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EIG Hosting Alternatives For Those Leaving

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When HostGator was acquired by Endurance International Group (EIG) a few years ago, many people experienced a decline in quality of service. Sites went down frequently, support was no longer stellar, and simply being a HostGator customer was a frustration. A lot of HostGator clients sought refuge and Arvixe was one of the more popular HostGator alternatives.

In late October 2014, a lot of people were surprised when news about EIG buying Arvixe spread like wildfire. Arvixe clients couldn’t help but be worried because we all know what happens to a host when it’s acquired by EIG. More and more people are now transferring their sites away from Arvixe and other EIG hosts (A Small Orange, Site5, BlueHost, HostGator, etc. see the full list of web hosts EIG owns) in order to avoid the clusterf@#k that’s bound to happen sooner or later.

If you’re one of the many people who are looking for a new host that is not owned by EIG, check out the EIG alternatives I listed below. I believe it’s very unlikely that EIG will ever acquire the following hosts, so don’t worry because you’re going to be safe with them! Also if you’re concerned about how you’re going move your website(s) to a new hosting company, don’t worry, all of these web hosts will gladly help you with the transfer process.

EIG Hosting Alternatives

The non EIG web hosts below are listed in alphabetical order.

A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting is one of the most reliable hosting providers I have used so far. They started out back in 2003 and are based out of Michigan. I’ve been using A2 for years and I’m very pleased with how well my sites load on their servers. Overall their uptime has been well above the 99.9% standard and I haven’t run into problems on their end where I’ve needed any help.

Review Hell is currently hosted on a A2 Hosting Turbo Boost shared hosting plan. I feel well taken care of with A2 Hosting and I’m confident that they will remain a reliable web hosting company for a long time to come.

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Read my A2 Hosting review here.

GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks has been around since 2008 and is located in California. I would be extremely surprised if GreenGeeks was ever acquired by EIG. They have four datacenter locations (Chicago, IL, Montreal, CA, Amsterdam, NL, and Singapore, SG) and offer shared, reseller, VPS, and dedicated hosting plans. I've had close to 100% uptime in the first year of using GreenGeeks. They don't have coupons but do offer great promotional prices for the initial hosting term. GreenGeeks promo pricing currently starts at $2.95/month.

Read my GreenGeeks review here.

InMotion Hosting

InMotion Hosting is considered to be one of the big guys, but in their case it's not a bad thing. A larger company with a well trained, and dedicated in-house staff, that knows what's going on can be a good thing. Their prices are on the high side after the first invoice period ends. They don't use coupon codes but have a decent promo/discounted rate for the initial invoice period.

InMotion has two datacenter locations you can pick from (Herndon, Virginia or Los Angeles, CA) and their loading speeds have been impressive. If you are looking for a host that has been in the business for a long time, that hasn't been sold to EIG, and most likely never will be sold, definitely look into InMotion Hosting.

Read my InMotion Hosting review here.

MDDHosting

MDDHosting is one of my favorite shared hosts simply because when you host your sites with them, you can be sure you're in good hands. And if you're wondering if there's a chance they'd ever be acquired by EIG, here's what MDDHosting's owner has to say:

We've had more than our fair share of generous buyout offers and haven't accepted any. At the end of the day we would never sell to a company that we did not trust 100% to provide the service and support our customers are used to experiencing. That said - I only know of a small hand full of companies that I would trust and none of them could afford us.

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Their service is excellent and it's very apparent that their business is being run by knowledgeable professionals. They love what they do and they'd bend over backwards for their clients. I don't think I could ask for anything more from a host especially at the less than $10 per month price point!

Read my MDDHosting review here.

Namecheap

Namecheap has been in business for many, many years. They're more known as a dependable domain registrar but they've also been providing hosting services for quite some time now.

Namecheap is the exact opposite of how EIG brands operate. Namecheap prioritizes clients, they listen to their customers' concerns, and they are transparent when technical issues arise. If you're looking for a large company that offers cheap hosting but does not and will never treat clients like EIG does, then Namecheap is for you.

There you go, folks. Some solid EIG alternatives. Let me know how things go if you do decide to switch to any of them!

