I first learned about this when a WebHostingTalk member created a thread informing us of the apparent Arvixe buyout. I’m shocked, although not so much because for some reason I felt this was gonna happen. Let’s call it gut feeling or whatever because I have no solid basis for it, really. Anyway…
According to EIG’s release, they recently acquired Arvixe last October 31, 2014. Quoted from their release:
In addition, on October 31, 2014, the company acquired the assets of Arvixe, LLC. The total consideration for these acquisitions is expected to be approximately $77 million.
“Why is this bad news?”
Because when EIG buys hosts, they turn to crap. Look at what happened to HostGator. They used to be an excellent host, but things went out of control in 2012 when EIG acquired them. Now they’re nothing but a sh**ty host with frequent downtimes and horrible support.
Read my HostGator review to find out just how bad of a hosting provider they currently are.
EIG’s acquisition of Arvixe could turn a good company into something you’d never want to deal with. I’m currently testing Arvixe’s service and I’ve been with them for well over a month now as of this post. So far things have been good enough — they aren’t as impressive as I expected but they’re better than many other hosts out there. Now that EIG has bought Arvixe, I wouldn’t be surprised if things went downhill sooner rather than later. In any case, I’m hopeful that they could at least retain some of the qualities that make them good.
“I’m an Arvixe client! Should I switch hosts?”
If I were hosting important, mission-critical websites on Arvixe, I would definitely move to another host right away (EIG Hosting Alternatives). Make sure it is not one of the other 60 web hosts EIG owns or else you’ll be right back where you started. There’s no telling when a host will go down hill when EIG lays even just a finger on it.
On the other hand, if you’re hosting a hobbyist site or any site that could afford some downtimes/slowness then I guess it wouldn’t hurt to keep your Arvixe account until things really go south (well, it has happened – see the Arvixe/EIG Updates section below).
What you should do right now is TAKE BACK UPS, regardless if you’re hosting something important on Arvixe’s servers or not. You never know when you’ll need them, most especially when you’re hosting with an EIG-owned web host!
Arvixe/EIG Updates
Let the Summer 2015 Server Migrations Begin
After about 8 months of being owned by EIG Arvixe began migrating servers on June 24th, 2015. The migration process has not been pretty (to say the least) for customers, and can’t be easy for Arvixe system administrators/support staff being plagued with performance problems and multiple downtimes across a large number of servers post migration.
Arvixe moving to EIG Datacenter?
Arvand’s (founder of Arvixe) response – While this migration is part of the transition, there are not going to be any technology alterations. Therefore, in essence, the migration is similar to what Arvixe has done several times in the last few years from one DC to another.
It is very easy to see the value of the Arvixe brand and everyone on the Arvixe side is on board to make sure the migration is a success. EIG has placed very capable individuals to support the migration and we don’t foresee any problems beyond the general issues that have come up in the past due to migrations.
Is it typical for shared servers to be on/off for over a week?
Okapi, Arvixe server has been on and off for the past 8 days, mostly OFF. Interestingly, I don’t see too many people concerned about this on their forums. The standard tech response is that they are experiencing spikes and are aware of it. 8 days of this unpredictability!
Yesterday, I was told that our site has been corrupted and would be restored via a backup. After it was loaded, it took 2 minutes to load the page and 2 minutes to do any admin work, and NOW, no connection at all.
Arvixe is the WORST ISP I have ever had!
I moved all my sites to Arvixe a couple of months ago. Their Starfish server has now been down the past 4 DAYS! They keep telling me that their tech is working on it and to have patience. I HAVE RUN OUT OF PATIENCE!!! I am done. As soon as I can, I am getting my sites off of their servers and never coming back. WTF??? Are they running this company out of someones basement???
My site on Arvixe down for 4 days
Everything was fine for about a month and a half but the last week has been absolutely disastrous as my simple website has been down for 4 days with with random errors. This is my first time using a web host and I couldn’t be more disappointed. I’m making this thread to both warn others about Arvixe and to also get help in finding a new host. I was looking into Hostgator when I found your forum and reading these threads about them being owned by the same company Arvixe is owned by, I’m so lucky I did find your forum.
Then in the final days of Summer, the Dallas111 server disaster happened where all data on the server was lost and they had no backups. Read this WebHostingTalk thread: Arvixe Bites the Dust!!!
