BlueHost vs Arvixe: Which One Should You Use?

Trying to choose the right web hosting company is an important decision – but it can be confusing with all the options and plans out there. Narrow your choices with this head-to-head comparison between Bluehost and Arvixe.

Both Bluehost and Arvixe are long-time web hosting companies. BlueHost has been in business since 1996. Arvixe was founded in 2003. BlueHost is well established with more than 2 million sites hosted on its servers. Arvixe is not as well-known, but it is a fast growing web hosting company.

Bluehost and Arvixe both provide shared hosting, WordPress hosting, and VPS and dedicated server plans. BlueHost’s VPS and dedicated server options are fairly recent additions. BlueHost is Linux-based, while Arvixe provides Linux and Windows options on all its plans.

BlueHost has been named a “Best Affordable Hosting,” and “Best Value Host.” Arvixe was a PCMag Editor’s Choice in 2015 and has been named by Inc.com as one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S.

In 2010, BlueHost was bought by Endurance International Group (EIG), and EIG purchased Arvixe in 2014. EIG owns numerous hosting companies but permits them to operate under their own original names.

EIG companies are not clones of each other. However, there are many similarities between them. If you have had issues with one EIG company, you may find the same problems with another.

Bluehost vs. Arvixe: Uptime and Reliability

Uptime. Although BlueHost’s uptime stats show it regularly to be 99.9% or better, they do not have an uptime guarantee. Arvixe has a 99.9% guarantee, and they provide a free month’s refund if a monthly average falls below that percentage.

Performance. BlueHost builds its own servers and uses 16-core AMD Opterons. Arvixe servers use the latest Xeons, and customer data is stored on 15K raid ten drives. Arvixe’s databases and email servers are on SSD storage.

Testing a site hosted on BlueHost yielded a load time of 2.37s, faster than 65% of the sites tested on Pingdom. A comparable Arvixe site produced a load time of 1.05s, faster than 89% of the sites tested.

Reliability. BlueHost’s data center is located in Utah. The data center is powered and cooled with redundant sources, and diesel backups are available for emergencies. BlueHost does no mirrored or redundant backups of data, except for their Cloud Plans, and backups are kept for a maximum of 30 days.

Arvixe has data centers in North America (Dallas, Texas), Europe (Amsterdam), and (Hong Kong). All the data centers are fully redundant, with multiple power and cooling options. The data centers are monitored onsite for security and reliability.

Opinion

For both Bluehost and Arvixe, reliability is excellent, and uptime is good. However, the lack of an uptime guarantee for BlueHost could be a concern. Tests show Arvixe sites to be significantly faster in response and load times.

Compare Key Features

Note: “Unlimited” and “unmetered” are popular terms used by web hosting companies when describing features. It does not, however, mean “use all you want.” The terms refer to what hosting companies “deem reasonable usage.”

Domain Registration. Both hosts are domain registrars. BlueHost also provides a free year of domain registration for new accounts. Arvixe offers a free domain for as long as you have the plan, and it offers a free transfer if you already have a domain.

Website Builder. BlueHost provides the drag-and-drop Weebly Basic, which is limited to 5 webpages. Basic is free of charge. For more features and pages, an upgrade to Weebly Premium is available for an additional fee. Arvixe plans come with RvSiteBuilder, a feature-rich builder with a WSYWIG editor and over 600 web templates.

Databases. Bluehost and Arvixe offer unlimited MySQL databases. Arvixe also supports PostgreSQL databases. Email Accounts. Bluehost and Arvixe both provide unlimited email accounts and email forwarding.

WordPress Hosting. Bluehost and Arvixe both offer managed WordPress plans. Managed WordPress plans are hosted on optimized servers featuring caching and extra security to enhance performance and stability.

The big advantage of managed WordPress hosting is that backups of your site, and updating WordPress and its plug-ins, are done for you, allowing you to focus on your site’s content.

Managed WordPress plans usually cost more than a standard shared plan. However, Arvixe’s shared hosting and managed WordPress plans are priced the same.

eCommerce Solution. Bluehost provides free shopping carts through its control panel, such as Magento, PrestaShop, ZenCart, and others. Arvixe also supports some free and commercial eCommerce options, many with 24/7 support and automatic installation.

Backups. BlueHost creates daily, weekly, and monthly backups. They also offer SiteBackup Pro, which does a backup and restore at the file level, for an additional fee. SiteBackup Pro is free with the Business Pro shared tier.

Arvixe does daily snapshot backups of its servers. Regardless of the backup policies, it is recommended that manual backups be made and stored off-site for additional security and reliability.

Hosting Security. To fight malware, BlueHost provides the basic SiteLock service free on its lower tiers, and SiteLock Pro free on its higher tier plans. BlueHost has internal processes in place to protect against DDoS attacks.

