A2 web-Hosting Full Review In 2021 - My Honest Opinion

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A2 Hosting is one among the oldest providers around. they're originally from Michigan and began in 2001 under another name (Iniquinet). Later on, in 2003, the name was changed to A2 Hosting.

On their website you'll read that 97% of their customers are satisfied which they promise “Up to 20x faster servers” – we’ll see later if their servers are as fast because the Road Runner (meep, meep) or whether A2 is more just like the Coyote. On top of that, their (first-term) pricing looks like a bargain, but what about the renewal fees?

That’s exactly why i made a decision to review A2 Hosting and tell you all about their products, prices, advantages and flaws.

Besides hosting plans, at A2 Hosting you'll get domain names too, and their prices are fair. for instance , a .com name will cost you $14.95 per annum . Among other extensions, you'll purchase: .com, .info, .net and .org domains. Country specific TLDs like .co.uk, .de, .fr, .es or .au aren’t available.

A2 Hosting is extremely popular for its shared hosting plans. Their renewal cost goes from $8.99 to $24.99 per month. It’s the one that the majority projects will need – unless you've got a site with huge traffic or need a special server setup, that is.

They also offer managed WordPress hosting plans. These are shared hosting packages that are optimized for WordPress, accompany some additional WordPress features (e.g. staging) and their support agents are WordPress experts. Managed WordPress hosting starts at $28.51 a month at A2 Hosting.

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It’s how to divide a server into smaller individual (sub)servers. this suggests that you simply can configure it to your needs and you won’t need to share resources with other clients. they're an honest match if you would like something in between shared hosting and a fanatical server. A VPS at A2 Hosting goes from as little as $5 a month to around $100.

You can imagine cloud hosting as a network of interconnected servers. So your website won’t be hosted on one server, but several at an equivalent time. they're an excellent solution for those expecting traffic peaks as you'll assign more resources as you would like them. they begin at $5 a month for 20 GB of storage and 512 MB of RAM – storage and resources are often increased.

But if your site is probably going to urge many thousands of tourists per month, you almost certainly need a fanatical hosting package. In other words, an entire server to exclusively host your project. These aren’t cheap, at A2 Hosting they begin at $120 a month.

If you've got clients of your own who require hosting, ready to " you'll opt-in for the reseller program where you’ll be able to sell hosting plans (without A2 Hosting branding) to your clients. These plans start at around $20 a month.

But during this A2 Hosting review, I’d wish to explore their shared hosting plans, so from now on, I’ll ask those in my analysis.

FEATURES
4.8
Powerful Tech That Hides behind Confusing Terminology
I’m relying on you to recollect that we’re talking a few hosting companies, so let’s all comply with call it “A2” from here on.

Anyways, making sense of A2’s exact features isn't an easy task. It seems that the corporate employs some very creative minds, and these guys gave a singular name to each little a part of the service. There are SwiftServers, Turbo Servers, Turbo Boosts, A2 Site Accelerators, special A2 Optimized software, and therefore the list continues.

Is a SwiftServer faster than a Turbo Server? may be a Boost better than an Acceleration? And as long as A2 is simply a number (and not a developer of hosting technologies), what tech is really running behind the scenes?

I’m here to sort it all out. Let’s start with the essential shared hosting plans. They’re all cPanel-based, meaning you'll easily access important features and use the favored one-click Softaculous to put in WordPress, Joomla, and other CMS (content management systems.) Cloudflare CDN are often easily integrated also .

I signed up for the primary plan, Startup, which is assessed because the aforementioned SwiftServer. Simply put, A2’s SwiftServers are basic, Apache-based servers. It’s a classic technology, but there are better ones available today.

A2 Pricing: shared Hosting Plan Includes ?

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Why Hosting Prices Vary From decide to Plan
Starting up a replacement website doesn’t need to be expensive. If you decide for a free platform like WordPress, there are only a couple of start-up costs to think about . These include paying for a website name, and signing up for a hosting plan.

