A2 Hosting Review

There are tons of cheap web hosting providers on the market. However, finding one that provides exceptional features at a bargain is a challenge. Thankfully, we found A2 Hosting.

It offers high-quality plans for users of all levels. You additionally get developer-friendly tools for fine-tuning your web server.

Other goodies include unlimited bandwidth, free SSL, and automatic backups. The company also claims to have superior hardware, delivering 20X faster speeds than traditional HDD servers.

On the downside, A2 Hosting customer reviews paint a terrible picture of server uptime. While that is bad for your business, it does compensate for any outages. Overall, the vendor promises to keep your website running 99.9% always. 

Here’s what else you can expect:

What Is A2 Hosting? 

A2 Hosting was founded in 2001 by Bryan Muthig, as a side-hustle project. To his surprise, it attracted tons of customers fast. 

The success was due to the pocket-friendly solutions. Its shared hosting plans ranked among the most sought-after ones. Unlimited bandwidth enabled individuals and businesses to set-up websites without worrying about budgets.    

At present, A2 hosting headquarters are in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the United States. It additionally runs regional offices in the UK, Brazil, and Canada. Above all, the host has a team of about 58 employees.

The host can impress you with:

A2 Hosting Infrastructure and Network

A2 web-hosting has a total of four data centers - in Michigan, Arizona, Singapore, and Amsterdam. They bring the benefit of dual fiber and multi-homed internet connectivity. Should one fail, the rest will kick into action to keep services running. 

You also won’t have to worry about power backup. The host has three-phase power supplies. Servers run round the clock with minimal interruptions. 

A2 Hosting Inc. also uses security access keys, CCTV surveillance, and guards for protection. Data is kept in the safest environment possible.

A2 Hosting Features

The list of A2 Hosting features is endless. Here’s a summary of the most important ones below: 

Powerful Servers

A2 Hosting uses LiteSpeed technology to power its servers. It offers up to 12X faster speeds than popular technologies such as Nginx and Apache. It uses intelligent caching to compress files. Likewise, the set-up can handle 4,300+ transactions per second. That’s 350% better than its closest competitor. 

Each of the web servers comes with RAID-10 SSD storage. It promises up to 500% superior performance than traditional HDDs. Altogether, these features ensure swift web page loading time always.

Unlimited Resources 

A2 web hosting gives you numerous resources. The best part is that you can run unlimited websites at a flat fee. However, it’s unavailable on the cheapest plan.

The bandwidth is also worth mentioning. You can host high-traffic sites for your business. You get a limitless NVMe drive for storing your data. 

A2 Hosting user reviews show that downtimes are frequent during traffic spikes. A closer look reveals that customers on the shared offerings experience it the most. That is usually normal with any host. As per the terms, the vendor limits the abuse of systems by aggressive users. Better get a VPS or dedicated server. 

Server Rewind Backups

Mishaps happen all the time in the world of hosting. You can face challenges such as corrupt updates, server failures, and cyber-attacks. A2 Hosting offers server rewind to help in such cases. 

You can choose between automatic or manual backups. You can schedule the automatic -daily, weekly, and monthly - from the A2 Hosting cPanel. If you choose manual, you can save any changes in real-time. 

Unlike the competition, A2 stores back-ups in an off-site location. It ensures copies of your archives are always available. If the worst happens, it will take a single click to restore your website.

A2 Website Builder

The A2 Hosting website builder is an easy-to-use tool for designing web pages fast. It’s ideal for users that lack professional coding skills or developers that want to save time. It comes with 100+ pre-built templates, an image editor, and ecommerce support. 

The drag-and-drop editor is the highlight of this feature. All you need to do is add content blocks and create the necessary web pages. However, A2 Hosting customer reviews suggest that it’s a bit sluggish. It tends to freeze sometimes, but not too often.

Another downside - it’s sold separately. The cheapest option is $2.49/month and only has a handful of features. It’s ideal for single-page sites that require fewer resources. If cost isn’t an issue, go with the Enterprise tier. Despite the high price - $18.49/month, it comes with lots of goodies. Like support for unlimited sites, ecommerce, and a free SSL certificate.  

Top-Notch Security

For starters, you get A2 Hosting AutoSSL for data encryption. It does a perfect job of securing connections between the end-user and your server. Sensitive data - like customers’ credit card details - is also handled safely 

Perpetual scanning helps to take things up a notch. It continuously scans your website to keep away malware, viruses, and spam. Every plan additionally supports HackScan guard for free. It has a dual firewall that makes it difficult for bad guys to breakthrough.   

The DDoS defense prevents attackers from overloading your server with unwanted traffic. A2 stops them from ever reaching your site. 

A2 Hosting cPanel

cPanel is an industry-leading dashboard that simplifies server management. It comes with an easy-to-use interface, fully-packed with productivity tools. They include file manager, database organizer, and DNS editor. 

Additionally, you can manage your A2 Hosting email accounts from here. That’s a free feature, by the way - looking at you, GoDaddy. 

The one-click installer is the highlight of this software. It comes with the support of 300+ apps for maximizing your hosting plan. These include popular CMS platforms such as WordPress, Magento, and Drupal.     

Content Delivery Network

You get the A2 Hosting Cloudflare add-on for free in all plans. Cloudflare’s CDN network is one of the largest in the world. It has 180+ data centers that are evenly spread across 200 cities globally. The CDN caches content to servers that are close to your visitors. This reduces the time that it takes to access your website. 

The service reduces the traffic load that comes from your server as well. It uses aggressive compression to reduce the size of static resources. Think HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images. This leads to a reduction in bandwidth originating from your site by up to 60%. 

The solution has an enterprise-grade shield to keep you safe. It comes with a free SSL certificate, DDoS protection, and a spam filter. Overall, you’ll experience an increase in performance of up to 200%. 