Arvixe scans and proactively acts against DDoS threats, as well as providing protection against brute force attacks. Arvixe plans come with SpamAssassin and Spamhaus filtering for email.

All Bluehost plans have a free Shared SSL certificate. BlueHost’s top shared plan, Business Pro, comes with a free Private SSL certificate.

Arvixe used to provide free shared SSL for its Linux shared hosting plans, but it seems that free SSLs are no longer available for Linux or Windows plans, except the Business plans, which have free SSL as long as you have a plan with Arvixe.

Control Panel. Arvixe uses the industry standard cPanel. BlueHost also uses cPanel but has extensively modified the interface.

Affiliate and Reseller Programs. Arvixe has a reseller program. BlueHost also has a reseller program, but it partners with third-party ResellerClub for the service. BlueHost’s affiliate program pays $65 per referral. Arvixe’s affiliate program pays from $70 to $135 per referral, depending on how many referrals you make per month.

Extras. BlueHost has $150 in ad credits; Arvixe comes with $200 in ad credits. Both will migrate an established website if you have one elsewhere. BlueHost charges a premium for the migration service, while Arvixe provides one migration free of charge.

Opinion

Both hosting companies provide premium features, with many “unlimited” options, at budget hosting prices. Arvixe does have an edge with a more robust website builder, a standard cPanel, and support for PostgreSQL and Windows.

Hosting Plans & Pricing

Note: Due to huge competition, promotional pricing is a common practice with web hosting companies. Promo prices are typically limited to the first term of service, so signing up for a longer term will yield higher savings. Even without promos, signing up for longer terms of service usually equates to a break in pricing. The prices below are listed on the host websites at the time of this comparison.

BlueHost

Shared Hosting. BlueHost offers three tiers of shared hosting plans. Basic allows one site, with 50 GB of storage, and unlimited bandwidth and email accounts, for the promo price of $3.95.

Plus, at $6.95 per month, allows up to 10 sites, and the storage is raised to 150 GB. A CDN is also part of the Plus Plan.

The Business Pro, at $14.95 per month, offers unlimited sites, as well as unlimited bandwidth, storage, and email accounts.

A CDN, Private SSL, dedicated IP, and Site Backup Pro is included in this top tier plan. BlueHost’s plans also come with free domain registration for one year.

BlueHost’s offers three scalable Cloud plans for an additional fee, which mirrors your data in three places for reliability and faster load times.

Managed WordPress Hosting. BlueHost has four managed WordPress plans based on VPS technology, so there are fewer websites per server.

The smallest plan, blogger, at $12.95 per month, is limited to 100 million visits, 30 GB of storage and five sites. The top plan, enterprise, priced at $85 per month, has 240 GB of storage, unlimited bandwidth, and 30 sites. The other two, professional at $37.50, and business at $60 fall in between.

All plans have free CDN and SiteLock (the bottom two tiers have SiteLock Pro, business has SiteLock Premium, and the top tier provides SiteLock Enterprise).

Arvixe

Shared Hosting. Arvixe offers four shared plans – two in PersonalClass and two in BusinessClass. For speedier load and response times for your clientele, you have the option of choosing the U.S., Europe, or Asian data centers at checkout.

Both Personal and Business offer unlimited space, bandwidth, emails, and databases. PersonalClass is $4 per month; BusinessClass is $22 per month; PersonalClassPro is $7 per month; and BusinessClassPro is $35 per month.

The Pro tiers allow an unlimited number of sites, while the lower tiers only allow six.

The difference between PersonalClass and BusinessClass is that BusinessClass has fewer users on the server – basically shared hosting with VPS features.

The ASP (Windows) option runs a few dollars more for each plan and tier. Arvixe’s shared plans provide for unlimited MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. Also, BusinessClass plans have a free SSL certificate for as long as the site is hosted with Arvixe.

Managed WordPress Hosting. Arvixe offers managed WordPress plans that start at $4 per month, the same as the shared hosting plans. Unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, and an unlimited number of sites comes with all the plans.

The WordPress sites are easily scaled from shared to VPS and dedicated hosting, though Arvixe’s pricing goes up for the VPS or dedicated servers.

VPS and Dedicated Plans: BlueHost has four VPS plans. BlueHost’s $14.99 per month standard VPS tier would be suitable for an individual or small business that needed slightly more performance than a shared plan would allow.

Arvixe offers two each in Linux and Windows. Arvixe plans are $40 and $70 per month for the Linux option. The two Windows VPS tiers are $60 and $100 per month.

BlueHost’s top VPS plan is only $59.99 per month, but it is limited to 4 TB of bandwidth, while all four Arvixe plans have unlimited bandwidth, and they come with a free SSL certificate for as long as you have the plan.

