Both as official supporters for Drupal community, Arvixe and BlueHost have been making much effort in supporting Drupal, as well as offering good hosting services for Drupal users. The 2 web hosts pre-install their servers with multiple versions of PHP, MySQL and PostgreSQL 9 to ensure enough choices and complete compatibility.
Also, they integrate an application installer with their control panel, so that users can install and upgrade Drupal with no risk and worry. The two companies just do the same good in terms of the support for Drupal.
Therefore, this comparison focuses on some other vital factors in selecting a good hosting service and analyzes the 2 web hosts’ advantages over each other. Below are the ratings made to help you get an overall understanding about how they perform.
Rating
Reputation
Pricing
Uptime
Speed
Control Panel
Support
Editorial Review
Arvixe Review
BlueHost Review
BlueHost Advantages over Arvixe
Larger in size & more trust from users
BlueHost is a much larger web hosting company than Arvixe. It currently manages over 2 million domains and websites, while its competitor is hosting approximately 0.2 million sites.
According to the 780 BlueHost reviews and 208 Arvixe reviews on HostUCan, BlueHost has also kept a higher customer satisfaction rate – nearly 100%.
More choices on shared hosting level
BlueHost offers 3 shared hosting plans to satisfy Drupal users with different demands on website size and complexity. The prices given in the list are all exclusive to orders completed through the promotional link below.
Basic: Priced from $2.95/mo, including 1 hosted website, 50 GB disk storage, 5 email accounts, unlimited bandwidth, and 25 subdomains.
Plus: Priced from $3.95/mo, including unlimited hosted websites, disk space, bandwidth and email accounts, $200 marketing credits, and 1 SpamExperts.
Prime: Priced from $6.95/mo, including unlimited resources, 2 SpamExperts, 1 IP, 1 private SSL certificate, and free domain privacy.
Bluehost Drupal Hosting Promotion
In comparison, Arvixe supplies 2 choices for shared hosting, neither of which is discounted now.
PersonalClass: Priced from $4/mo, including 6 hosted websites, unlimited disk storage and bandwidth, $200 marketing credits, and daily backups.
PersonalClass Pro: Priced from $7/mo, including unlimited hosted websites and all other features in PersonalClass.
Enhanced cPanel interface
Both of Arvixe and BlueHost utilize cPanel to simplify their customers’ experience in managing accounts and websites. The difference is that Arvixe uses a standard cPanel, while BlueHost has enhanced cPanel with many other tools.
BlueHost cPanel has a customized interface with pleasant design and extremely rich features. Besides the features included in the default cPanel package, the enhanced control panel comes with more helpful tools like Page Speed Grader, Google Apps and server management.
More secure email
In addition to the normal anti-spam methods, BlueHost offers extra spam protection with Postini. Leveraging the power of Google, Postini automatically filters emails and stops the harmful ones from reaching you, which makes your email system much more secure.
Besides, the users of Plus and Prime have free access to SpamExperts, an advanced spam detection and filtering system that can get rid of 99.98% email threats and junk emails.
Faster speed with resource protection
Arvixe and BlueHost both use more than one data center and cooperate with multiple bandwidth providers. Thanks to the network redundancy, complete switching system and high-performance servers, BlueHost has been delivering fast server responses and page loads.
For shared hosting, BlueHost uses a special resource protection technology to isolate websites consuming excessive resources, which helps other websites on the same server run stably. When comparing the 2 web hosts with each other, we find that BlueHost surpasses its competitor in server response speed.
Better uptime
BlueHost has been doing great in uptime. It makes the promise of 99.9% uptime for shared hosting, and then fulfills the promise with satisfactory statistics.
The results of our long-term monitoring show that BlueHost delivered 99.98% uptime on average in the past year. This is great because most shared hosting providers actually cannot reach 99.9% service availability. Our surveys have revealed the main reasons for such excellence.
BlueHost has always been valuing customers’ businesses and understanding how important it is to keep websites accessible at any time.
BlueHost builds up servers and optimizes them constantly to guarantee the best possible performance.
It cooperates with multiple premium network carriers to ensure the network redundancy. The routers and distribution switches also feature full redundancy.
All the storage devices are RAID protected in order to prevent data loss.
The company utilizes various security measures such as configuring advanced firewalls, performing brute force detection and conducting nightly server updates.
The company has equipped all data centers with redundant power supply and cooling systems.
See BlueHost monitoring statistics in the past 30 days.
In terms of Arvixe, it is actually among the “most providers” that cannot offer 99.9% uptime. Numerous complaints have been written to the well-known forums and review sites, with which you can see how poor Arvixe is in uptime. Our monitoring has also proved this.
More responsive technical support
The 2 web hosts both offer real human being powered support through phone, live chat and support ticket. BlueHost even guarantees 30-second response for customers seeking help via phone and live chat, and 15-minute ticket response. The real responding time of BlueHost hotline and live chat is no more than 1 minute in most cases.
However, for Arvixe, support is the largest drawback because the company hasn’t paid enough attention to improve its support services. Many users complain the Arvixe outsources the technical support. Besides, the ticket response time is over 24 hours, and live chat is of completely no help.
Arvixe Advantages over BlueHost
Longer full refund period
Arvixe promises a long full refund period of 60 days for shared hosting, 30 days longer than that of BlueHost. Therefore, Drupal users hosting with Arvixe get more time to try and test their hosting package.
Note that BlueHost allows pro-rated refunds after the full-refund period, while Arvixe doesn’t.
Better price value of the entry-level plan
The entry-level plan of Arvixe includes more resources than that of BlueHost. It allows hosting more websites, and comes with a larger amount of disk space, bandwidth, email accounts, FTP accounts, and databases.
But on the other hand, BlueHost Basic plan is cheaper than Arvixe PersonalClass plan in the discounted price.
For a clear comparison of the features, read the following table which includes all the differences and some common features between BlueHost Basic plan and Arvixe PersonalClass plan.
Feature
Plan
PersonalClass
Basic
Hosted Site(s)
6
1
Disk Space
Unlimited
50 GB
Bandwidth
Unlimited
Unlimited
Databases
Unlimited
20
Email Accounts
Unlimited
5
Subdomains
Unlimited
25
PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby
SSH
Daily Backups
Free Domain
Regular Price
$4/mo
$7.99/mo
Discount
–
63%
Special Price
–
$2.95/mo
How to Claim
–
Link Activation
Judging from this table, it is clear that Arvixe PersonalClass plan is more rich-featured than the entry-level plan offered by BlueHost.
Secure website data with RAID 10 disk array & R1Soft
Arvixe protects all servers with RAID 10 disk array, which ensures that customers’ data is completely safe even in the bad situation of hard drive corruption. This is an expensive but effective way for data protection.
For user-side backups, Arvixe offers R1Soft, an advanced tool that is highlighted by Continuous Data Protection, bare-metal restore and disaster recovery. R1Soft is a quick and reliable solution for online backups. But still, you should always make your own offline backup to make sure the security.
How to Make the Decision?
Arvixe and BlueHost come with a few similarities. For example, they both provide cPanel, a free domain, and different support channels.
However, due to their differences, signing up with BlueHost is undoubtedly the better decision for individuals and businesses with high requirements on hosting reliability, speed and email security.