A2 Hosting Uptime

A2 Hosting has a 99% uptime guarantee, which is industry-standard. It means that you should expect downtimes of up to 45 minutes a month. Should it stretch beyond that, you’ll receive compensation, equal to a whole month’s worth of hosting for free. 

But.

The warranty covers faults arising from internal equipment failure only. That means any interruptions originating from third-party suppliers don’t qualify. Still, that’s pretty decent, as most hosts hardly offer any refunds whatsoever.

A2 Hosting Speed

Speed is the part of this  

Conducting a ping test was among the first stages of the research for this A2 Hosting review. We wanted to check the response time across the network. By using Fastorslow.com, we were able to get 100ms. Pretty impressive! 

We then tested the time to the first byte (TTFB). It measures the duration it takes for a web server to fulfill user requests. And boy-oh-body did A2 Hosting VPS shine - a record of 200ms. That’s what Google recommends for webmasters. 

Lastly, we turned our attention to page loading time. For that, we used GTmetrix.com. It gave us an average of 1.5 – 2.0 seconds. Perfect! 

A2 Hosting Services

A2 Hosting plans comprise of the following: 

Shared

The shared plans offer affordable solutions for beginners and small businesses. You can choose from Startup, Drive, Turbo Boost, and Turbo Max. Despite being cheap, they provide incredible features. You’ll receive unmetered bandwidth, free CDN, and support for unlimited sites. 

The plan is also ideal for users working with small teams. You can use A2 hosting cPanel to create custom emails for your colleagues. You can give people admin rights to provide support in website management. 

But according to A2 hosting user reviews, that’s not a good idea. The majority of users complain of frequent downtimes and sluggishness. It occurs because each site can only handle a few HTTP requests. This, however, is a limitation that targets users with high-traffic websites. It ensures fair usage. 

VPS

Virtual private servers (VPS) are ideal for developers and businesses that need more power. 

The A2 Hosting managed VPS is the first one that you’ll find in this category. It’s more user-friendly. The vendor handles all the backend tasks that keep your server running. That includes monitoring, maintenance, and performing upgrades. It will cost you at least $33.99/month.  

Unmanaged VPS is the cheaper option, with prices starting from $4.99/month. In fact, it was the one we chose to run the tests on for this A2 Hosting review. Despite being pocket-friendly, it’s not good for beginners. It has almost zero support. You’re basically on your own. 

At least you get root access privileges. You can install virtually any type of software or application. They equally give you the freedom to maximize your server’s performance. 

You also get dedicated resources - at least 1GB of RAM and AMD-powered CPU cores. On the downside, storage starts from 150GB and maxes out at 450GB. Same with the bandwidth - it ranges from 1TB to 4TB per month. Unless you get millions of monthly visitors, it’s nothing to worry about.

Reseller

A2 reseller hosting fully supports while labeling, which you can use to rebrand the services. Likewise, you can use the feature to adjust the pricing as you wish.  

You’ll get WHMCS that enables you to automate all billing. You can also issue your customers with an A2 cPanel dashboard for free. 

What’s more? 

You get customer support at no extra cost.

Resources are also on the higher side. You’ll receive a whopping 256GB of RAM alongside 60GB+ storage and dedicated CPU cores. Bandwidth, however, starts from 600GB/month, which is hardly enough for hosting multiple websites. 

Dedicated Servers

A2 Hosting dedicated server plans perfectly fit enterprises and developers that have demanding projects. Unlike in shared, VPS, and reseller, you get a standalone web server - all resources are entirely yours to use. 

You can install anything you want. You can use root access to run custom configurations, apps, and software. Still, you’ll find Webuzo for a one-click installation of popular widgets like WordPress, PHP, OpenCart, and more. 

Cost is the only downside. The price starts from $99.59/month for the lowest Sprint plan. While that’s high, you get 2 A2 Hosting dedicated IPs, 10TB+ bandwidth, and 1TB+ space. And the cherry on top - upgradable storage. 

The host also charges a $25 fee to downgrade or migrate a web server. 

All in all, you get priority support with a fast turnaround.

A2 Hosting Support 

You can access A2 Hosting support via chat, email, and a ticketing system 24/7/365. The first option is usually the best under any circumstance. 

Our experience, however, was horrible. It took almost half an hour for a customer agent to get online. Despite the lateness, the staff didn’t bother to apologize at all. He just went straight to giving unhelpful responses to all our queries. 

Even though opening a ticket did work, the wait time was disheartening. It took up to 48 hours to receive a response. Thankfully, this time the agent was friendly and helpful in addressing our issues. The person additionally made follow-ups to ensure that we’re okay. 

Customers often complain about this in their A2 Hosting reviews. Some even mention it as the main reason for parting ways with this host. It’s just better to use other alternatives. For example, the knowledge base has 100+ articles for addressing everyday challenges.

Comparison Table

You’ll find a lot of A2 Hosting alternatives on the market. They all offer unique features at affordable prices. We did manage to summarize some of them in the table below: 

As usual, the devil’s in the details. You should always look for round-the-clock support, uptime guarantee, and features. From here, it’s best to settle for the one that offers the best price. 

A2 Hosting Pricing

A2 Hosting has four pricing plans:

A2 Hosting offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you’re not impressed with the service, you can request a full refund. 

A2 Hosting Review - Verdict

A2 Hosting is a good and affordable option. It’s secure, comes with RAID-10 SSD storage, and supports unlimited websites.

As for the negatives, A2 Hosting user reviews often point out issues with the support team, the limited HTTPS connections, and the extra cost attached to server migration.

In the end, it’s all down to your budget. If you’re a pretty tech-savvy person in need of decently priced hosting, this is the vendor for you.