Headsup: ASO has been purchased by EIG

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Our A Small Orange Shared Hosting Review

A Small Orange comes fairly highly ranked in our user driven Shared Hosting Reviews table given it’s unique entry into the web hosting service market and the little unique quirks they put in the site to make it an enjoyable experience for its customers. They set themselves apart from other companies with their simple, yet effective name that is extremely memorable; coupled with a colorful and radiant template for their website that really sets the tone for their site. Not only should you read our editorial A Small Orange Review below, but also check out the User A Small Orange Reviews by clicking the User Reviews tab at the top of this page.

One interesting thing you may like to know is that the Chief Executive Officer and General Manager is Mr Douglas Hanna (edit: He left late 2014). He founded and writes for a popular blog on customer service and customer service experience called Service Untitled. He also served as the Customer Service Manager at Hostgator before they got purchased by EIG. He also serves as a Member of the Board of Advisors at CodeGuard (WordPress backup service). The point we make by revealing all this information, is you will see as you read our review that we think ASO & Hostnine (sister companies) have one of the best customer support experiences you will find in hosting. This really is their big strength.

Cons

• Support – Arrrgh… this one was hard to write, and in context of other hosts support should probably be in the positive category. However, the last year has seen their ticket response times go from around 15-20 minutes to around the 1 – 2 hour mark. They have also changed their live chat software, so when you respond it goes to the bottom of the queue again meaning that more complicated matters can drag out. But just to clarify, I am nit-picking here, and their support is still one of the best around.

Our A Small Orange Review Verdict
Our Verdict – Pretty Good – Recommended
They are fairly high up on our list of hosting providers we would recommend. Particularly if you check the A Small Orange Reviews below you will see many people feel the same. They deserve it based on a number of reasons like offering monthly payment options, discounted pre-paid pricing, and up-front quoted pricing based on the monthly price, not on some ridiculous three to five year prepaid plan, as well as a fresh, and tangy website template that has quite the appeal to it. While Hostnine and A Small Orange are owned by the same company (or at least used to be), it is good to make note of the fact that they are cheaper than Hostnine. With that in mind, we feel that they really care about it’s clients and they have the tools available to maintain success and grow and prosper.

Various Reviews of ASO:
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Cody January 13, 2016 at 9:01 am
I’ve had a small orange for well over a year and 9 months. I am now leaving them after my server was down for 11 days straight with no information besides “we’re working on it”. Proof:https://status.asmallorange.com/?id=590
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berwyn January 12, 2016 at 12:24 pm
To who is looking for a hosting or server, please do not use this provider (asmallorange.com).
i have been using their service about 8-9 months. it was good for the first 2-3 months, after that everything get screwed up. it’s really terrible on their service including their support live chat.

support live chat cannot be used anymore until today. no contact number can be contacted. raised a couple of tickets but nobody reply the ticket. Asked for refund, nobody response.

it ‘s a nightmare for everyone who is going to use their service.
i just hope that i can claim back the money that they have charged to me.
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robert January 11, 2016 at 9:45 pm
It just to be great but after it was bought by new owners everything is crap.
Will me closing all my accounts and migrating to another hosting company.
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Jo January 10, 2016 at 12:10 pm
Used to LOVE them for their great customer support & recommended them to all my clients – NOW its HORRIBLE. Customer support STINKS. STAY AWAY. I will be shifting shortly and taking my clients with me.
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Chris K January 7, 2016 at 8:01 pm
I came on board to ASO 2 years ago. Their service and support rocked and I was totally pleased. Earlier this year, things started slowing down. Their support began to dwindle. I just noticed that towards the end of the year, even their SUPPORT Phone Number had been taken off the site.

Live chat is now a joke, you need to fill out a form when you have an issue with their service. Which is fine if they’re going to answer the flippin’ ticket. Instead, the copy and paste their responses. I had a request about my server different than what is was about when it was down, they simply copy and pasted a response to my ticket and it had nothing to do with the issue at hand.

I also noticed that my server had intermittent down time. I would receive an email from site monitor ( pingdom.com ) that I had down time. With this year, I had 48 times that it showed me that I had down time. Most were a few minutes, some were about an hour and it wasn’t until December 2015.. nearly a week straight… twice. The beginning week and the last week…

They’re a waste of your money… STAY AWAY.

If you don’t mind wasting money, by all means, join their company.

In a post earlier by JACK, he wrote about the company being purchased by: EIG…
Here’s their website with their company names:
http://www.endurance.com/our-company/our-brands

A Small Orange is there too… Sad Company to host with… STAY AWAY!

I don’t know how many times I can say this…. STAY AWAY FROM THEM!!!
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Jack January 4, 2016 at 6:05 pm
STAY AWAY. A Small Orange is now just another brand of Endurance International Group (EIG), along with HostGator, BlueHost, Arvixe, HostNine, and close to a hundred other names. EIG has a reputation of taking over great companies and destroying them.

