Arvixe: Another One Bites The Dust

It was a year ago when i wrote The Downfall of HostGator because they were bought from EIG group. Now we have an other hosting company that goes that way, Arvixe.

Arvixe was never a good reputable and reliable hosting company, it took me a few days to leave them back in 2011. Their Windows hosting was a total crap and their support didn’t have a clue what they were talking about.

It seems that a lot of customers that left HostGator went with Arvixe and now they have to leave again for an other company.

What happened is that EIG group bought Arvixe in 2014 and now they relocate they websites and servers. Also it seems that most of the stuff are fired and Arvixe is under the management of some other hosting company (from EIG group of course).

The whole thing reminds me of Hostgator fiasco. When people started to complain at HostGator Forums, they had to shut that particular forum down. Now if you look at Arvixe forums, they are full of complains and even hate messages. I think it is a matter of time before they close those down.

This case is not the same case as HostGator, because HostGator was for a long time an EXCELLENT hosting company. Arvixe was never a reliable hosting company and because of this Arvixe will not be missed at all.

This was posted a while ago on some reputable hosting forum, apparently from some ex-stuff of Arvixe:

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.

Also this was posted a while ago, that will give you an idea on what is going on.

The Hack 9/28/2015

Early morning, at approximately 6AM US Eastern time on September 28, 2015, Arvixe was hacked.

Arvixe pulled their client billing area offline and it just displayed a message about the ‘functionality not available’. This happened around 7AM US Eastern time.

During the hack someone overwrote the client database with one single record over top of everyones account. Assuming others saw the data error then. Abubakar appeared as the owner of all accounts and a Turkish IP was part of the details mass replaced on the accounts.

Arvixe was able to restore the client database from backups, unlike that client yesterday at Arvixe who lost their site and database and the R1Soft backups included for some reason failed to be accessible: https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1516593.

EIG management has kept the matter hushed. Have you seen it in the media or on the forums? Not until now.

I’m not sure what EIG does exactly. I mean they have totally destroyed each and every company they bought and their reputation, some more some less. There are several posts about “staying away from EIG group” with detailed portfolio of they acquisitions.

So here is what you should avoid, don’t tell me i didn’t warn you.

Full List of EIG Companies

(courtesy of https://researchasahobby.com/full-list-eig-hosting-companies-brands/)

000WebHost (000webhost.com)
Sister company of SEOHosting [27] which was later acquired by EIG

2slick (2slick.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

AccountSupport (accountsupport.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

ApolloHosting.com (apollohosting.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

A Small Orange (asmallorange.com)
Acquired by EIG in July 2010

Arvixe (arvixe.com)
Acquired by EIG in October 2014

Berry Information Systems L.L.C. (berryinfosysllc.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

BigRock (bigrock.com)
Acquired in January 2014

BizLand (bizland.com)
Former name of EIG. Founded in 1996

BlueDomino (bluedomino.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

BlueHost (bluehost.com)
Acquired by EIG in November 2010

BuyDomains (buydomains.com)
Acquired by EIG in the 3d quarter 2014

CarielWeb (carielweb.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

ComputersConcepts (computersconcepts.net)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

Directi Web Technologies (Directi, directi.com)
Acquired in January 2014

Dollar2Host (dollar2host.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

Domain.com
Belongs to EIG since October 2011 or earlier

Dotster (dotster.com)
Belongs to EIG since July 2011 or earlier

DomainHost (domainhost.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

Dot5Hosting.com (dot5hosting.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

Dotster (dotster.com)
Acquired in July 2011

EasyCGI (easycgi.com)
Belongs to EIG since July 2009 or earlier

Ehost (ehost.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

EntryHost (entryhost.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

Escalate Internet (escalateinternet.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

FastDomain
Has become part of Bluehost since December 2006 (or earlier)
Bluhost was later acquired by EIG (see above)

FatCow (fatcow.com)
Belongs to EIG since May 2007 or earlier

FreeYellow (freeyellow.com)
Belongs to EIG since May 2007 or earlier

Globat (Glob@t, globat.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

Homestead Technologies, Inc. (homestead.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

HostADay (hostaday.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

HostCentric (hostcentric.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

HostClear (hostclear.com)
Bought by JustHost in October 201, which was later acquired by EIG (see below)

HostGator (hostgator.com)
Acquired in June 2012

HostNine (hostnine.com)
Is a sister company of A Small Orange (ASO), which is an EIG hosting (see above).

