Good by WebHost4Life and hello Arvixe. WebHost4Life has been my hosting company for nearly 7 years… since August 2003. Back in the day, things were great, web sites were responsive and support was knowledgeable and relatively quick. Time went by and servers and service got upgraded, more storage, more SQL DB’s, better email web client and SPAM protection.
About a year ago they began migrating accounts over to a new servers, new control panels, and I had high expectations based on previous changes so looked forward to migrating. But what I didn’t know was this was all happening because WebHost4Life was sold to some family business in Turkey and day to day operations were being handled by some teenagers. Well, the migration happened the first of June and I got a nice email notice about it with all the important information, servers, IP addresses, web links, etc… But my web sites were only working intermittently or occasionally at best.
Using the new control panel I opened a support case regarding the problems. Messages went back and forth for 42 days (way to long) and clearly the support specialist as they called them selves didn’t have a clue what they were doing. For a good read, review the support ticket here. I then began noticing that there were LOTS of other customers having similar issues, found the business had been sold off and former customers were encouraging to abandon ship. Considering I was already way to relaxed about this, not wanting to do the work to switch hosting accounts, I got off my virtual butt, quickly did some research and landed with Arvixe.
Arvixe is great, support is responsive and online chat works quite well. I experience a minor issue signing up, but called support and resolved it instantly. For what I need there price can’t be beat. Windows .net hosting, unlimited storage, unlimited SQL DB’s and MySQL, unlimited data transfer, unlimited FTP, unlimited EMail accounts and much more for $5/month. Their control panel is simple and clean (powered by WebSitePanel, an open source project), but it works, it works fast and nicely emulates what you would do with IIS. I know it hasn’t yet been a week with Arvixe, but life is good with Arvixe and my web sites seem to be more snappy.