BlueHost has three dedicated tiers, allowing 3, 4, and 5 IPs, respectively. They are priced at $74.99, $99.99, and $124.99 per month. Depending on the configuration, the six single processor dedicated server tiers from Arvixe are priced from $128.70 per month to $227.50 per month.

For those needing more performance, Arvixe has two multi-processor tiers priced at $357.30 per month. Arvixe also offers cloud options, starting at $108 per month. Though more expensive than BlueHost, the Arvixe plans are fully managed.

Money-Back Guarantee: BlueHost has the industry standard 30-day guarantee. Arvixe has a longer 60-day guarantee. If you have the free domain registration on BlueHost or Arvixe, they will withhold a domain registration fee from any refund, and you will keep the domain name.

Opinion

Arvixe’s prices are higher than BlueHost’s, but the lower tiers have more features than, the lower tiers on BlueHost. Arvixe has a longer money-back guarantee and offers Windows plans for those that need it.

Ease of Use

Control Panel. BlueHost uses cPanel, but with a modified interface, so regular cPanel users will have some adjustments to make. Arvixe uses the regular user-friendly, icon-based cPanel.

One-click Installer. BlueHost uses the MOJO Marketplace one-click installer for installing nearly one hundred applications easily. Arvixe uses Softaculous as the one-click installer for hundreds of applications.

Website Navigation. Both BlueHost’s and Arvixe’s sites provide the data you need to choose a plan, with helpful comparison charts for comparing tiers in their plans. Both are clean, uncluttered, and user-friendly.

Opinion

Both Bluehost and Arvixe have one-click installers, use cPanel (though modified in BlueHost’s case), and have user-friendly websites. Both are user-friendly and are equally easy to use.

Technical and Customer Support

Based on customer reviews, this is one area where BlueHost is lacking. Arvixe had a stellar reputation for customer support. However, since the EIG buyout, customer service has suffered, according to customer reviews. It still rates above average.

Bluehost and Arvixe both have email and live chat 24/7. BluHost’s phone support is 24/7 as well, while Arvixe’s phone service is limited to office hours, Monday through Friday. Both have an extensive knowledge base with tutorials and videos. BlueHost has a blog and a forum; Arvixe has an active blog.

Opinion

Both Bluehost and Arvixe provide multiple methods of contact. Even though Arvixe’s reputation has suffered lately, it still gets more positive reviews for customer service and support than BlueHost.

User Reviews

Note: Usually reviews are posted by those who are passionate, so most customers who post reviews are either strongly negative or strongly positive. For that reason, you should never use customer reviews as your main reason for choosing a host. However, if there is a common complaint from many users, it may be something to consider.

Negative Reviews for Bluehost and Arvixe

BlueHost. Negative reviews for BlueHost are almost all related to support. Long wait times, having to create repeated tickets for the same issue, and even rudeness, are common complaints.

Arvixe. Until recently, there were few negative reviews of Arvixe. Lately, some reviews are concerned about poor customer service and long wait times.

Positive Reviews for Bluehost and Arvixe

BlueHost. Most positive reviews from customers of Bluehost concern happiness with the prices and plan features provided.

Arvixe. Arvixe gets high marks from its customers for making so many features available at such a budget price. Windows users are pleased to find hosting for them at an affordable price.

Opinion

Overall, even with recent negative customer support reviews, Arvixe gets high marks from its customers. BlueHost, too, except for a large number of customer support complaints, is well-liked.

BlueHost vs. Arvixe: Which hosting is best for you?

Bluehost and Arvixe both have advantages that make them appealing.

Reasons to choose Arvixe over BlueHost:

• Free domain registration as long as plan is hosted
• Pre-installed WordPress
• Windows server options for all plans
• Longer money-back guarantee

Reasons to choose BlueHost over Arvixe:

• Lower pricing for the first term of service for several tiers of shared hosting
• Free SiteLock
• Lower VPN and dedicated server pricing

Though BlueHost’s managed WordPress plans are more expensive than some others, the features make them very popular, as seen in the fact that more than 1 million WordPress sites are hosted on BlueHost.

However, Arvixe, with its budget pricing, is worth checking out if you are a WordPress user. If you are mid-sized or larger, you might look to BlueHost’s VPS or dedicated server plans.

Both companies have suffered in customer reviews involving customer support, which could be a concern. However, both of these hosting companies offer full-featured plans at excellent prices.

These are many other web hosting companies you could consider. For those that don’t mind spending a little more for fast load and response times, and premium features, checking out SiteGround is worth your time.

For a hosting company that is an excellent choice for managed WordPress, and that has one of the best money-back guarantees in the industry, you might consider InMotion Hosting.

Do you have any questions about BlueHost or Arvixe? What have been your experiences with web hosting in general? Leave your comments and let us know.