Recently I switched to Arvixe web hosting on a suggestion from a random stranger and I have to say that so far the decision has been very rewarding. With this post I’m going to go into detail the advantages that Arvixe web hosting has provided me and why if you are looking for a new web host for ASP.NET 4.0 or WordPress hosting you should consider Arvixe.
I initially found Arvixe because I was in search of a web host that could not only support ASP.NET 4.0 but provide me with the flexibility and freedom to use whatever mail server that I wanted in order to send emails from my applications. My selected web host also needed to be able to support multiple websites under one account and the ability to have WordPress websites hosted along side my .NET websites.
When Arvixe was suggested to me the first thing I did was check them out, I looked at the offerings and tried to find as much on the company and their hosting capabilities as I could. Then like any good consumer I went in search of reviews of their services and while they did in fact have some negative reviews they were primarily positive. The few negative ones had been responded to directly by employees of Arvixe in order to try and resolve the issues.
My final stop before making a decision was to get on their website and talk with their customer service. I was sure to have plenty of questions ready when I was able to talk to someone. It ended up taking less than a minute before I was able to talk to an actual human being and they were actually able to answer some of my more challenging questions.
Pleased with what I heard I decided to sign up for one month of hosting service and start by switching over one website that was currently non-functional on my current hosting. Working with their hosting was very easy to set up and get up and running. They use a control panel called Website Panel and it’s very easy to work with and navigate.
One thing I found that I liked a great deal, that wasn’t even on my list of wants, was that all websites are hosted parallel of each other. With my Go Daddy hosting I could have multiple websites hosted under one hosting account, but they would all have to be squished into the same folder, there was little organization and what it meant is if you knew the sub folder all my websites would be accessible under one domain. With Arvixe it’s different, all of the websites have their own core folders and then beneath them is a log and wwwroot folder. This adds a great deal of separation between websites and it made me very happy once I noticed it.
This next part may sound odd, but I also love that the SQL Server for my website is hosted on the same server as my website, I know there is some possible performance loss there, but it makes it a lot easier to go from local development to deployed code. There is less configuration to change or worry about screwing up connection strings because I can set up my local development environment identical to that of what it will be in production.
So there you have it, those are the two main reasons, that I have found, that make me feel that Arvixe web hosting is superior to the other hosting options out there currently. Now there are some draw backs, for instance their application installer doesn’t seem to work well and also seems to have outdated versions of applications. Which is not a big deal if you able able to figure out installing applications on your own. Also, another minor one is that their DNS entry editor doesn’t have the ability to do more than one domain at once and isn’t quite as organized as GoDaddy’s but it is also much faster for simple edits. Hopefully this information will be useful if you are looking for a new web hosting company and look for similar features as me.
7 Responses to “The Advantages of Arvixe ASP.NET Web Hosting”
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Hi Mike,
I am in the same situation as you were sometime back. Stuck with GoDaddy grid hosting and its horrible performance just because I wanted ASP.NET 4.0. So, I am contemplating switching to Arvixe as my needs are pretty similar to yours here. Just had a couple of questions. Would be awesome if you could comment on these!
1. How is the website performance with Arvixe? Is it comparable to what you used to get with GoDaddy shared hosting before or is it better? Did the google crawl stats graph fall back to the original values?
2. How easy is it to create a new virtual directory or a database or install an application? With GoDaddy it is an ordeal. We setup stuff and then queue the batch and wait for anywhere between 30 minutes to 2 hours for that job to complete. Is it similar with Arvixe or is it better?
3. I am learning wordpress still and so I am not fully well-versed with migrating wordpress to another hosting provider. I was thinking of getting my current wordpress blog exported into the usual xml file and then my customized theme backed up through FTP. Then I can just install wordpress on the new host, import the xml file and then upload the theme. Is my approach correct or should I do something different?
Thanks for your time!
Shankar
Hi Shankar,
Thanks for the comment, i’ll do the best I can to answer it.
1. The performance is about the same on average as I was experiencing using GoDaddy’s shared hosting, slightly slower response times to the Google Spider, but not enough to effect ranking. It’s light years better than performance on GoDaddy’s Grid hosting though.
2. It is really easy to create a new virtual direct, website or whatever you need. Their web based UI is really clean and responsive. The only problem I’ve run into so far is their application installer doesn’t seem to work very well and also doesn’t seem to have the latest version of WordPress. It is very easy to install WordPress though and it took me far less time to download the install package from WordPress.org and upload it and install.
3. Migration was a breeze. For my existing WordPress sites on GoDaddy here is what I did. I went into my Website Manager and went to the databases and made a backup of all my WordPress databases. Then through FTP downloaded a copy of the entire directory. Then uploaded those files to the wwwroot folder for my website on Arvixe through FTP. Next I created an empty MySQL database on Arvixe for the website and took the backup script that GoDaddy Produced and copied it into the query execution manager for Arvixe and executed. At that point all I had to do was modify the wp-config.php file to point to the new database and I was good to go.
Hopefully that answers your questions. If you have anymore feel free to contact me again.
Thanks for your detailed response, Mike! Arvixe seems like a pretty decent deal. Planning to try them out. I see that you have an affiliate link. I am assuming I just have to click through it and purchase my hosting plan. Obviously, I would like for you to receive some commission since in reality you have made this sale indirectly 🙂
That is correct.
Hopefully you will be as pleased with them as I have been.
Also, should you have any problems I’ve found their support staff to be fast to respond, and easy to communicate with through their web interface.
Hi Mike,
Found your blog from a post on todays woot off and since it mentioned C# I figured I’d check it out. Seems to be more of a generic everything blog and not just a C# blog but I found this post about GoDaddy very amusing.
Every day I talk to people on how bad GoDaddy hosting is for anything outside of a standard HTML website. So many of my new customers come from GoDaddy because of the limitations and performance. A big one is SQL Database size. Sure they offer MSQL but in the fine print it’s size is very limited and there are no options for increasing it’s size.
Anyways keep up the great posts and if you or any of your readers are looking for developer hosting I ask they shoot me an email and I’d be happy to offer them a free 30 day trial.
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Regards,
Chris Ward
Dear Michael,
thank you very much for this post and reply. I’m just start my way from GoDaddy to Arvixe with all my and customers sites . I’m little worrying about response time, but hope it will be not worth than usual GoDaddy’s 30-60-more sec. any way.
best regards
Allen
Thank you for your post. I also have bad experience with Godaddy. The server went down 3 times a week and their support is not cooperative. I gave up with them and then switched to asphostportal.com. I’m quite happy with them