Alternative to Aruba for your company website

A premise worth stating right away: Aruba is not a provider to criticize. It's one of the most solid operators on the Italian market, with certified data centers and prices among the most competitive in Europe. The point is not the quality of the service. The point is understanding what kind of service it is, and whether it matches what your business actually needs.

What Aruba offers for business websites

Aruba was born and remains primarily an infrastructure provider: domains, shared hosting, servers, mailboxes, certified email (PEC), digital signatures, cloud services.

Alongside this, it also offers solutions for building a site: hosting packages with WordPress preinstalled, guided creation tools, ready-made templates to customize.

The business model is that of infrastructure: low price, very high volumes, standardized service. It works very well for what it is. An Aruba domain and hosting cost a fraction of what you'd spend elsewhere, and in the vast majority of cases they work without problems.

The question to ask, then, isn't "is Aruba good or bad". It's this: who builds, updates, secures and maintains the site?

In Aruba's model, the answer is: you. Or someone you pay separately.

Why a business looks for an alternative

Those who end up looking for alternatives to Aruba usually haven't experienced a service outage. They've simply discovered that hosting was the easy part.

There are four recurring situations.

The site exists, but no one maintains it. It was built years ago by a collaborator, an intern or an agency the relationship with which has since ended. It runs on a WordPress stuck on an old version, with plugins no one updates. As long as it works, it works. The problem shows up all at once.

Updating content has become a problem. Changing a schedule, adding a service, publishing some news: operations that should take two minutes turn into a request to someone, a wait, and often a quote.

The site is slow and it's not clear why. On shared hosting, resources are split among many sites on the same server. In most cases this isn't a problem; when it becomes one, diagnosing it requires skills the business owner doesn't have and that standard support doesn't provide.

No one checks security. Hosting protects its own infrastructure, not the application running on it. If your WordPress has a vulnerable plugin, that's your problem. And intrusion attempts aren't a remote possibility: they're constant automated traffic hitting any reachable site.

DIY is cheap. In money.

Aruba's advantage is clear and real: you pay a few dozen euros a year and your site is online.

What that price doesn't cover is everything else. And in a normal year of life for a business website, the "everything else" looks like this:

• Updating the CMS and installed components, checking each time that nothing breaks

• Checking backups and making sure they can actually be restored

• Monitoring response times and Core Web Vitals

• Maintaining GDPR compliance for cookies, forms and data handling

• Updating content as the business changes

• Stepping in when something breaks, usually at the worst possible time

It's not impossible work. It's recurring work, and someone has to do it. If you do it yourself, the cost isn't zero: it's the time you're not spending selling. If you have someone else do it, the cost still comes out, just on a different invoice.

The honest comparison isn't "40-euro hosting versus a managed plan". It's: hosting plus technical work plus emergencies plus your time, versus a plan that includes everything.

Over three years, for a business website that's actually working for you, the two figures come much closer together than they seem at first. If you're running these numbers, you'll also find the guide on when it's worth rebuilding your business website useful, where the real costs are broken down item by item.

Support: what it covers and what it doesn't

This is where most misunderstandings arise, and not because of Aruba.

Hosting support covers the hosting: a reachable server, disk space, an active database, working email, a valid SSL certificate. Within that scope, Aruba responds, and responds well.

It doesn't cover, and isn't meant to cover, your site. If the layout breaks after an update, if a contact form stops sending, if the site is slow because of how it's built, if someone injects code through a plugin: all of these are outside the hosting contract.

This distinction is legitimate and clearly stated in the terms of service. The problem is that many small businesses don't notice the boundary until they run into it, usually during an emergency.

So before choosing, the question isn't "is there support?". The question is: support for what, exactly?

Ownership and portability: here Aruba is among the best

This needs to be said, because it's true and because it matters.

With Aruba, the domain is registered in your name, the files are yours and downloadable via FTP, the database is exportable, and moving everything to another provider is a routine operation. There are no multi-year lock-ins or exit penalties.