I had links to Arvixe community forum discussions that were related to the migrations below, but the forum went into “maintenance mode” on October 7th, 2015 and has since been completely taken down (damage/reputation control?). If they put the forum back online and don’t remove those threads I’ll put the links to them back up.
- Arvixe community forum thread: huge problems on arvixe we need explanations
- Arvixe community forum thread: Is it common for our server to be down for hours??
- Arvixe community forum thread: Hey Arvixe this is a spectacular s**t-show!!!
- Arvixe community forum thread: Datacenter meltdown list of affected servers and possible causes
- Arvixe community forum thread: Jellyfish server problems loading times
Original Arvixe Employees Let Go and The Arvixe Brand is Managed by A Small Orange
A former Arvixe staff member says that many original Arvixe employees are being terminated at the end of September. From a WebHostingTalk thread titled, Goodbye old Arvixe.
Supposedly 100+ were let go and about 8 were moved under the EIG umbrella.
I hope that this post can perhaps be referenced on future acquisitions because EIG really does push the current leadership to indicate that everything will remain the same. In the case of Arvixe I have heard they even really pushed current staff to continue to push through the stressful work environments caused by the migrations where phone technicians may be answering 80-100 phone calls a day where the expectation was “every issue has to be resolved on the spot” because if an issue made it to ticket, you could count on that customer never receiving an answer let alone a resolution.
The promise of an email with a job offer at the end of the “Arvixe” acquisition is what kept most staff going, to find out that really no one met the “EIG criteria”, and that everyone was being let go…. that really just doesn’t set well with me that friends of mine endured this.
Arvixe staff. Thank you for your service in the industry. We wish you the best.
October 2nd, 2015: An inside look into Arvixe posted to WHT, with confirmation of lay offs, that A Small Orange (ASO) manages Arvixe, and so much more. For Arvixe customers that have been wondering what has been going on read this!
My last day at Arvixe was September 30th. Layoffs were announced on the 26th. There was no transition at all.
Starting on Monday people began to realize that no one was actively replacing laid off staff because there was no one to replace them with.
The ticket count kept on climbing. Some staff went to work double-time trying to at least do something for the huge number of problems our customers were facing and others were demoralized and did next to nothing their last days.
On my last day there was no server monitoring staff left. If a server went down then a shift manager had to fix it, but most of the shift managers were in training with EIG except for those who were also getting laid off. Servers failed and little could be done.
The only people who checked the forums for customer problems were laid off as well. The main Priority Support person was laid off. He was also the most experienced support tech at Arvixe. Most of the QA department kept their jobs but they were more of an internal disciplinary wing with only one person as an exceptional tech and one person as a really bad tech.
Arvixe Managers kept their jobs. Not Shift Managers, Shift Managers there were like lead support techs. Now ASO has more customers to support, less support techs but twice the managers.
If you have a ticket open at Arvixe it will not get a response for 4 days to 1 week. The best bet is to get on twitter or facebook and contact Arvixe Support that way with your ticket number. Then the social media monitor will contact a shift manager, the shift manager will then get a support tech to stop what they are doing and work on a ticket. I was stopped in the middle of tickets constantly to work on a social media ticket.
The core cause of this is a question we speculated about. Arvixe had shared hosting on two server images of 96GB RAM each. The original plan was to divide the customers on each server by 4 and place each quarter on one 32GB RAM image. That was akin to moving 1 lot of customers to a 128GB of RAM but would mean less tickets per failure should a failure happen.
But a step was missed. Instead they migrated all 96GB customers to 32GB. Then to make up for that foul-up, They provisioned more servers but the future to-be-laid-off support staff had no access to the new servers. Then, the new servers had no, or little functioning backups. One went down and was down for 1 week or more.
Then our backup software had a bug in it. This was not Arvixe’s fault. But this would have been something manageable had the migration not shoe-horned 96 into 32 and support staff could not restore a working mysql database. Only one person could do this and he was not around 24/7. That added to the ticket count.
Then EIG and ASO would do poorly constructed commands. One took out part of a reseller server, Then support had to spend time recovering that. Before EIG if someone would do a command like that, they would be fired. After EIG we were told “who did it or what was done is not important”. That was how we deduced a very high up person at ASO/EIG had done that command.
