Aruba – 8633 Customer Reviews: Analysis (Sep 2026)

Aruba Summary

Name	Aruba
Total Reviews	8633
Average Score	4.0
Website	https://www.aruba.it
Address	Via San Clemente, 53 – 24036, Ponte San Pietro (BG), Italy
Server Locations	United Kingdom, Germany, France, Czech Republic

Number of Reviews

8.6k+A lot

* 8633 Reviews show that Aruba is used by a wide range of customers. You will be provided with more insight about the company in the following article.

Avg. Review Score

4.0Positive

* Scoring 4.0 on average is a confirmation on how great the workforce behind Aruba are.

Customer Support

NeutralRating

* Customer support for Aruba is mentioned in both good and bad appraisals. We cannot give a prospect for their future in that sense.

Features and Services

Founded in 1994, Aruba is the largest web company in Italy. It claims 16 million users and over 2.7 million registered domains, and it’s entirely Italian-owned, registered at Ponte San Pietro near Bergamo.

Hosting Types Offered

• Shared Linux hosting in Basic, Easy and Advanced tiers
• Shared Windows hosting, adding a Professional tier for ASP.NET and MSSQL
• A combined Linux plus Windows plan
• WordPress hosting, from self-managed to fully managed Premium
• Managed WooCommerce hosting
• Hyper Hosting, a cloud tier with dedicated CPU and RAM
• Cloud VPS, dedicated servers and colocation via Aruba Cloud
• Certified email (PEC), digital signature, SPID identity and e-invoicing

That last line matters more than it looks. This isn’t only a host. It’s one of Italy’s biggest suppliers of regulated digital services, and its review score covers all of them.

Key Features Customers Highlight

• A domain and SSL in every plan: the DV SSL certificate (Domain Validation, the basic HTTPS certificate proving you control the domain) is preinstalled at renewal as well as signup.
• Softaculous installer: one-click setup for over 300 apps, WordPress and PrestaShop among them.
• HiSpeed Cache and CDN: an AI-driven cache that preloads pages it expects visitors to request. A CDN (Content Delivery Network, edge servers delivering files from near the visitor) is bundled from the Easy tier up.
• Current PHP: the WordPress plans run PHP 8.0 through 8.4, plus HTTP/3. That’s unusual at this price.

Malware removal, a web application firewall and DDoS filtering are marketed across the shared range too. We’ll come back to what the contract promises about those.

Data Center Locations

So how many data centers does Aruba run? Its own sources disagree. The datacenter.it site lists five: IT1 and IT2 in Arezzo, IT3 in Bergamo, IT4 in Rome, and CZ2 in Ktis, Czech Republic. The company’s Trustpilot description claims seven. Aruba Cloud lists nine, adding Prague, Paris, Frankfurt, London and Warsaw.

The gap is presumably owned sites versus leased space, but nobody at Aruba reconciles the three figures. What’s verifiable is the owned network: 80 MW of IT power and over 1 Tb/s of interconnection. Aruba describes those facilities as compliant with or exceeding ANSI/TIA-942 Rating 4 and ISO 22237. Note that wording. “Compliant with or exceeding” is not the same claim as “certified to”.

Shared customers can’t pick a location; only the cloud products offer that. Serving Italian visitors, it hardly matters. Serving another region, it’s a real limitation.

Performance Expectations

We found no current independent benchmark data for Aruba’s shared hosting. No recent third-party speed test or uptime monitor published figures we could verify, so we won’t invent any. What we can say is that Aruba owns its data centers instead of reselling someone else’s, which removes one common cause of unexplained slowdowns.

Hyper Hosting, the premium tier, launched on 13 January 2026. Each customer gets 8 dedicated vCPU (virtual CPU cores reserved for you alone), 16 GB of RAM and a dedicated IP. That removes the noisy-neighbour problem, where one busy site on a shared server slows everyone else down.

Customer Experience

The Trustpilot score is 4.6 out of 5 from 11,207 reviews, with 3,093 arriving in the last twelve months. The distribution is where it gets interesting: 8,743 five-star (78%), 399 four-star (3%), 204 three-star (2%), 215 two-star (2%) and 1,646 one-star (15%).

Read that again. Over four times as many people gave Aruba the worst possible score as gave it the second-best. There’s almost no middle here. Customers leave delighted or furious, and roughly one in seven leaves furious.

What Customers Praise

Support competence dominates the positive reviews, which will sound odd given what comes next. Reviewers describe technical staff who fix DNS records, mail configuration and two-factor problems quickly and politely, once contact is made. Trustpilot’s topic analysis flags staff, customer service and response time as consistently positive themes.