ASP.NET Hosting Note: I've been getting a lot of questions from people leaving Arvixe about recommended ASP.NET hosting providers that are not owned by EIG. I do not personally use Windows hosting plans, but here are some reputable companies (non-EIG) that provide ASP.NET hosting that might meet your requirements: A2 Hosting and LiquidWeb. Talk with them and see if they are a good fit for your website(s). Best of luck everyone!


Important Update: Endurance International Group is now Newfold Digital. Soon after Clearlake Capital Group completed it's acquisition of EIG in early 2021 it announced the formation of Newfold Digital.


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28 responses to “EIG Hosting Alternatives For Those Leaving”

  1. krcodin says:

    ARVIXE IS THE HELL,is the bad. No exist support and arvixe have bad panel.

  2. The One and Only says:

    I am actually considering leaving HG. I recently purchased their Snappy 2000 VPS package and its just horrible. Other hosting companies offer the same power for a lower price, if not better. Thanks, ill keep this article in mind!

  3. Peter Smith says:

    Siteground is good for wordpress. I also use asphostportal for my .net site

  4. HasithaP says:

    Yes, LiquidWeb is very good webhost! Their support , uptime is superb.

    • Owen says:

      They also cost twice as much as a typical web host and have had multiple hacking issues in the past. When they are running properly, they are pretty reliable. However, none of their service justifies a $15/mo tag.

      • janvdr says:

        You get what you pay for and for resellers they are actually 5 bucks cheaper than my previous host. Excellent value!

  5. Janet Ference says:

    This is such a hugely helpful post. Thank you. Arvixe has gone to hell in a handbasket. I love namecheap! I appreciate that I learned about them from you. Cheap. Fast support. Super friendly. And they’ll do the work of migrating cpanel hosting for free (for those of us not tech savvy, this is an amazing service).

  6. arvexed no more says:

    I too have to thank you from the bottom of my heart for this. I signed on with arvixe in early 2012, and they started going downhill before the year was out. I had caught them during a promotion that gave me a really unbeatable rate for the life of the account, however, so I hesitated to leave, especially since every time I looked for a better host, they cost twice as much (I have multiple domains) and/or had all the same complaints (I now realize that was because they were mostly owned by EIG).

    In 2014, after a couple of tech support nightmares that dragged on for months (yes, months), I got as far as moving my domains (to NameSilo, if anyone wonders – cheap, same price year-to-year, privacy, parking and forwarding are included at no extra charge). But then the new host I’d selected completely dropped the ball on the promised free transfer – after a week of canned responses with no actual word on what was holding up the works, I asked for a refund, and reluctantly decided to give arvixe another year.

    It’s been a terrible year, with more and more downtime. I got hacked (possibly my own fault), and when arvixe scanned directories I knew to contain at least two instances of an infected file and told me it was clean, I knew I was on my own to deal with the hacker. And that was all BEFORE they were bought by EIG.

    Since the sale, even attempting to get through to support was a joke. I signed up for their support RSS feed a couple of weeks before I changed hosts, since my site kept going down and that was the only communication that was coming out of their tech support. In that time (about a month), they have performed emergency migrations on 10 servers, emergency maintenance on 15 more servers, service interruptions on 22 servers, plus network interruptions, mysql interruptions, and their ticketing, chat and phone systems have all gone down, sometimes for hours. It’s not unusual for the server crashes to last for 12 hours, and it should be noted that although my site was down for hours at a time, the server I was on was never listed in the feed, so this is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

    Also, my account doesn’t expire until 2016, so I just left my files in place and redirected my nameservers without telling them. When I ftpd into my arvixe home directory a few days later, all of my files were gone. They later reappeared, but believe me, I was extremely grateful that I had already relocated them!

    Based on your reviews, I selected MDDHosting as my new host, and they have been fabulous. A hour and a half after I signed up with them, they had transferred my files. I was initially taken aback when I realized there was no phone support, but the tickets were answered, as you said, always in less than 15 minutes,a nd sometimes in less than 5. Furthermore, I often interacted with the same person as I had before, who actually remembered me (NEVER happened at arvixe!). Also unlike arvixe, the person responding actually read the ticket, knew what they are doing, and both fixed things on their end, and told me what they had done, if I asked, targeting their terminology to my technical understanding level. My site has been very stable, and also consistently (if moderately) faster than it was at arvixe. My sites are on WordPress and they are obviously very familiar with WordPress structure and issues.