An ASO / EIG person also “hacked” our customer database and changed all customer names to one name of someone in Pakistan. Again, all we knew was that it was internal and it was “not important” and “not a hack”, even though ASO people were the first to proclaim it a hack.
Arvixe’s problems are now it is management heavy and light on support.
They moved servers from more resources to less resources.
ASO/EIG staff who do clumsy commands that destroy things.Thats what happened.
October 5th, 2015: There are so many customer support tickets open now (the number keeps on rising too) that social media channels are recommended to try and get a reply.
From WHT posts
Arvixe customer: “Arvixe’s toll free support number has been busy for the last 8 hours I’ve been trying to call it. All my sites are down, including email and the control panel for the entire host server. Opened a support ticket hours ago and no response. Tried Chat and I’m 87th in the queue with a 2 hour wait time. I’m just sorry I didn’t hear about the sellout until a day after the migration where all my data was lost. As soon as I get a backup of my data I’m out. I’m sure hundreds of people are right behind me.”
Helpful former Arvixe employee’s advice: “Try twitter. You are more likely to get a response via social media than their support system. Last I heard they had 5600+ tickets open. When I was there and fulled staffed if we had 200 tickets open it meant that about 20 were older than 24 hours. Then 200 tickets open was bad, now there would be praises and bonuses given out if only 200 were open.”
Twitter Poll – Arvixe and Backups
24 hour Twitter poll “Leaving Arvixe? Have a backup so you can move?” results:
92 votes were cast, 47% have their backup, and 53% can’t get their backup.
Leaving Arvixe? Read about these Arvixe/EIG Alternatives https://t.co/CjTBgDcxQ5 Have a backup so you can move?
— Review Hell (@HostReviewHell) November 5, 2015
Looking to leave Arvixe?
Check out these Arvixe (EIG) web hosting alternatives!
June 28th, 2016: I haven’t updated this post in several months but things are still not going well over in Arvixe land. There has been a multitude of complaints from Arvixe customers since last Fall. Search Twitter and WebHostingTalk about Arvixe and it’s the same narrative of disappointment with them over and over again.
January 27th, 2017: Around 90 customer support jobs are going to be cut at the A Small Orange (Arvixe & Site5) Austin, TX office – 2017 Layoffs at A Small Orange (Arvixe) in Austin, TX.
August 2nd, 2017: Arvixe is considered to be one of EIG’s “non-strategic brands”. The plan for this group of hosting brands is to raise prices, streamline operations, and expect a higher level of churn. Arvixe’s prices originally started at $4/month and on June 1st, 2017 they increased their prices and now their starting price is $7/month, a 75% increase.
ASO is indeed decent these days, but the problem with EIG is that the s**t can hit the fan in half a second; that’s why, despite wanting to hope, I see very unlikely that Arvixe will remaing good as they were before acquisition.
Better grab a back-up of your Arvixe websites and move elsewhere before s**t really happens.
what..is this for real??? i just transferred to Arvixe from hostgator!! -_____-FML
That’s s**t luck, I feel for you. u.u
In my opinion, despite the hassle, I think you should transfer again – for the sake of your website/s – to either MDDHosting or BigScoots.
+1 Mddhosting
To answer the question about switching hosts: Yes. The overall expectations of any EIG owned host is low. Arvixe was good when I worked for them. Lately, it seemed to have slacked. I’m in the process of building a new Windows server to provide Shared hosting on. If you can hold on for a week or so, I’ll have hosting for you. I will provide better, more reliable and better managed Windows based Shared hosting.
Wtf… i guess it`s time to pack up & leave before things start going wrong
My Hostgator renewal is coming up so I finally decided to switch. Arvixe was my first choice and after talking to their reps (Nov. 3rd) I almost joined. One of my requirements was that the company I switch to is NOT owned by EIG, yet the reps failed to tell me they were sold a few days ago. I got lucky and finally went with another host which makes me very happy right now. No more EIG in my life :)
EIG has acquired Arvixe? Wow… It is bad news… Time to move now… This is my last month contract with them.
Run! This is definitely a bad news. I was hosting with webhost4life when they got bought out by EIG. It was a nightmare! Do NOT wait until they start their migrations.