The reviews here reflect my own experience: ASO was a great company until taken over by EIG in mid-2014, and for a little while after. They’ve killed it now.

EIG in my opinion deserves to be driven out of business, but instead they have become a multi-billion-dollar corporation. Do your research and do it well, as they now seem to be actively trying to hide it when they take companies over.
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BBB Business Review of Endurance International Group

Typical BBB Complaint:
1/11/2016
Complaint: Netfirms.com, an online business run by this company, took down my website, ****************. They claim that it was due to "heavy usage", when this wasn't the case, as the website has only been receiving about 1,500 views a day in the past weeks, far below the allowed usage. They instructed me to view a text document left in a file folder called "Bandwidth_usage.txt" so that I could see the source of all this traffic and then essentially told me to solve the problem myself. When I viewed the document, it became clear that the "traffic" was simply search engine bots from ******** and *****, likely indexing my website, and that Netfirms hadn't taken the taken the time to actually check the situation out before taking my website down. They informed me (in the same letter that told me I would have to solve the problem myself) to contact them once I had resolved the issue, so I did, but have received no response. When I used their Live Chat support, the operator told me the website would be back up by today, and it's currently midnight, and there's been no change. After hours and hours, I've received no news, no updates, nothing. To make matters worse, Netfirms has also taken down *all* of my other websites without any reason. These websites are entirely unrelated to ****************, but for some reason have been taken offline in what seems like some sort of strange punishment. Right now, I have no idea what's going on. I'm paying them for the service of hosting my websites and keeping them online, but they refuse to respond to me or even acknowledge that they've made a mistake. These website are very important to me, especially ****************, the website they initially took down for no reason, and a lot of other people count on it being operational. I'm very disappointed in Netfirms, as there have been almost non-stop problems over the past months, now culminating in this strange incident in which they're taking my money, but providing no service in return, nor allowing my websites to be operational. I've been with them for at least a decade, probably more, and it's very disheartening that they would treat such a long time customer in this manner.

Desired Settlement: I would like the following things to happen: 1. I would like **************** (and all my other websites), to be reactivated and put back online. 2. I would like a month of hosting added on for free, because I'm exhausted with all the trouble I'm constantly having with the service.

Consumer Response: Dear BBB of Boston,Netfirms has restored my websites, and while I still feel they’ve treated me unfairly as a customer, I’m thankful that my websites are back online and operational, so I would like to consider this complaint “resolved” for the sake of peace.Thank you very much for your time and help

 

I have heard of EIG (employee reviews here) for years and they are notorious for buying successful internet companies, then laying off the American staff and out-sourcing their Tech Support to India, Philippines, etc. From what I understand, the weekend & night shift Tech Support has already been farmed out to the Philippines.

 

Anyway, just a heads-up for us. For right now, so-far/so-good.

Still, I will begin collecting some data on who-else out there is still, like ASO used to be…in case things get bad for us at ASO.

 

Candidate #1: http://buyshared.net
Recommended here.


Candidate #2: https://www.mddhosting.com/hosting.php
Recommended here.


Candidate #3: https://mattwservices.co.uk/resources/categories/shared-hosting.9/
Recommended here and here.(i.e. Ozzy47) See MattW on XenForo.com


Candidate #4: https://clients.wswd.net/cart.php?gid=1
Recommended here. See WSWD on XenForo.com

 

While on the AdminZone board, I read through part of an article entitled A Forum Admin's Guide to Web Hosting where it stated:

So next, I happened to trip across this post (on webhostingtalk.com) last night…

 

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The EIG Acquisition
A Small Orange was quietly acquired in 2012. They were acquired by a behemoth in the hosting industry called Endurance International Group (NASDAQ: EIGI) which owns dozens of brands including some of the largest and most well known hosting companies: Blue Host, Host Gator, Host Monster, Just Host, Site5, iPage, Arvixe and more.

EIG has a very bad reputation in the web hosting world. If you ask most industry veterans they will tell you to run to the hills when it comes to EIG. The oft-repeated story is EIG acquires a hosting company, migrates them to their platform and the quality of service falls off a cliff. The best example of this is perhaps their migration to their Provo, UT data-center which had a catastrophic outage in 2013. This outage was huge. The impact dropped four of EIG's largest brands many percentage points in the Review Signal rankings in a single day. But these major outages continue to happen as recently as November 2015.

In a recent earnings call with share holders, EIG CEO Hari Ravichandran talked about two recent acquisitions and their plans for them. “We expect to manage these businesses at breakeven to marginally profitable for the rest of the year as we migrate their subscriber bases onto our back-end platform. Once on platform, we expect to reach favorable economics and adjusted EBITDA contribution consistent with our previous framework for realizing synergies from acquisitions.”

