Aruba.it Hosting Reviews 2024 – Not Bad, but What’s the Catch

Is Bigger Always Better?

To compare the best web hosts, we hosted the same WordPress website on each one and tested performance, customer service, and value for money. Check out the results here.

As well as being one of the oldest web hosts (founded in 1995), Aruba.it is by far the largest website hosting provider in Italy. It’s a European affair, with customers in France, the U.K., Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and more.

Aruba.it provides hosting services, cloud services, housing and colocation services, dedicated servers, and domains, as well as a variety of digital services.

Digging into its stats, it’s clear that we’re dealing with a big player. Aruba.it hosts more than 2.6 million domains and 8.6 million email accounts. It has 130,000 servers and around 5 million customers.

But bigger doesn’t always mean better. Sometimes, as companies get bigger, they get complacent. Customers become nothing more than a number, and the standard of the service declines. Is this the case with Aruba.it? And more important, is this hosting giant right for you?

Let’s find out.

(Nearly) Everything You Need

Aruba.it is a big company, so you’d expect it to offer all the standard hosting features as well as some bonus ones. And it doesn’t disappoint (most of the time).

It offers all the usual features like SSL certificates, automatic daily backups, and antivirus and anti-spam protection, but common features like free website migration and a content delivery network (CDN) are not included.

Let’s dig a little deeper into some of the most interesting features Aruba.it has to offer.

Choice of Operating Systems and Platforms

Aruba.it offers a range of options for your website. Not only are there WordPress-specific packages, you can also choose from Windows or Linux operating systems, or Joomla, Drupal, PrestaShop, or Magento content management systems (CMS). Overall, it’s a decent range of options for a shared hosting provider.

Features Designed for Developers

I’m not going to tell you that Aruba.it is the best host for developers—providers like DigitalOcean and Vultr have more to offer. But what I can say is the range of features for developers is decent for this type of host. To give you an idea, there’s support for PHP 7.2, Perl 5.16, Python 2.7, and Ruby 2.4.2, as well as phpMyAdmin and MySQL database.

GDPR-Ready Features

If you’re doing business in the EU, your website is most likely subject to the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Aruba.it offers a suite of GDPR features, such as SSL certificates, malware detection, and daily backup. Your site will be in compliance and the features could help you avoid any financial penalties.

Data Protection

Aruba.it makes a big deal out of its data protection features. It won’t sell your data to third parties, and because your data is stored in Europe, it’s not subject to U.S. laws such as the Patriot Act or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Unlimited Disk Space and Traffic

Aruba.it makes it easy to understand your resource quotas. All plans come with unlimited disk space and unlimited monthly traffic. Unfortunately, Aruba.it doesn’t provide a clear explanation of how much usage is considered acceptable and at what point your usage will be capped. In most cases with unlimited resources, as long as you’re using the website for normal activity, you’ll be fine.

Aruba.it’s old-fashioned user interface and the lack of live chat are disappointing. However, Aruba.it offers a range of features that do make your life easier, such as its beginner-friendly tools and automatic backups.

Read on to find out its best user-friendly features.

Create an Account

The combination of a poorly translated website, an outdated interface, and the lack of live chat made my signup process quite tedious. To make matters worse, it’s not possible (unless you upgrade to a VPS plan) to use a domain registered elsewhere. You’re forced to either purchase a domain or transfer a domain to Aruba.it, paying for the privilege. You can read more about my frustrating experience here.

Connecting a Domain and Installing WordPress

Don’t let the account creation process deter you. If you’ve signed up for a WordPress plan and purchased a domain via Aruba.it (let’s be honest, you don’t have much choice), then this step is nearly entirely done for you. Click here to read more about how it works.

Beginner-Friendly Features

Aruba.it does a good job of covering a broad spectrum of services and features, great for both beginner and advanced users. It offers a semi-premium one-click installer that supports more than 200 programs, as well as a website building tool, SiteBuilder, free with all shared hosting plans.

WordPress Hosting Solutions

Aruba.it offers two types of WordPress plans. The first comes with WordPress pre-installed and the second is a fully managed WordPress plan. That’s great news for you if you’d prefer to outsource the day-to-day management of your WordPress application, for instance, the updates and the server configuration.

Not Bad, but Not the Best

According to the Aruba.it website, its data center is Tier IV, which is the best of the best, and should mean you get less than 26 minutes of annual downtime. While Aruba.it has a few disgruntled past clients, downtime isn’t often the cause of complaint.

There isn’t a clear uptime guarantee, which is surprising for a host of this size and one that clearly knows the importance of top-notch infrastructure. Nevertheless, based on other reviews, downtime does not appear to be a major concern.

But what about speed? I always like to confirm a host’s performance. To do that, I created a test WordPress website and put it through a Sucuri page load test. As you can see below, the results are not bad.

Even the worst-performing locations, such as Tokyo and Singapore, are far faster than 2 seconds load speed, which is when Google tells us most visitors will leave your website without viewing it.

Overall, if you’re website isn’t highly dependent on speed, e.g., an e-commerce store, Aruba.it is an acceptable choice.

Not Good Enough

If you’re the kind of customer who likes to be able to jump on live chat, this is not the right host for you. There are some useful how-to guides, but you’re extremely limited in other customer service options.

Throughout the website, call-to-action buttons urge you to contact customer service 24/7 for help, however, they all lead to the same place — a generic online contact form. If you need immediate help, these online forms are useless.

While setting up my account, I was astonished to discover that I couldn’t use an existing domain registered elsewhere. So, I reached out to support and submitted a question. Unfortunately, it took nearly 24 hours to receive a reply that confirmed my earlier suspicions.

I thought I’d try to message the team via Facebook, as often this can be a quicker way to get support. That wasn’t the case here. I received an immediate bot reply (in Italian) telling me to submit an online form to get support. I wasn’t impressed.

A Budget Brand

The plans are very affordably priced, especially when you consider that both disk space and traffic are unlimited. Domain names are an added cost (you can’t use one registered elsewhere) so you should factor in that additional cost, while SSL certificates are included. Plans can only be purchased in annual terms; however, there are some pretty decent introductory prices available.

You can pay by credit card or PayPal, which should be sufficient for most customers.

How much does Aruba.it cost?

Aruba.it offers plans from $1 to $14. The price depends on which type of hosting plan you choose. You can see the updated pricing table (updated weekly) below.

Which Aruba.it plan should I get?

My recommendation is to start with a cheaper plan. You can always upgrade later on. Aruba.it can help you with the migration to a more expensive plan. The increase in visitors many times takes longer than expected and you shouldn’t pay a lot of money until the need arises. Of course, your needs may vary, and you can consult with a hosting expert from Aruba.it.

How good is Aruba.it’s customer support?

Aruba.it is not ranked as one of our top web hosts. But that can also be a result of Aruba.it being a small, under the radar, hosting provider. There are advantages to a small hosting company – as a customer, you are more important to them. You can also check out our comparison of the most popular web hosting services here.

Cancellations and Refunds

It wasn’t immediately obvious how to cancel my account with Aruba.it. But once I’d figured it out, it was easy. I just needed to wait for the cancellation to be processed. Read more about my experience here.