Can’t we all just wait until we get an email saying they are upgrading us to better hardware?
Well it is happening right now. They started migration and after that, contantly slow response time and 60% uptime. No real support. Rude staff. No answer. Multiple complaints. Thanks for informing, Im moving after 6 years of good hosting.
Legally what can we do to fight EIG?
If LinkedIn is being sue for sending too many emails for sure something could be done with destroying web hosting companies and having people unemployed for no good reason.
Also this should also fail under Antitrust.
Look at this case:
http://www.justice.gov/atr/file/779371/download
I also want a refund. If anyone knows how to go about this, please let me know!
1.5 hour phone wait on Oct 12th, 2 hour phone wait on the 14th. Rudest tech guy I have ever talked to in my life – definitely not from the same team that gave impeccable support in the past. Their priority support number now redirects to the main line, and they have now removed their phone numbers from their website completely. Run like hell!
Arvixe is a scam. They don’t respond back to their customers. And they fired all of their staff with no warning even though they were promised jobs after the acquisition. Terrible company. Arvand Sabetian and Michael Carr should be ashamed.
You can take down those forum thread links to Arvixe now. The forum doesn’t appear to exist anymore. Small wonder.
Damage/reputation control…
Which is why everyone needs to get on Twitter, they can’t control their brand there. It’s all going to be out in the open for everyone to see.
They’re also trying to spam Twitter with fake reviews praising them.
It’s really a shame. I have – for a short period of time more, two VPS with Arvixe, they expire in November I picked them up two and three years ago respectively on Black Friday sales. Support was always great, and there was a good community on their discussion boards. They don’t have to do much to support VPS’s, there weren’t a lot of help I required. So last week, all of a sudden my e-mails couldn’t get through to some locations because it seems they put my e-mail server on a dynamic rather than a static IP address. Then when I log into WHM to look at it, I find that I am now on a TRIAL version of cpanel. I pulled one off of auto-renew just in time, I’m going to have to see if I can pull back the credit card payment on the other. Two months ago I would have been a customer for another year without question.
You have one job guys, you flunked it.
Been with them since 2010 or there abouts and I can definitely confirm the statements being made in the piece above, about their lack of customer service, their support and the way they have been treating customers. This year has been a nightmare, all thanks to EIG.
When I saw the warnings about EIG this summer I was skeptical, I didn’t think any company could actually be that much of a failure and still stay in business, but the proof is here for all to see.
EIG has run Arvixe into the dirt, and they’re continuing to do it kill it with each passing day.
If I was a suspicious person I would start to think EIG is nothing more than a whipping boy designed to buy up companies and run them into the ground at high speed. This would be a perfect tool for a competitor, right? Buy up all the competition and destroy the business from the inside out, eventually they have to come to your “real” brand.
I wonder if there are any suspicious links between EIG and another tech giant?
Needless to say, I’m looking for another company after five years, Arvixe can suck my fat one.
I have had the same problems as the above, and have just moved everything to another provider.
What is happening here – are (the remaining) management shorting shares?
Moved off of Arvixe today after being down and getting no response from support. I have had sites hosted with various providers since the late 1990’s. This is not the first time I have switched hosts, but this is the first time I have had the host not respond at all. Completely lost two days of business. Apparently they were recently purchased by EIG. I will do my homework and make sure future hosts I use are not part of EIG.
EIG is bad news, as soon as they took over there was no response from Support about anything, and after 2 weeks they replied to something not even close to what I was asking. Arvixe used to be great, they had great support and I used to recommend it to people. But they definitively are at the bottom of the barrel now. I have now left and encourage others to do so. Pretty sure the E in EIG stands for Evil.
E-mail I just sent to Arvixe:
My VPS hosting account comes up for renewal on 11/29/2015. I will not be renewing it. I have already moved all the sites elsewhere, you can close it down on the 29th.
I will be maintaining my billing account here since I have domains registered with you, you have a good price on them, and that part of your business still seems to be operating properly.
I do not take the decision to change providers lightly, I have had VPS accounts with you for 3 years, and up until August have been extremely happy with your response and the operation of the company in general.
