In 2010, I posted about my woes with WebHost4Life (which I’m shocked is still around.) I looked around for another host, and ended up going with Arvixe. I’ve been happy with them ever since.

In the comments, Sebastian wrote:

Sebastián Cañizares writes:

Arvixe is the same problem … they say “We are currently facing network issues across at least one of our facilities The packet loss is disrupting service” and after 3 months my site still has the problem … the site going up and going down …

I was wondering if I was blind to a problem, so I thought I’d do a bit of digging.

Since learning my lesson with WebHost4Life, I’ve been using a simple PowerShell script to monitor my blog uptime and response time. It’s been running since 9/1/2012.

Caveat: This is running from my house - so the data is actually a combination of:

• How fast and reliably Arvixe responds to requests
• How fast and reliably my home connection (Comcast, router, etc.) responds and transmits those requests

In any case, the data I have doesn’t seem to back up what Sebastian says.

Uptime: Out of 12,978 samples, my combined data only failed to get a “200 OK” response code 154 times. So that’s about 99% uptime.

Response times:

• Until about October 2013, the response times were usually less than 2 seconds. This includes the time that WordPress takes to render the content / etc.
• After October 2013, most of the response times are still usually less than 2 seconds. However, there has been a secondary band of response times around 5 seconds.

For $6 a month, Arvixe continues to be a great investment.