    I want to thank you for outing EIG and their subsidiaries, so I understood I didn’t have to surrender to their low standard as the best I could hope for. I also appreciate you commenting on the availability of a month-to-month rate while testing a host. I didn’t know such a thing was possible on budget hosts, and after my experience with arvixe, it made me feel a whole lot safer about checking out a different company. Also thanks for pointing out that paying $2-3/month more can be worth it in hours of site problems and tech support hell saved. When you put it that way, I could see that it was SO true! MDDHosting is worth every penny of $7.50 a month, (and will cost even less when I am ready to trust again, and sign up by the year).

    • arvexed no more says:

      I have to modify my original endorsement of MDDHosting. While they are still a vast improvement over Arvixe, that is a pretty low standard. Initially, I was very impressed with the tech support – I mostly got the same couple of people, they were very knowledgeable, and responses were so fast, I didn’t even mind the lack of phone or chat support. I even had tickets addressed by the owner a couple of times.

      However, they have added a new tier of basic support that is giving me Arvixe flashbacks. The first tier reps seem to think their job is to stall, discourage or dismiss any question they can’t answer, instead of escalating immediately to someone who knows more. This means there may be several rounds (over several hours, or longer) of being very firm that you want your problem addressed before you are delivered to someone who knows what they are doing, which is a waste of time for everyone, not to mention a major squelcher of customer goodwill. Given the size of the company, it’s possible there is only one person doing this. But the first tier support reps are anonymous (unlike the higher tiers), so you never know who you’re dealing with.

      There have also been some technical glitches. While they have all been addressed, they left me with the impression that MDDhosting is not as systematic as they could be in managing accounts and servers. They are also not as transparent about admitting their own errors as I would like to see. Acknowledged errors, I can forgive – we all make them. But when errors are downplayed, acknowledgements are delayed, or excuses are made, I have to wonder whether a host is more concerned with looking good than being good.

      On the plus side, the servers are very fast. Everybody prefers this, but for some sites it is necessary, and I have one of those sites. So for now, I am hanging in there, and hoping what I really want to believe, that I just caught them in the middle of staff and hardware transitions, and my experience with them thus far is not typical. If there was another host that I wanted to try, I’m not sure I’d wait any longer to test this theory, but there isn’t right now. However, I’m sticking to the monthly plan, and at this time, I cannot in good conscience recommend MDDHosting.

      • arvexed no more says:

        Checking back in – the past three months have been pretty quiet. I am very happy with the speedy Litespeed servers. Uptime seems to be pretty good, except for one upstream issue with their server farm. I have resumed referring my clients to MDDHosting. I still have reservations about the first tier tech support issue, but I don’t know of anyone better at this time. I also want to recognize them for running things well enough that I don’t need tech support!

        I’ll update again the next time I have contact with support.

      • Daniel Kamman says:

        I signed up with MDD about a week ago, transferring a client’s WordPress website from an EIG host whose server was having problems. Two MDD support people did a great job quickly helping me to solve transfer problems that appeared to be due to the EIG server problems. You can see more details in my comment of a few minutes ago at https://www.reviewhell.com/reviews/mddhosting-review/

  7. Sonal Sinha says:

    If someone needs VPS and Dedicated servers then do add WiredTree and KnownHost into this list..They are also non EIG and superb…

  8. Adrian Hedley says:

    i just signed up to winhost after being let down by arvixe many times in the past weeks. the issues i had are. dns issues, slow response time, ftp not working and finally my control panel was down and a client website was down and told me the engineers are working on it and will be available in a few hours time, after being already down for 5 hours. that is all the customer support could say after 20 minutes waiting to get to them!!! beware of arvixe

  9. J says:

    I can also confirm as a former Site5 staffer that some of the support team from Site5 have moved on to some of these hosts. I can’t say who, or where (well I could, but I’m not comfortable with it), but if the staff was what made you like Site5 be aware that they are still around in the industry, and I recognise a lot of the new hosts they are with in this list.

    • janvdr says:

      J while the original staff worked at site5 your service was very good! It was a great experience until these EIG guys took over. Now the inmates run the asylum. SAD. But thank you guys.

