Table of Contents
A2 Hosting Review: Introduction
We will cover a lot in this A2 Hosting review, as it’s very important to know what you’re getting into.
One of the most critical decisions to make when planning your website is choosing a host. If you get this wrong, and you are in a lot of trouble. You can find yourself stuck with a yearly contract holding you and your website back.
It’s vital that you pick carefully. But, you probably already know that, and that’s why you are reading reviews like this one. Here, we are going to review A2 Hosting, a company best known for their blazing site speeds.
By the time you finish reading this A2 Hosting review, you will have much better information about the company. We’ll cover plans, features, support, pricing, and more. This should help you decide whether this provider is a good option for your site. Let’s dive straight in!
History Of A2 Hosting
A2 Hosting is an independent hosting company founded back in 2001. This means they have almost two decades of experience. That is a huge plus, as the competition in the hosting industry is fierce. If someone survives for two decades, then they must be good.
A2 Hosting is still independent. Many of their rival hosting providers are part of a huge conglomerate. Because of this the end user is much “closer” to the staff at independent providers. They generally have more in-house engineers and less outsourced to other continents.
A2 Hosting started modest but has continued growing over the years. Now it has four data centers. Two are in the USA, Arizona and Michigan, one is in Europe (Amsterdam), and one is in Asia (Singapore). They own all their servers, guaranteeing maximum stability.
A2 Hosting lets you test out their data center speed and ping. You can see for yourself how fast everything works. But, we will cover the speed later.
All A2 Hosting data centers have state of the art technology. The environment is regulated, with static-free flooring and close climate and humidity control. This helps provide optimal server performance.
Their data centers are SSAE16 certified. This means no unauthorized access is allowed. Video surveillance is also in place around the clock.
They have redundant power supply systems, backed up by diesel generators. The dual fiber entrance network is also redundant, with multihomed network connectivity. That means the stability of your site is not dependent on only one network provider. A2 Hosting has many, just in case something comes up.
And it’s not just about technology, A2 Hosting has a hand-picked team of experts. They are willing to offer help, and take pride in their support, and dedication. We’ll dive into that more later in this A2 Hosting review.
A2 Hosting cares about our planet too. They are 100% carbon-neutral for more than a decade. I wouldn’t quite call them GreenGeeks, but it tells a lot about their ethics.
A2 Hosting Site Speed
A2 Hosting is not shy to tell you that they have ultra-fast servers, as you can see it everywhere on their site. Well, there’s nothing wrong with that, because it’s true.
I’d like to warn you now that I’m about to get a bit technical here. I think it’s helpful to know what A2 is doing to boost speeds though.
“High powered hosting” as A2 Hosting likes to call it, is based on the latest and greatest technology. They were one of the first hosting companies to include Solid State Drives on their plans.
As you already know, SSD is significantly faster than HDD, which allows for blazing fast speeds. Furthermore, because there are less moving parts, SSD is much more reliable.
Their HTTP2 Cloud Linux hosting solutions are combined with CloudFlare CDN. This helps allow them to deliver up to 20x better performance than the competition. They also implement caching on all plans, reducing page load times.
Furthermore, A2 Hosting limits the number of sites per server. In fact, they even do this on their cheapest shared plans. This will make sure that servers are never overcrowded. It also stabilizes performance, and minimizes the chance of the whole server going down because of traffic spikes on one hosted site.
Why Speed Matters
Having a fast server is not only necessary for user experience. Yes, users will leave the site if it takes forever to load, but that’s not the only issue. Slow sites rarely rank high in the results. Page speed is one of the Google ranking factors. These days you will struggle to rank high without having a blazing fast website. And we all know how important it is to be on the first page of the search results.
Therefore, don’t gamble, and make sure you sign up with a fast host. A2 Hosting was the fastest host that we tested. They blew away all competition when you compare their shared plans with others.
During our tests they averaged load times of 342ms. To put that in perspective the industry average is close to 900ms. These guys stand out from the crowd.
A2 Hosting Plans
Features A2 Hosting offers shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud, WordPress and reseller hosting solutions. Additionally, they domain registration services. We can say that all share the same features when it comes to speed. Still, they all share some other standards as well, which we will discuss here.