The EIG Playbook
EIG's playbook has been to acquire web hosting brands, migrate them to their platform and 'reach favorable economics.' They've been doing it for years and it seems to be working well enough for investors to continue to put money into the company. M&A to grow subscriber bases and economies of scale to lower costs. It's a very simple and straightforward business plan. It doesn't speak to anything beyond spreadsheet math though, such as brand value and customer loyalty. And those are certainly lowered and lost post-EIG acquisition according to all the data we've collected over years and multiple acquired brands. It's calloused business accounting, but it makes perfect sense in the race to the bottom industry that is commodity shared hosting.

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You can see all the EIG brands tracked here on Review Signal in the chart above and their acquisition dates below:

iPage - 2009. BlueHost/HostMonster - 2010. JustHost - Feb 2011. NetFirms - March 2011. HostGator - June 2012. A Small Orange - July 2012. Arvixe - November 2014. Site5 - August 2015.

You'll notice their ratings, in general, are not very good with Site5 (their most recent acquisition) being the exception. iPage was acquired before I started tracking data. BlueHost/HostMonster also had a decline, although the data doesn't start pre-acquisition. JustHost collapses post acquisition. NetFirms has remained consistently mediocre. HostGator collapses with a major outage a year after acquisition. Arvixe collapses a year after being acquired. Site5 is still very recent and hasn't shown any signs of decline yet.

The Expected Decline of A Small Orange
So nearly every industry veteran I talked to expected A Small Orange to collapse. Immediately after acquisition. Except me. I was, am and will continue to be willing to give the benefit of the doubt to a company until I am shown evidence.

For years, post acquisition people were saying ASO's demise was right around the corner. For years, I still waited for that evidence and the prophecy to become True. But it didn't happen.

It often took EIG less than a year to ruin a brand. We don't have to look further than Arvixe for an example of this, which was acquired in November 2014. Today, Arvixe has one of the lowest ratings of any company on Review Signal at a shockingly low 27%.

But A Small Orange continued to chug along. It didn't hear the naysayers or believe itself to be a victim of the EIG curse. Instead, ASO was the best shared host for years post-acquisition. It seemed to have a fair level of autonomy from the EIG conglomerate. The staff I knew there, remained there, and all indications showed they were still the same company.

Until it wasn't.

The Fall of A Small Orange

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The chart above shows Review Signal's rating of A Small Orange. The Blue line is the rating as calculated by [Positive Reviews / (Positive Reviews + Negative Reviews)]. The Red line only calculates the rating from the past 12 months of data. It's slightly different than Review Signal's actual calculation because I am not filtering out duplicates for quick analysis. The difference for A Small Orange is that when you remove the duplicates, the year 2015 had a 43% rating indicating there was quite a few people writing multiple negative things about A Small Orange.

Sometime in 2015, the A Small Orange that thousands of people trusted and raved about became another EIG brand. I tried to get the inside story. I reached out to the former CEO who sold the company to EIG and became an executive there for a couple years post acquisition. He reached out on my behalf to EIG's PR team to see if they would participate in this story. Both declined to participate.

So, I'm left to speculate on what happened at A Small Orange based on what's been publicly stated by their CEO and watching their strategy unfold for years across many companies/brands. My best guess is EIG finally got involved with A Small Orange. They used to be a distributed/remote team, now all positions they are hiring for are listed as in Texas (their headquarters). I saw a HostGator representative get moved over to ASO's team, so the internal staff was changing and people were being moved from brands with less than stellar reputations to ASO. The former CEO left mid-2014, which likely left a leadership and responsibility gap. ASO could probably run on auto pilot through the end of 2014, but over time having no champion for your brand in upper management eventually will come back to hurt the brand when decisions get made based on simple economics.

Once 2015 rolled around, the service had noticeably declined. The overall rating for A Small Orange in 2015 was 43% (only using 2015 data). For years, they had been in the 70's. It also ended the year with a massive outage for most, if not all, of their VPS customers which has been going on since Christmas. I personally received multiple messages from users of this site asking about what was happening and alerting me to this decline in service quality.

ASO was also responsible for the Arvixe migration that went very poorly and caused the Arvixe brand to tank. I'm not sure why EIG doesn't have a dedicated migration team to handle these type of moves considering how many acquisitions they go through and how large a role it plays in their growth strategy. But that's a whole separate issue.

It's with great disappointment that I have to admit, the A Small Orange that played such a huge role in the founding and success of Review Signal and provided a great service to many thousands of customers is dead. It's become another hollow EIG brand where the quality has gone down to mediocre levels. And that seems perfectly ok to them, because it's probably more profitable for their bottom line.

 

For now, our saving grace is we're on a Shared Server at ASO with a pretty vanilla setup. Most of the complaints about ASO seem to be from Adminstrators who are using a Virtual Private Server.

