Arvixe Review: Professional Host for Personal Sites & Enterprise
Arvixe Web Hosting is founded in San Luis Obispo, CA. Since 2003 Arvixe offers professional web hosting for personal, small business and enterprise websites.
Their PersonalClass hosting plan includes unlimited disc space and monthly data transfer. Customers can host up to 6 domain. Arvixe uses cPanel as its Control Panel. It has Fantastico and Softaculous (Magento 1-click installer) as AutoInstallers integrated.
Arvixe has PHP 4 and 5 on their servers. You have to check what version your server has and switch it if you want to. To change the version to PHP5 you have to go to cPanel and from Software/Services choose PHP Configuration and do the switch. The registration of 1 domain is free for live. You can get this plan for $4.00/mo. If you want to have a Dedicated IP, it will cost you $2.00/mo.
The Magento Installation with Arvixe ran smoothly. We did not experience any problems. We have heard from other customers, that they used to have the following problem – they received the error “PHP extension pdo_mysql must be loaded”. If you get the same message, you can solve it by creating and uploading a file called php.ini with the following lines:
extension=pdo.so
extension=pdo_mysql.so
Upload this file to the Magento Hosting directory on your account and restart the installation. It will activate some required settings. You can also ask for help the Arvixe support team. They are very professional and are available 24/7. You can also check their tutorials and developer articles, if you should have other questions.
I wasn’t very happy when I had to make additional configurations just to finish my magento installation. It took me much more time than it should to start my application. Once the script was installed I didn’t have much problems. The site isn’t working very fast but you know that if you want to have a big magento-powered site you need to have atleast a VPS to have enough hosting power for the script!