Security
You can have the fastest site in the universe, but if it is unsafe for your visitors, you are out of luck.
A2 Hosting makes sure the user, and your information stays safe.
They have “Perpetual security measures” that will stop as many threats as possible at server level. This stops them before they even come close to your site.
You will also get free HackScan protection. Also you’ll receive extra protection. This includes frequent rebootless Kernal updates, brute force, dual firewalls, and DDoS protection. So even if your site is under many attacks at once, you can expect A2 Hosting to prevent it from going down.
Good Uptime
A2 Hosting has a 99.9% Uptime Commitment. This is excellent, as a fast website is worthless if your site is unreachable.
But, their uptime is not the greatest, as it sometimes fluctuates around 99.9%. As we said before, A2 Hosting uses the latest technology. They have redundant power supplies and server access restrictions. And it shows, which you can check yourself, A2 Hosting has nothing to hide, and most of the time the uptime is very good.
There was a period of time where they did suffer some major uptime issues. But, since that time they have had nearly perfect uptime.
Free Migrations + One-click installations
If you have a website on a different host, you will be glad to hear that A2 Hosting does site migrations for free. This is common, but not every web host offers this feature.
Transferring the site on your own is also an option. With a free option why not use it? Besides, the process is complicated for non-technical individuals. The only requirment is that your site uses cPanel.
If you haven’t built your site yet, don’t worry. A2 Hosting has one-click installations for all popular services, making the process hassle-free. You can expect to have your website up and running in a matter of minutes.
Unlimited RAID-10 Storage And Bandwidth
With A2 Hosting you don’t have to worry about your data vanishing for good. They use RAID-10 storage. That means everything is duplicated in several locations, eliminating the chance of lost data. Furthermore, A2 Hosting won’t measure your bandwidth. You can count on maximal performance no matter how much traffic your site draws in.
Free SSL
A2 Hosting offers a basic SSL certificate completely free. This is good enough for smaller websites.
If you run a larger business, you can upgrade to a paid, advanced SSL for deeper protection. SSL is not only about encrypting data, but it also makes your site rank higher. Google prefers HTTPS over HTTP. This will show that your website is safe for users.
A2 Hosting Options
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is best suited for those of you who are starting out. It’s not ideal for those with huge websites with many pages.
This type of hosting puts several websites on a single server to share the same resources. Because of this, shared hosting is exceptionally cheap. Also, most of the time, nothing goes wrong, and the performance is decent.
However, if a traffic spike does happen on one of the sites, that can sometimes lead to overloading the whole server, taking all sites down. To make sure this doesn’t happen, A2 Hosting limits the number of sites per server. This gives users more resources per site, and it shows in performance and stability.
A2 Hosting has both Linux and Windows shared hosting, with Windows being a bit more expensive. This is a big bonus as many of their competitors don’t let you choose your platform.
Plans:
- Lite – $3.92/mo – 1 site, 5 databases, 5 subdomains, 25 parked domains, no addon domains, 25 emails, unlimited RAID-10, unlimited bandwidth, no Turbo, no HTTP2, no rewind backups.
- Swift – $ 4.90/mo – unlimited sites, databases, subdomains, parked domains, addon domains, emails, RAID-10, bandwidth, no Turbo, no HTTP2, but you have rewind backups.
- Turbo – $ 9.31/mo – everything unlocked and unlimited, including the most advanced speed improvements, for up to 20x faster website.
Windows plans have the same features, but a different price. They are slightly more expensive.
- Lite is $4.9/mo
- Swift is $5.88/mo
- Turbo is $10.78/mo
WordPress Hosting
Regular, non-managed, WordPress hosting is essentially equal to ordinary shared hosting. Because of this we will focus here only on managed WordPress plans.
What “managed” means is that your hosting company takes care of the site maintenance for you. They will make sure everything stays updated, and that your site is hack-free and up all the time.
Managed packages are the best option for people who are willing to pay a bit extra to save time. Get a managed plan if you only want to focus on your content, leaving the site maintenance to your host.