So I guess that's a bit of good news for us, for now.(i.e. so far, so good)

Secondly (again, for now) even though ASO's Review Signal* Rating has dropped, it still remains one of EIG's better hosting choices as of 01/19/2016. ASO remains in the Top Ten (#9 for now) of Review Signal's Hosting Helper list.

Still, the writing on the wall doesn't look good for ASO's future. As I stated earlier, I'll keep an eye out for other possible hosts and post any info to this thread.

Here is a summary of various hosting companies and their respective grades by Review Signal: Review Signal Algorithm Change Chart (3/2/2016)

Of interest is the fact that none of my host canidates listed above appear on the chart, however in all fairness they are just hosts known to be more XenForo friendly.(i.e. Not hosts that were recommended for any other capabilities.)​

*- WHAT IS REVIEW SIGNAL?
Review Signal transforms opinions shared on social media into a review site for consumers. We currently focus on web hosting reviews.

 

Review Signal's - Compare Hosting webpage.

Notice: You can click on any host listed to see positive/negative reviews from their actual customers.

Here is the Customer Review page for ASO.

 

I posted the following question on webhostingtalk:

and Kohashi responded:

 

I just replied to the RRI Website Checks thread and added a LINK to check on our Website Uptime, in view of all this information about ASO. It's a FREE service by HetrixTools that verifies RRI is UP each minute of the day, then posts the results on a report page.

This way at least we'll have a better idea if/when/how-often RRI is unavailable to users.

 

arvixe is (yet) another hosting company that was bought-up by EIG and I tripped across the following article when I noticed that responsibility for their servers had been dumped onto ASO's Technical Support Staff...

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(Article dated Nov 1, 2015)
Something is very wrong with Arvixe. There is widespread discontent among users with many customers reporting problems with their sites, and being unable to get a response from Arvixe support for days. It appears Arvixe has migrated all its servers, and sacked many of its staff, transferring responsibilities to one of its other brands.

Update 28th January 2016: Looking at recent comments and reviews, there are still issues. Furthermore, complaints have increased at A Small Orange, who took over responsibility for this mess.​

Final Thoughts
The migration must have been (and to some extent still is) an extremely traumatic time for all involved. There is no way we can currently recommend Arvixe with all this happening although we will be keeping an eye on them for the future.

Out of all the hosting companies owned by EIG, Hostnine, and A Small Orange are the two that have always remained recommended by us. If Arvixe is now managed by them, then this is a good thing.

In the long term, we suspect that they will get back on their feet and put all these issues behind them. The questions are “How long will it take?”, “Can you afford the risk of staying with a host like this?”. Ultimately, the answer at present must be no. There are simply too many complaints, and support times too long to recommend staying with Arvixe. Avoid!

 

Not sure if we've entered the Death Spiral of EIG or not, but it's certainly not looking good over the past week…

 

Looking at our (sephiroth) server status, reveals nothing helpful…

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so not sure what is knocking RRI offline, but it's certainly happening a lot now.

 

Times that RRI has been OFFline, since my last update...

NOTE: Our server is currently loaded at 5.60​

I notice the Server Load for Sephiroth seems to be going UP, as in ASO is loading more onto the Sephiroth server. Out of 54 servers that are currenly online, the average Server Load is 3.49 and it's also worth noting that 24 of their servers are currenly OFFLINE/NOT-AVAILABLE.

Ref: Current ASO Server Status

Per my count, so far RRI has been OFFline for 442 mins during May.

 

Thoughts on Endurance International Group (EIG) Hosting
LAST UPDATED: MAY 4 2016 / WEB HOSTING INDUSTRY

The web hosting business is part of an incredibly large industry worth well into the billions. A number of large and well established web hosting companies that we’ve known to trust for their reliability, service and support are being bought out by even larger web hosting conglomerates. Some of the largest and most successful web hosting companies in the industry, including HostGator, BlueHost, HostMonster, and HostNine have been bought out by Endurance International Group (EIG).

Who is Endurance International Group (EIG)?
For those who are unaware, Endurance International Group is one of the world’s largest web hosting companies managing over sixty different hosting brands.

Non-EIG Hosting – The Benefits of Choosing a Hosting Company Not Owned by EIG
The fortunate fact is that there are several other highly reputable hosting companies in the industry that still have not been taken over by the Endurance International Group. Slowly but surely, many hosting companies are finding out about EIG and will refrain from a deal if it means a reduction in service, support and reliability for their customers.

There are options available for those who are looking for non-Endurance International Group hosting, the following are some of the best options for reliability, price, customer service and performance; A2 Hosting, InMotion Hosting, WebHostingHub, StableHost,GreenGreeks, SiteGround.

See also: Reliable recommended web hosting (by Research as a Hobby)