Finding the proper hosting service and plan are often challenging as there are many options to think about . What’s more, price is probably going to play a serious role in your decision, since website hosting varies widely in cost. These are a number of the foremost crucial factors:

Type of plan. for instance, shared hosting is typically the most cost-effective sort of hosting, while dedicated plans are costlier.
A number of websites. Hosting quite one site on an equivalent plan will cost extra
Amount of resources. Different plans offer varying amounts of bandwidth and space for storing .
Managed or unmanaged.

 If you would like a managed hosting plan, you’ll usually pay quite you'd for unmanaged hosting.

Extra features. Hosting plans frequently offer additional features, which frequently affect their cost.

 These extras vary, but can include a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, Content Delivery Network (CDN), and more.

You can use this list of features to roughly predict what proportion a given hosting plan may cost. In short, the more sites, resources, features, and extras you’re after, the more you’ll pay. for instance, let’s check out some specific examples.

How Much you ought to Expect to buy Web Hosting (3 Case Studies)
In the following sections, we’ll take a glance at three example scenarios. for every one, we’ll found out a hypothetical (but common) situation, and discuss what quite hosting you’d want to seem for and the way much it might likely cost.

1. A First-Time Website Owner
Let’s imagine that you’re building your very first website, like a basic blog or personal portfolio. Either way, it won’t be very big, and you don’t expect tons of traffic, a minimum of not initially.

For this website, a basic hosting plan should be sufficient. You won’t require tons of space or resources, and you likely wouldn’t use many of the additional features offered by fancier plans. In fact, you’re probably best off with the only sort of hosting – a shared plan:

Prices for A2 Hosting shared hosting plans.

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Nearly every hosting provider offers shared hosting, and these plans are both popular and cheap. If you’re trying to find a one-website shared plan, you'll expect to pay under $10 per month. as an example , our own shared hosting is merely $7.99 per month for the Lite plan if you buy a year beforehand .

A2 Hosting has a vast and unmetered policy, if you employ too many resources, you’ll be asked to upgrade or to use fewer resources.

A2 Hosting has monthly, 12, 24 and 36-month deals – the above prices are for a 12-month plan. Obviously, the longer the deal (e.g. 36 months) the cheaper it gets. However, remember that you’ll be requested to pay the complete amount beforehand .

But let me tell you what each plan will get you:

Their entry plan, Startup, allows for less than 1 website and 100 GB of storage. Sadly, it doesn’t accompany the power to revive the backups that A2 Hosting keeps for you. Bandwidth and storage are unmetered.

With the Drive tier, you're allowed to host as many websites as you would like and therefore the storage is unlimited. The backup restore features are enabled too. It also comes with more resources; 1 GB of RAM memory and a couple of cores.

The main addition to the Turbo Boost package is its higher performance. Your server will work on HTTP/2, you’ll have fewer server neighbors and therefore the caching options (A2 Optimized Site Accelerator) are available. Caching plugins for WordPress, Magento and PrestaShop are included too.

The Turbo Max plans have twice the maximum amount resources (RAM and cores) than Turbo Boost.

At checkout, they provide a bunch of add-ons that you simply can buy separately. for instance , if you’d wish to create your own backups, you'll get 5 GB of backup storage for $1.99 extra a month. Paid SSL certificates, spam filters and CloudFlare (a CDN) also are available.

2. A Growing Website
Now, let’s say you’re already running a moderately successful website. It might be a blog with a faithful readership, or alittle to mid-sized online store. you'll have began with shared hosting, but you’re getting more traffic and consumption more resources than your plan can handle.

In this scenario, you’ll want to upgrade to something more robust. In most cases, Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting is that the logical next step. this provides you access to a virtual server that’s completely isolated, more resources, and sometimes performance-enhancing extras.

What’s more, VPS hosting plans are often even as cheap as shared hosting if you’re willing to manage your own server. However, this may require a particular level of technical expertise and spare time. If you've got both of these , you'll get VPS hosting for as little as $5 per month:

Prices for A2 Hosting unmanaged hosting plans.