  10. janvdr says:

    I am missing Liquidweb on your list, the support of these guys rocks! And they have fast SSD servers. I changed from Site5.com to them, And i have experienced the most dedicated support since i got on the internet. But that´s only since 1987 … yes nineteen hundred and eighty seven

  11. nsnbc international says:

    Thanks. Would you know any hosts based in Switzerland to avoid US and EU legislation? Sadly, as a newspaper we increasingly “have to” worry that legislation with regard to media in the US / EU is becoming as restrictive as in, let’s say, Russia, China, etc.. of course more politely, not so overtly, but who cares whether or not the who censors you does it politely or not.

  12. Toppa Yposition says:

    Just throwing a hello and a big thank you for your list NON- EIG web hosting companies. I will also never buy from GodAddy, and I wonder if EIG has any stock in that loser company. It’s a real tit on a bull these days.

  13. C K Reed says:

    We just got rump-ended by EIG (our whole account supposedly moving from IXweb to Site5, but no one at either company can tell us how to access our account now). I have about 80 websites that I host on different hosts for IP variety and location. I will be checking out the Ann Arbor hosting above (Go Blue!).

    Also, one company that is not on this list and I highly recommend checking out and possibly reviewing is called NetFronts. When I started with them back in 2003-ish, they were in Utah I think, but now in Colorado. NEVER EVER had a problem with them. Consistent pricing. Great uptime. And support requests often answered in minutes! I hope A2hosting is just as good because I like what I read about them also.

  14. Big Bob says:

    I got the same bad deal. Moved from IX to site5. Could not access site5 cpanel and my email quit working. Went to http:transfer-to-site5.com found a link to chat with support. They reset my password to access the customer area of site5. The user name is same as you used at IX. To get email working they had to update the DNS MX record for my domain. I had to change the incoming/outgoing servers in my email client. The whole process is rotten, i feel used, and i am going to dump site5 and eig for one of the hosts listed here.

  15. Mark says:

    At least I wasn’t the only one moved from IX to Site5 BS, had the exact same problems and jumped ship to dyn and DO…

  16. Tom says:

    I just got totally screwed by IXwebHosting “migration” to Verio.com. My sites have been down now going on five days. Apparently my files didn’t get transferred. My email is crippled. My support ticket is gathering dust, only so I can have some guy from India do half assed work and close it out.

  17. arvexed no more says:

    I just want to update my earlier comments from 2015-2016. I am still with MDDhosting, and have moved numerous clients who were on bad EIG hosts or GoDaddy over to them. They continuously invest in improving and updating their infrastructure, which is all too rare in shared hosting. Support (which I rarely need) continues to be extremely prompt, and with the same handful of people, including the owner. They have also been responsive to some issues I raised. The only thing I can think of to complain about is that their “customizable” pricing plan isn’t very transparent to people who are comparison shopping, which is only hurting them, since their prices are actually quite reasonable.

  18. Leon DeBoer says:

    Just a warning, the once-excellent Bluehost is owned by EIG now, too, and far and away the worst hosting support I’ve ever experienced (And I’ve been with Verio and PacBell!) Horribly stupid support argues with you instead of answering your issues. If you have any actual knowledge, and catch them lying to you, they’ll actually scream at you and hang up on you. That’s actually how they treat paying customers. For a real laugh, try asking to escalate the issue to a manager — SOP at any reputable webhost where the front-line support can’t resolve an issue. At Bluehost? They don’t care. They’ll tell you to change webhosts if you don’t like it. So I did.

  19. Grant says:

    Knownhost has been excellent

    Moved my vps resellers accounts over to them after 10+ years with A Small Orange. – wasn’t getting the reliably or service anymore. KH have been great!

  20. John says:

    Ha! I’m here right now because I had an issue with ASO tech support, which was awfully reminiscent of the issue I had with bluehost’s tech support years before when I found out they were bought by EIG.

    Funny how this tech support thing is how you can always tell EIG bought your hosting service.

  21. Scott Cohen says:

    5 hours and no response after getting this email. Terrible customer experience
    Good Day. With regards to your ongoing concern, currently we are still fixing the issue
    to your directory and will provide you follow up updated. Should you have any further question, please let us know. Regards, Bluehost Tier 1 Web Advisor
    ref

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