The last four months have seen this go straight downhill, as I am sure you are aware. Over the last six months I have seen messages that I am on a trial version of cpanel, I am no longer able to send e-mail to various locations due to changes with the server, and have had 6 separate instances where the server was down for significant amounts of time. Meanwhile your support has become non-existent, your community board has been pulled down, and your reputation is heading down with it.
I’m really sorry about this, again, I really enjoyed being with you folks before the EIG buyout.
In any case, you have lost a customer, and I wanted to let you know why. I made sure my new host is not EIG owned, and will be sure to be a lot quicker about moving if I hear it becomes one.
So you tell me about how bad Arvixe is and how EIG is terrible…and supply no alternatives to where I can go? This is hell on earth! You just make the problem worse.
There are a couple of links on this page to a post about Arvixe/EIG alternatives https://www.reviewhell.com/blog/eig-arvixe-alternatives/
ARVIXE SUCKS!!!
I wish I had read this article a few months ago. I’ve been with Arvixe for 9 years. They used to be awesome as any internet search will attest but man-o-man do they suck horribly now. The server my 8 web sites are on has now been down for over 2 weeks with NO EXPLANATION. They have removed all support numbers from their website and when I call the old numbers I had it says they are not available at this time. And here’s the real kicker, I can’t even get at my DNS records to point my sites to a new location. My customers are simply out of business. EFF ME!
This company has not merely gotten worse, it’s toast. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE EVER PUT ANYTHING ON ARVIXE…EVER They are not long for this world.
My main business site and all of it’s sub domains are have been down for 6 days now. I have submitted many tickets and called many times. I only get a call center that tells me “your ticket has been escalated” but yet nothing has been done. Arvixe is the WORST company ever. I will be blogging and posting everywhere about how bad this place really is. No one should have to put up with service like this. I will be taking my business elsewhere and hopefully warning potential clients of the problems.
I moved one site out last year but planned to move the rest early this year. I just tried to start this process, got most of my replacement services set up, and now I find that I can’t access my Arvixe servers by FTP at all. Nothing I try works. Some of my sites won’t perform a backup at all, but none of them can be accessed by FTP even if they do backup. This might be a little “tin-foil” but I’ve heard from other disgruntled customers who are also trying to leave that Arvixe is deliberately blocking attempts to retrieve data, they are actively stopping customers from moving their sites.
All of this is happening because their services are facing yet another massive collapse in stability while tickets are still going unanswered for MONTHS. I’ve been trying to rectify a simple site restore with them for MORE THAN 3 MONTHS. They occasionally update the ticket saying it’s been moved to someone else, then I hear nothing for another week. I respond to it again with a demand that it be looked into and there’s silence. Then another week later I get another reply telling me it’s been moved to another ticket…
I can only deduce that they’re trying to make it look like they’re a functional team by moving tickets around rather than actually fixing problems.
This is a warning to all, if you have any services hosted with Arvixe, even if your sites are functional right now, MOVE OUT. Do not stay with Arvixe. These people are verging on the criminal and you will regret remaining with them.
Been moving my sites this week after I found one of my blogs had all the media files removed. The upload folders were just emptied out without warning by someone at Arvixe. Successfully moved another of my sites this week, but tried another today and everything for the last 2 years is gone. Looks like they’d been diverting everything to another server, I have no idea where all that content for the last 2 years has gone and of course Arvixe is not responding at all.
Two years of work is just gone, no explanation, no recourse, no response from failing Arvixe.
This is a criminal company, they’re frauds, they’re destroying peoples livelihoods.
Heed the warnings people, Arvixe is a criminal enterprise.
I’ve been using Arvixe for some years but it has lately becoming pure shit. I wonder if it’s related to what is said here or not, as this is some years old. Anyway, they don’t even bother to reply to the support tickets which is just mind-blowing and I have never ever seen something so bad as this.
On top of that, all of my sites kept getting “hacked” in the way that they kept getting infected by random russian hackers who used my sites to hide their phissing and all. You could think it was my fault (I myself wasn’t too sure if that was the case!) but since I changed hosting, this has stopped, which led me to believe the backdoor was actually on their servers.
Some time ago all my sites got deleted too and I never got an explanation why (my best guess is the script of some hacker deleted the wrong files) and luckily I could recover it, but this can give you an idea of how reliable this is.
If you are reading this, considering to sign up for this, please, don’t.