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Of course, not everyone has the knowledge and knowledge needed to manage their own server. therein case, you’ll be more happy with a managed plan – which we’ll address within the final case study.

3. A Busy Business Owner
This scenario posits that you’re a busy professional, running a business site or a thriving e-commerce store. You believe your site to perform well consistently, but you lack the time and/or technical knowledge to form that happen yourself.

In that case, you’ll probably need a managed hosting plan, where your provider will lookout of the many vital tasks for you. These exact tasks will vary, but you sometimes won’t need to worry about optimizing your site, performing updates, creating backups, configuring your server, or keeping an eye fixed on security.

These services are often incredibly helpful, but it also comes at a better cost. you'll find managed plans for almost every level of hosting – shared, VPS, dedicated, etc. – and you ought to expect to pay a premium for them. As an example, our managed VPS plans start at $49.99 per month:

Prices for A2 Hosting managed hosting plans.

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For even more robust plans, like dedicated hosting, the difference are often smaller. Our unmanaged dedicated hosting begins at $119.99 per month, while the managed version costs $169.99. If you’re running a site popular enough to wish a fanatical server and you aren’t a developer, you’ll almost certainly want some help.

In the end, whether the value of a managed plan is worth it depends on your needs and goals, especially if you’re making an income from your site. However, managed hosting pays itself off quickly in saved time and convenience.

Support from A2 Hosting

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During the primary five months since we migrated the websites I opened another three support tickets with A2 hosting, which were a part of my tests. one among them was about the CPanel, which was unreachable at that point . After troubleshooting the difficulty , A2 Hosting found a drag with the CPanel, which they acted upon and glued within a couple of minutes. All support agents involved within the case were well informed and polite, and therefore the reaction time is extremely quick.

I also like their approach towards support tickets; once I reported the CPanel issue, it had been reachable from their side. They didn't simply revisit to me telling that it's working and closed the ticket, as unfortunately typically happens. They replied to me, asked me variety of inquiries to troubleshoot the difficulty and see why WE couldn't access the CPanel. And this is often what a hosting provider should be; a business partner which will assist you lookout of the technical aspect of your WordPress website, not just another business providing you with hosting space and bandwidth.

Pros of a2 Hosting 

Speed: As we’ll see afterward , A2 Hosting is one among the fastest providers I’ve ever tried.
Advanced features: Their higher plans accompany interesting advanced options like staging areas or a server-side caching system.
Uptime: they need improved their uptime rate since compared to last years’.
Server locations: you'll prefer to host your website in America (East or West Coast), Europe or Asia.
Unmetered storage and bandwidth: Your storage is unlimited (for the very best 3 plns), although your total amount of files can’t be quite 600,000. Bandwidth isn’t metered either.
Windows-based hosting: Unlike many other competitors, Windows-based servers are available.

Cons of a2 Hosting

On-demand backups paid separately: If you’d wish to use their on-demand backup system to make your own backups, you’ll got to purchase their add-on.
Confusing checkout: albeit they're not as pushy as other providers (e.g. iPage), their inspect is loaded with add-ons that you simply presumably won’t need (e.g. paid SSL certificate).
Concurrent HTTP connections: All shared hosting plans seem to be limited to fifteen to 50 concurrent HTTP connections to the server counting on the plan – this might not be enough for a few ..

When to Use A2 Hosting

If you're after a medium-priced provider that’s generous with storage and bandwidth, A2 Hosting may be a reliable choice.

On top of that, it comes with some features that similar competitors won’t offer, for instance , built-in server-side caching, staging areas and speed optimization plugins for CMSs like WordPress, PrestaShop or Magento.

I can imagine that A2 Hosting would be an honest fit new bloggers who need a reliable host, for little and medium-sized businesses who are after a significant hosting service, or digital solopreneurs (e.g. SEO consultants or WordPress developers) who need storage for his or her website and potentially their clients’.