On top of that, A2 Hosting has a dedicated team of WordPress experts. This means that WP experts will take care of your site, not some random “jack of all trades” engineers.
Plans A2 Hosting has 3 WordPress managed plans. All have free SSD, SSL, and CDN. They also have unlimited bandwidth, automated backups, site staging, Plesk, Jetpack, and more.
Here is what’s different:
- 1-site solution – $11.99/mo – 1 site, 10 GB storage
- 3-site solution – $18.99/mo – 3 sites, 25 GB storage
- No limits – $36.98/mo – unlimited websites, 40 GB storage
I should note I think these plans are a little more on the expensive side. You can see this when comparing them to SiteGround’s managed WordPress plans.
VPS Hosting
Virtual Private Servers (VPS) are a more powerful hosting solution than shared hosting. They allow much more flexibility than dedicated, at a better price. With VPS, you still share resources with other sites, but here, they are guaranteed to you.
If your site needs it, you can upgrade. But, you will never have some random website ruin your sites performance. VPS hosting is much more powerful than shared hosting. However, VPS are much more affordable than dedicated hosting as well.
They offer more flexibility, as you can upgrade at any time. They are the perfect middle solution for those of you who find shared hosting lacking, but still don’t want to switch to a separate server.
Plans A2 Hosting has three VPS tiers – unmanaged, managed and core. Because unmanaged is only for the advanced developers and managed doesn’t give you root access, we will focus on Core, as it gives the best of both worlds. They also let you choose between Windows and Linux platforms, which is excellent:
- Power+ – $32.99/mo for Linux; $36.29/mo for Windows – 4 GB RAM, 75 GB storage, 2 TB bandwidth, 4 CPU
- Prestige+ -$46.19/mo for Linux; $49.49 for Windows – 6 GB RAM, 100 GB storage, 3 TB bandwidth, 6 CPU
- Pinnacle+ – $65.99/mo for Linux, $69.29 for Windows – 8 GB RAM, 150 GB storage, 4 TB bandwidth, 8 CPU
Dedicated Servers
Dedicated servers are top of the line, ultra-high performance, at the highest price. If you have a huge website that has an enormous following, then you need a dedicated server.
Here, there’s no sharing anything, and the whole server is just for you!
Of course, it comes at a price, but bunk beds are for kids anyway, it’s king size mattress time!
Just like with VPS, A2 Hosting offers three tiers of dedicated servers, but we will focus on the Core. Your server is managed, but you still have root access to make advanced changes:
- Sprint – $141.09/mo – from 8 GB RAM, 2×500 GB storage, 10 TB bandwidth, 2 CPU (Intel 3.1+ GHz)
- Exceed – $207.49/mo – from 8 GB RAM, 2×500 GB storage, 15 TB bandwidth, 4 CPU (Intel Xeon 2.4 GHz+)
- Mach – $290.49/mo – from 16 GB RAM, 2×1000 GB storage, 20 TB bandwidth, 8+ CPU (2xIntel Xeon 2.1 GHz)
Reseller Hosting
Your customers deserve only the best. If you decide to host on A2 reseller Hosting, you can count on top speeds, and the fastest support, which is also extremely important.
Here are the reseller A2 Hosting Plans:
- Bronze – $13.19 on Linux; $14.51 on Windows – 30 GB storage, 400 GB bandwidth
- Silver – $18.47 on Linux; $19.79 on Windows – 75 GB storage, 600 GB bandwidth, free WHMSC
- Gold – $24.41 on Linux; $25.73 on Windows – 150 GB storage, 1000 GB bandwidth, free WHMSC
- Platinum – $40.91 on Linux; $42.23 on Windows – 200 GB storage, 2000 GB bandwidth, free WHMSC
A2 Hosting Support
A2 Hosting “Guru” Support is phenomenal.
First, it’s ultra fast, and you can expect to get someone helping you much quicker than with many other hosts. Also, A2 Hosting doesn’t outsource their support staff to third world countries. You won’t have to waste time talking to someone who can barely understand you. Here, you will get proper support, 24/7/365.
We especially like how they have a dedicated support team just for WordPress. This makes it very appealing to sign up for their managed plans. Also, A2 Hosting provides free migrations. This is another huge bonus, considering that not every host does this without fees.