It's a concrete advantage compared to several providers that sell "website packages" where the customer, at the end of the contract, discovers they have almost nothing in hand. If you're comparing several proposals, this is one of the points where Aruba does better than many competitors, and one that should always be checked, as explained in the guide on what to check before signing a website contract.

However, freedom doesn't solve maintenance. Having full control over something that no one maintains means being free to watch it age.

When Aruba is the right choice

You don't always need an alternative. Aruba is the right choice in these cases:

You have in-house technical skills. If someone at your company knows how to administer a CMS, read a log and restore a backup, hosting is exactly what you need, and paying more doesn't make sense.

The site is a minimal presence. A page with contact details and opening hours, updated once a year, doesn't justify a managed service.

You need infrastructure services. Domains, certified email (PEC), digital signatures, mailboxes: on these, Aruba has a value-for-money ratio that's hard to beat, regardless of where you host your site.

Budget is the absolute constraint. If right now the priority is having a presence while spending as little as possible, cheap hosting is a rational choice. It only becomes a problem when the site starts to really matter and no one is looking after it.

How to compare two different proposals

Comparing hosting with a managed service is a category error: they're two different things. A sensible comparison is based on the result, not the product.

The questions that make proposals comparable are these:

Who updates the system? CMS, component and library updates: who does them, how often, and who's responsible if an update breaks something.

Who responds if the site goes offline? Not the server: the site. Within what timeframe and through which channel.

Who handles application security? Is there a filter in front of the application, or is it relying on the fact that nothing happens?

Who makes content changes? If you do it yourself, is there a panel you can actually use. If a provider does it, how many changes are included.

What does everything together cost by year three? Adding up hosting, interventions, emergencies and in-house hours.

What remains yours if you change provider? Domain, content, database, access credentials.

Once you've asked these six questions of every proposal, comparison becomes possible. Without them, you're comparing one price with another price, which is the quickest way to choose badly.

What to look for in a managed alternative

If the answers to those questions show that DIY isn't for you, the alternative isn't "more expensive hosting". It's a different model, where technical management is included in the service instead of being your problem.

In a managed model, you should find:

Infrastructure and maintenance included. Server, backups, updates and monitoring handled by the provider, with no separate line items and no interventions to authorize one by one.

Application security built into the service. Not a plugin to install, but a filter already active in front of the application.

Autonomy over content. A panel for updating text, pages and images without having to open a request.

A real point of contact. A person who responds, in your language, and who knows your project.

Predictable cost. A fee that doesn't grow with unexpected events, with no silent renewals and no multi-year commitments.

Guaranteed portability. Domain registered in your name and content exportable in standard formats. On this point, the managed model shouldn't be worse than hosting: if it is, that's a warning sign.

KeideaCMS as a managed alternative

KeideaCMS is a managed Italian platform: the site is built, hosted, updated and protected by the people who develop the system, with a single fee that covers infrastructure, maintenance, security and support.

The difference compared to hosting isn't the price: it's where responsibility ends. With hosting, responsibility for the site is yours from day one. With a managed service, it stays with whoever provides it to you.

It's not the right choice for everyone. If you have in-house skills and want full control of the server, a well-configured hosting plan costs less and gives you more freedom. But if the site needs to work while you're busy with other things, the math changes.

If you want to understand which side you fall on, the starting point is to look at the site you have now: how the managed service works and what it includes is explained in detail on the dedicated page.

The choice depends on who's looking after it

Looking for an alternative to Aruba doesn't mean Aruba did something wrong. It almost always means what you need has changed.

Cheap hosting is the right choice when you have the skills to use it or when the site doesn't matter much. It becomes a costly choice when the site starts bringing in customers and no one is looking after it, because the bill arrives in the form of slowness, stagnant content, security incidents and missed opportunities, not in the form of an invoice.

Before deciding, ask yourself the six comparison questions and look at the numbers over three years, not one.

Transparency note: Aruba is a trademark of Aruba S.p.A. This article is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Aruba. The information is provided for informational and comparative purposes and should be verified against the operator's current published contractual terms.