Scope is the second theme. Customers like buying hosting, certified email, digital signature and e-invoicing from one Italian supplier on one invoice, and no international host offers that. Longevity is third. Reviewers who’ve been customers for ten or fifteen years say so explicitly, usually as the reason they haven’t moved.

Common Complaints

Reaching support is the loudest complaint by a distance. Recent one-star reviewers describe being bounced between phone numbers nobody answers, and tickets that take a working day to produce an inconclusive reply. One summed it up as support that “goes to sleep now and then and needs chasing several times”.

Identity verification failures come second. Several recent one-star reviews concern SPID and digital signature enrolment: OTP codes that never arrive, recognition failing on the fifteenth attempt, accounts unusable for weeks after payment. Context matters here. A large share of Aruba’s worst reviews is about regulated identity products, not web hosting.

Account design comes third. Customers report being pushed into two separate accounts with usernames made of random digits, one for domains and one for billing. Others call the panels and help pages dated.

Community Feedback (Reddit and Forums)

English-language Reddit barely mentions Aruba, since the name collides with HPE Aruba Networking and with the island. Real discussion lives on the Italian subreddit r/ItalyInformatica, and the tone there differs from Trustpilot.

Italian developers rate Aruba well as a registrar. In one thread, a user whose Register.it domain was quoted at EUR 1,500 to renew called Aruba “pretty consistent on price” by contrast. Another called it “very good as a registrar”. That’s meaningful praise from people with no reason to flatter.

One technical warning recurs, and it’s worth knowing before you buy. Aruba binds DNS management to the hosting product rather than the domain. Change or downgrade your plan and the MX records reset. Those are the DNS entries that tell the world which server handles your mail, so resetting them silently breaks external email such as Google Workspace. The community’s fix is to buy a domain with DNS management only when your mail lives elsewhere, never the “domain with email” package.

Some Italian users rule Aruba out on support history alone, excluding it “for poor support experienced in the past”.

Support Quality

Advertised support is 24/7 phone and ticket plus live chat. The published targets are a chat reply within 90 seconds, a phone answer within 2 minutes and ticket resolution within 6 hours. Aruba sets those itself, and they carry no penalty if they slip.

Now for the number nobody quotes. Alongside the main profile scoring 4.6, Aruba holds a separate Trustpilot profile for its customer support subdomain. That one scores 1.8 out of 5 from 128 reviews, 96 of them in the last twelve months. It’s an active corpus, not a stale one.

Why the split? It’s visible on the page. Aruba runs a review invitation campaign, and invited reviews carry the tag “Reindirizzata”. In the current listing, the five-star reviews carry that tag while the one-star reviews read “Non scritta su invito”, meaning organic. Invitations go out after a ticket closes, so customers whose problem was never solved never get one. They arrive under their own steam, and many land on the support profile.

Both numbers are real. They measure different populations.

When to Use Aruba

There are situations where this is clearly the right call.

Ideal For

Italian businesses needing PEC, SPID or e-invoicing alongside a website: no international host can sell you legally valid certified email or a digital signature. Aruba can, on one account with one invoice. If your accountant needs those, the convenience is worth paying for.

Buyers who want a registrar they can leave: Italian developers rate the registrar business highly. The .it renewal at EUR 11.99 is normal for the market rather than punitive. You also get an auth code, the transfer password that lets you move the domain to another registrar at any time.

Projects that will outgrow shared hosting: with 80 MW of owned capacity, the upgrade path runs from shared to Hyper Hosting to full cloud without changing supplier.

You’ll Appreciate It If

• You want Italian data residency, since the shared platform runs from Aruba’s own Italian sites
• You care about renewable energy: Aruba bought three hydroelectric plants on 8 July 2026 and now runs 11, producing over 60 GWh a year
• You’d rather have one Italian supplier than four international ones

When NOT to Use Aruba

No host suits everyone. Skip this one if any of the following describe you.

Look Elsewhere If

You need a contractual uptime guarantee: this surprised us most. We searched the full text of Aruba’s hosting supply contract, version 4.7, in force since 7 July 2026. It contains no uptime percentage anywhere. Article 12.2 says Aruba commits to ensuring the best functionality of the system. It then accepts no liability for delays, malfunction, suspension or interruption. A formal SLA (Service Level Agreement, a guaranteed uptime commitment with a penalty attached) exists only as a separately negotiated “mission critical” contract.

You’re relying on the advertised backups: the plan pages market automatic backup that protects you from data loss. The contract says otherwise. Aruba performs no specific backup of your data, beyond a periodic storage-wide copy kept for its own purposes. Restoring your content is your responsibility alone. Even the paid backup service carries no guarantee the copy will work. Keep your own.

You read “unlimited” literally: the plans advertise unlimited web space and traffic. The contract defines the word. Wording such as “unlimited space” means only the possibility of progressive increases in 1 GB units. It does not imply space free of physical or technical limits.