HostMonster (hostmonster.com)
Is a sister company of BlueHost, which was acquired by EIG (see above)

HostWithMeNow (hostwithmenow.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

HostYourSite.com (hostyoursite.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

HyperMart (hypermart.com, hypermart.net)
Belongs to EIG since May 2007 or earlier

IMOutdoorsHosting (imoutdoorshosting.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

Intuit Websites
Acquired in August 2012

iPage (ipage.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

iPower (IpowerWeb, ipower.com)
Belongs to EIG since May 2007 or earlier

JustCloud (justcloud.com)
Belongs to EIG since February 2014 or earlier

JustHost (justhost.com)
Acquired by EIG in 2010

LogicBoxes (logicboxes.com)
Acquired by Directi, which was bought by EIG (see above)

MailEIG (maileig.com)
Belongs to EIG since 2011

MojoMarketplace (mojoness.com, mojo-themes.com, mojo-code.com)
Acquired by EIG in March 2013

MyDomain (mydomain.com)
Belongs to EIG

MyResellerHome (myresellerhome.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

NamesDirect (namesdirect.com)
Belongs to EIG since 2011 or earlier

NameZero (namezero.com)
Belongs to EIG since 2011 or earlier

NetFirms (netfirms.com)
Was acquired by EIG in 2011

NetworksHosting (networkshosting.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

Nexx (nexx.com)
Was acquired by EIG in 2012 or earlier

OsullivanSystems (osullivansystems.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

PipeDNS (pipedns.com)
Belongs to EIG since 2011 or earlier

PowWeb (powweb.com)
Belongs to EIG since May 2007 or earlier

PureHost (purehost.com)
Belongs to EIG since May 2007 or earlier

ReadyHosting (readyhosting.co.uk, readyhosting.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

ResellerClub (resellerclub.com)
Acquired in January 2014

Saba-Pro (SabaPro, sabapro.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

SEOGears (seogears.com)
Belongs to EIG since 2014 or earlier

SEO Hosting (seohosting.com)
Was part of HostGator which was later acquired by EIG (see above)

SouthEastWeb (southeastweb.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

Spertly
Belongs to EIG since 2013 or earlier

Sprly (spry.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

StartLogic (startlogic.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

SuperGreen Hosting (SuperGreenHosting, supergreenhosting.com)
Merged with JustHost, which was later acquired by EIG

TightHost (tighthost.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

TypePad (typepad.com)
Belongs to EIG since 2014 or earlier

Unified Layer (unifiedlayer.com)
Belongs to EIG since 2013 or earlier

UsaNetHosting (usanethosting.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

VDeck (vdeck.com)
Belongs to EIG since 2011

VirtualAve (virtualave.net)
Belongs to EIG since May 2007 or earlier

VPSlink (vpslink.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

Web2010 (web2010.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

WebDevHosting (webdevhosting.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

WebHost4Life.com (webhost4life.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

webhosting.info
Acquired by Directi, which was bought by EIG (see above)

WebsiteWelcome (websitewelcome.com)
Belongs to EIG since 2011

WebstrikeSolutions (WebstrikeSolutions.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

Xeran (xeran.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

YourHostingAccount (yourhostingaccount.com)
Belongs to EIG since 2011

YourWebHosting (yourwebhosting.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

Webzai (webzai.com)
Acquired by EIG in the 3d quarter 2014

ZipitDesigns (zipitdesigns.com)
Belongs to EIG since April 2010 or earlier

Verio (verio.com)
Belongs to EIG since the 4th of August 2015

Site5 (site5.com)
Belongs to EIG since the 4th of August 2015