You can reach them through phone, chat, tickets or email. You can also post questions on the forum or their social media pages. A2 Hosting also has a terrific knowledge base as well. Lastly, they have a lively blog, where you can read quality articles.
A2 Hosting Pros and Cons
Pros:
Blazing fast speeds – this is the fastest hosting provider we have tested, even on cheaper plans. Their “Turbo” plan stands out, and if you want a fast site, this is the one you go with.
Decent security – speed is not everything, and A2 Hosting knows this. That’s why they keep your site safe from various attacks, preventing them at the server level.
Terrific support – A2 hosting has support that is not only fast but knowledgeable and willing to help as well. They also offer free migrations.
Four data centers, green energy – you can choose from their four data centers. This makes sure you get the best performance no matter where your audience is. Also, they invest in green energy, trying to reduce pollution.
Cons:
Not the cheapest host – when compared to the competition, A2 Hosting is not the most affordable. Especially considering higher renewal costs (prices above are only for the first year). If you’re looking for cheap hosting Hostinger might be the best option for you.
Questionable uptime – 99.9% commitment doesn’t mean guarantee. Their server stability sometimes fluctuates.
Money-back Guarantee
A2 Hosting has an Anytime Money Back Guarantee that lets you try their servers for full 30 days, risk-free. This is an excellent opportunity to dive in and test as many features as possible. It allows you to see for yourself how A2 Hosting behaves, and if it is really that fast as they claim.
A2 Hosting Coupon!
We did our best and hooked you up with an incredible discount code. Use it and get roughly 50% off your price. Use this A2 Hosting Discount link to get started today. This is likely the best offer you will find online.
A2 Hosting Review: Conclusion
Throughout this A2 Hosting review we covered a lot. In particular we went over the speed, and what makes them so quick. Additionally, we covered their great WordPress support. We also dove into some key A2 Hosting pros and cons.
Overall I recommend A2 Hosting. They are not my highest rated host, but they come in near the top. If you want to see my full list check out my complete WordPress hosting comparison.
My score for A2 Hosting is a 9 out of 10.
Have you tried A2 Hosting before? Do you agree or disagree with my A2 Hosting review? If you’ve tried them before I’d love to hear your own mini A2 Hosting review in the comments below! If you haven’t please feel free ask any questions. Thanks for taking the time to read this review.
Though I have used hosts with better pricing and better uptime, I’ll admit that A2 hosting’s site speed is way above all the others and that is a very good factor every host should consider improving on. This is all that attracted me to them and I’ve been enjoying it since I joined them.
You’re totally right about A2 Hosting being one of the best hosts out there. I made the switch to them from HostGator recently and I am so happy about it
There are just so many things about a2 hosting that make them stand out from the others. I’m impressed with their site speed, customer support, good plans, and great user experience. They may not be that cheap but still, the price will give you good value for your money so no need to stress it.
Perhaps at one time A2 Hosting used to be a good web hosting company, but that time seems to have been long passed. A2 hosting appears to have a larger and larger amount of issues piling up. Not only are they more and more unreliable, but their customer service is slower and slower, almost to the point of being unacceptable!
Now the newest issue is that their email filters do not do anything at all that they’re designed to do. It’s absolute garbage. I set up key words like any email that has the words “sex” and “freespin” in the body of the email message should be discarded… yet I am getting them all the time, every day.
It’s like the entire business of A2Hosting is a SCAM to get as many people’s money as possible… in the meantime they just make it look like (!!!) a serious business… while it’s all just a joke, an amateur platform LOOKING LIKE a worthy business. That’s where it seems to be heading. Seriously…
I would NEVER recommend A2 Hosting to my worst enemies! Like I said, one problem would be understandable and they could fix it… but when you have a constantly mounting amount of issues, I seriously doubt there is any way to save it. Maybe their manager is new or they have hired some people from their competition who are working on DESTROYING A2 Hosting… well, they are doing an excellent job, it’s heading to destruction…
When I ask them for any compensation, they simply say “Nope…” Once they got your money, you are pretty much screwed. DO NOT TRUST THEM with your hosting!