You want monthly billing or a trial: everything is annual and prepaid, with no money-back guarantee. What exists is the statutory 14-day withdrawal right under Italian consumer law, covering consumers rather than businesses.

Red Flags for Your Situation

• You cancel late: contracts renew automatically unless you give at least 15 days notice before expiry. Cancel afterwards and it takes effect 30 days later, refunding unused days minus Aruba’s costs.
• Your email lives at Google or Microsoft: DNS is bound to the hosting product, so plan changes can reset MX records and break external mail.
• You need support in English: the guides, the reviews and the community are overwhelmingly Italian.

Aruba Plans and Pricing

Everything is billed annually and excludes Italian VAT at 22%. There’s no monthly option on the shared plans.

⚠️ Renewal Warning: Aruba prints renewal prices next to promotional ones, which is more honest than most hosts manage. Read them. Entry Linux hosting at EUR 9.90 renews at EUR 34.99, a 253% increase. The Easy tier renews at EUR 59.99 from the same EUR 9.90 start, a 506% increase. Budget for year two before you buy.

Shared Hosting (Linux and Windows)

Basic: EUR 9.90 first year, renews at EUR 34.99 (3.53x). Includes a domain, DV SSL, HiSpeed Cache, unmetered space and traffic, 5 mailboxes of 1 GB.

Easy: EUR 9.90 first year, renews at EUR 59.99 (6.06x). Adds a CDN, unlimited mailboxes, 10 GB of mail storage, 5 MySQL databases with backup.

Advanced: EUR 19.90 first year, renews at EUR 79.99 (4.02x). Adds SSH command-line access, 20 GB of mail storage and 5 PEC addresses on your domain.

Windows Professional: EUR 49.90 first year, renews at EUR 160.00 (3.21x).

Linux + Windows: EUR 21.90 first year, renews at EUR 44.99 (2.05x).

Look at Basic and Easy again. Both cost EUR 9.90 in year one. At renewal they sit EUR 25 apart. So a buyer comparing them at checkout sees the same price with more features, picks Easy, and inherits the worst multiplier in the shared range. It’s the most expensive mistake available on this site, and nothing at checkout flags it.

WordPress and WooCommerce

Hosting per WordPress: EUR 11.90 first year, renews at EUR 49.99 (4.20x). Backups keep 1 to 7 days of history.

Managed Smart: EUR 14.90 first year, renews at EUR 79.00 (5.30x).

Managed Premium: EUR 39.90 first year, renews at EUR 129.00 (3.23x).

Managed WooCommerce: EUR 79.90 first year, renews at EUR 249.00 (3.12x).

Hyper Hosting

Hyper Hosting Linux: EUR 199.00 first year, renews at EUR 390.00 (1.96x).

Hyper Hosting Managed for WordPress: EUR 199.00 first year, renews at EUR 420.00 (2.11x).

Notice the pattern. The premium tier carries the gentlest renewal in the catalogue. Aruba discounts hardest exactly where it plans to raise the most.

Hidden Costs to Watch

• Hosting price follows the domain. The terms say hosting prices vary with the cost of the attached TLD (Top Level Domain, the ending such as .it or .store), at signup and renewal. EUR 9.90 buys the cheapest ending, not any ending.
• Standalone domain packages renew brutally. “Dominio con email” runs EUR 0.99 then EUR 16.49, a 16.7x jump. A .cloud domain goes EUR 0.99 to EUR 24.99, a 25.2x jump.
• Cheap add-ons are teasers. Unlimited mailboxes cost EUR 1.00 in year one, EUR 16.99 after. Unlimited mail storage goes EUR 1.00 to EUR 14.99.
• Changing plan costs EUR 10.00, waived only within 14 days of purchase.
• Promotions don’t stack. In a bundle, one discount applies: the one attached to the priciest component.
• Ten promotional domains a year, maximum. Go past it and Aruba can charge list price and suspend the account.

Pricing Verdict

Credit where it’s due: the renewal prices are stable. Internet Archive captures show the same figures holding from January 2025 to today, with one exception. Aruba raised the Hosting Linux Basic renewal from EUR 32.99 to EUR 34.99 between 31 July and 10 September 2025, and its own promotion terms still quote the old EUR 32.99 a year later. So this isn’t a host that ratchets you upward yearly. It’s one with a single enormous step between year one and year two, then a flat road.

Which means the honest way to price Aruba is to ignore year one. At EUR 34.99 with a domain and SSL included, Basic is fair. At EUR 59.99, Easy isn’t obviously good value against the Italian market. Do the multi-year sum before the promotional price does your thinking for you.

Aruba Transparency Score

Here’s how upfront the company is with the information that affects your decision.

