here’s the noticeable differences we’ve found when comparing:
Arive Linux VPS Comparison
- Pricing ranges from $20/mo to $70/mo before our coupon.
- Less RAM per plan (less resources needed).
- cPanel / WHM Control Panel used.
Arvixe Windows VPS Comparison
- Pricing ranges from $30/mo – $100/mo before our coupon.
- More RAM on all plans.
- WebSitePanel Control Panel used.
No matter which you choose, it is important to note that the LITE plan does not have a control panel installed and should only be considered by advanced users who know how to install an Apache/PHP stack on a server to get the VPS working the way they want. Therefore, for most users, the middle or last plan will be the only options that include full management and a control panel.
For your marketing efforts, Arvixe offers a $100 Adwords voucher and a $75 Yahoo/Bing voucher for free advertising. These are available on all six available plans.
During your checkout, there are enhancements available to order including an upgrade to SSD ($5/mo), extra 15GB space ($10/mo), remote backup ($25/mo), additional RAM ($10/mo) and priority support ($20/mo). Also, depending on whether you are going with Linux or Windows, there’s other options available like RVSiteBuilder Pro, a cPanel feature, for $5/mo on Linux.
An interesting options with Arvixe is the VPS location option. With any plan, you can opt to have your VPS setup in United States, Europe or Hong Kong.
Customer Support Review
For customer service, should you need help, they offer a knowledge base, blog and discussion board to get get self-help. Additionally, for assistance, they offer a toll-free telephone number with 24×7 availability, they have a live chat feature which is available for both technical support and sales support, and last, under the knowledge base, you’ll find a “Submit a Ticket” option to get help via email.
Their knowledge base doesn’t appear to have a VPS-specific category with topics. Therefore, you’ll need to use search to find specific topics that you need assistance with. They do have a cPanel/WHM section but there doesn’t appear to be many topics specific to WHM. Any sort of search in their knowledge base with common 3 letter acronyms like WHM or VPS, return no results which isn’t good. We think they should drop the character limit for results to 2 so these topics can be found easier.
On their blog, they have categories specific to VPS hosting available that include “Linux Server Admin, Windows Server Admin, Server Security and a few others. We find the categories list cumbersome at best since it is not an alphabetical list and extremely hard to navigate. We’re also not sure why they have so many categories. If this blog was in our hands, we’d pick 10 categories at most and file most of topic-specific content under tags. An example of the bad organization is the fact they have both a cPanel/Linux Hosting tag and category which should never happen.
Their discussion board also does not have a VPS-specific category available. They do have a Linux or Windows general support board to get assistance, however, finding topics specific to your VPS needs is troublesome. Regarding activity, the board does appear used by their customers to get help and we found the community helping each other in several topics we looked at. Thankfully the search function for the forum does allow you to search for 3-letter terms like WHM or VPS.
It was interesting for us to discover that the Terms of Service document on their site hasn’t been updated since January of 2009. The entire document doesn’t reference the term VPS or Virtual Private Servers once. By process of elimination regarding their Money Back Guarantee policy, we’ve determined that no money back guarantee is offered on any VPS plan.
Your Experience? Summary
Overall, Arvixe is a decent virtual private server host to use. Although the managed VPS pricing is a bit more expensive than we’d like to see, they do offer extremely competitive rates for the advanced user who doesn’t require a control panel.
As almost always, our reviews are feature reviews here and we rely on their customers to let us know how their customer support and reliability is. Leave your balanced review below to let us know the pros and cons on your experience so far. Would you recommend them to others? Is the customer support response times acceptable to you?