• Company Information: Excellent. Full legal identity sits in every page footer: VAT number, tax code, share capital, registered address. Data centers get public pages and 3D virtual tours.
• Pricing Transparency: Good. Renewal prices appear next to promotional prices on every product, which most hosts avoid. Two things cost it a top mark. The promotions page contradicts itself: the plan cards say Basic renews at EUR 34.99 and Advanced starts at EUR 19.90, while the terms further down that same page still say EUR 32.99 and EUR 24.90. Both are superseded figures left unrevised. Separately, the fact that hosting prices move with your domain extension appears only in small print.
• Technical Documentation: Good. PHP versions, protocol support and data center standards are all named. Missing: any per-plan CPU, memory or file-count limit for shared hosting.
• Terms and Policies: Limited. The contract is public and readable, which counts for something. But it carries no uptime figure, disclaims the advertised backups, redefines “unlimited”, and buries the 15-day cancellation deadline where no product page repeats it.

Overall Transparency: strong on facts, weak on guarantees. Aruba tells you exactly what it charges and exactly who it is. It won’t promise much about what happens when things break.

Alternatives to Aruba

If this isn’t the right fit, these three address its specific gaps.

For a Flatter Renewal: VHosting Solution

Its entry plan lists at EUR 26 a year with no promotional split, which undercuts what Aruba charges from year two. It also carries a 30-day money-back guarantee. Watch one detail: the free .it domain covers year one only, so budget a domain renewal after that. Both providers appear in our Italy web hosting guide.

For Better Support: SiteGround

It costs more at every tier and renews steeply too, but its support reputation is the opposite of the one Aruba’s support profile carries. Worth the premium if you expect to open tickets and need them answered.

For Dedicated Resources Without the Markup: Hetzner

Did the EUR 390 Hyper Hosting renewal send you looking elsewhere? A plain VPS buys more hardware for less, provided you can administer it yourself. Our Italy VPS hosting comparison covers the field.

For managed WordPress, our Italian WordPress hosting guide lists the rivals to that EUR 49.99 renewal. Our cheap Italian hosting roundup covers the budget end.

Conclusion

Copy this result

Aruba earns its 4.6 out of 5 across 11,207 reviews, but that average hides a split audience: 78% rate it five stars and 15% rate it one.

The Bottom Line

This is a genuine infrastructure company. It owns real Italian data centers, runs a solid registrar arm, and covers Italian legal requirements no international host touches. It’s also a host whose entry prices are engineered to look cheaper than the product is. The contract offers no uptime guarantee, and support is either excellent or unreachable depending which door you come through.

Buy it if you’re an Italian business wanting one supplier for hosting, certified email and digital signature, and you’ve done the sum at renewal prices. Skip it if you need a service level you can enforce, or if your email lives elsewhere.

For a wider view, see our Italian cloud hosting comparison, where Aruba’s cloud tier sits alongside its rivals.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Aruba good for beginners?

Partly. The Softaculous installer makes WordPress a one-click job, and a domain and SSL come included. But the panels are dated, and several reviewers report being pushed into two accounts with numeric usernames. Expect a learning curve.

Is Aruba worth the price?

In year one, yes. EUR 9.90 for hosting with a domain and SSL is hard to beat. In year two it depends on your tier. Basic at EUR 34.99 is fair value. Easy at EUR 59.99 is a 6.06x jump, so compare it before you let it renew.

What do customers complain about most?

Reaching support. Recent one-star reviewers describe phone numbers nobody answers and slow, inconclusive tickets. Identity verification for SPID and digital signature comes second, with OTP codes that never arrive. Renewal pricing is third, and it hits hosting customers hardest.

How does Aruba compare to Register.it?

Both are large Italian brands with steep renewals, but Aruba’s are steeper. Register.it runs a 70% first-term discount, so its Linux tiers renew at roughly 3.3x. Starter goes from EUR 2.65 to EUR 8.85 a month. Aruba’s Linux plans run 3.5x to 6.1x. Register.it also offers monthly billing and a free trial, and Aruba has neither. On the registrar side, Italian developers generally rate Aruba the better of the two.

Is Aruba good for WordPress?

It’s reasonable. The dedicated plans run PHP 8.0 to 8.4, support HTTP/3, include a firewall and keep 1 to 7 days of backups. Pricing starts at EUR 11.90 and renews at EUR 49.99. What you don’t get on the cheaper tiers is staging, and no tier gives you a contractual uptime guarantee.

Does Aruba offer refunds?

There’s no money-back guarantee. Consumers get the statutory 14-day withdrawal right under Italian law, claimed by registered post, certified email to [email protected], or a support request. After that you can cancel any time, but it takes effect 30 days later and refunds only unused days minus Aruba’s costs. Premium domain purchases are excluded from refunds entirely.

User Reviews for Aruba