It’s a very solid option for those looking to host a Windows-based project.

When to not Use A2 Hosting

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However, there are a few of limitations that make me reluctant to recommend A2 Hosting for larger projects. Having a concurrent HTTP connections limitation could also be a deal-breaker for those getting more traffic.

A2 Performance Tests

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Along with support, performance is one among the foremost important aspects of a hosting provider. Having the foremost advanced technology and features is pointless if your hosting provider can’t continue together with your website’s needs.

That’s why I’ve intensively tested A2 Hosting’s speed and uptime. Let me show you the results.

A2 Hosting Speed Test

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Slow websites aren’t cool, and a fast hosting provider is significant for supporting a quick site. As you'll imagine, your site’s speed is crucial for having better user engagement and lots of studies have correlated slow sites with lower conversion rates.

On top of that, Google and other search engines dislike slow sites. So even more reasons to possess a quick hosting provider.

For over a month, I closely monitored A2 Hosting’s speed (and that of other competitors) using tools like Pingdom, GTmetrix, and Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

I have to mention that A2 Hosting’s speed is impressive. As you'll see within the table above, they were one among the highest 3 providers in our tests and had an impressive performance.

Is This Industry Giant Still Worth Your Time?
Renowned hosting provider A2 Hosting has been around forever, but that doesn’t guarantee quality. Actually, the other scenario is far more common. Recent years have seen once-mighty names like GoDaddy and HostGator become the butt of the many a joke, and rightfully so – their services have declined to the purpose of absurdity.

Expecting little, as I usually do, I began to see what has become of A2 Hosting in 2021. is that the company using its considerable size and resources to the advantage of its users? Or is it just another uncompetitive service cruising on brand recognition?

After signing up and testing the hosting for a couple of months, I can tell you that there are still many things to love about A2 Hosting. It’s a particularly user-friendly service, and in some aspects, it absolutely rocks.

The A2 Optimized Plugin

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Next up is A2 Optimized, which supposedly grants you “6x faster page loads”. Ah, more magic! this point , we’re actually talking a few WordPress plugin that A2 developed itself. Kind of. It’s a plugin inspired by Sauron’s One Ring, one that brings other plugins together and within the darkness binds them.
Not that there’s anything wrong thereupon . You’ll get a pre-configured WordPress installation, and it'll already include important plugins like Jetpack and W3 Total Cache. While these are household names within the industry (and any WordPress user can install them themselves), it does take a while and energy to urge the work done.

It’s nice to ascertain A2 saving us a couple of hours of configurations and installations, and creating a platform that allows you to easily manage all the various plugins. Not “6x faster,” but definitely an honest thing.

Automatic Server Backups

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You’re a responsible adult, so you obviously know backups are important. Still, not all backups are created equal, and it’s important to know which sort has relevancy to you.

All A2 plans allow you to use the cPanel management panel to perform full on-demand account backups, and Softaculous itself are often wont to make on-demand backups of the CMS itself, be it WordPress or another.

What’s missing is that the choice to schedule automatic backups, as it’s very easy to forget to run them yourself. Or to easily be too lazy to try to to so. this feature is merely available within the more advanced plans, but it makes life such a lot easier.

A2 Uses a Tried-And-True Interface, So There’s No Funny Business
It’s not that tough to form an internet site hosting service easy to use. There’s actually an answer available on the market that’s been developed for this exact purpose. It’s called WHMCS, and it really just works.

It’s not the best , most beautiful user experience ever created, but it sure gets the work done. Because it’s pricey, many companies prefer to avoid it altogether, and instead develop “custom account areas.” 90% of the time, these are a horrible failure.

Luckily, A2 had no qualms about purchasing WHCMS and making your life an entire lot easier. The system takes care of everything, from signup and billing to account management and cPanel integrations.

Choosing Your Plan
Still, the foremost confusing a part of A2’s service comes before signing up. There’s an almost endless number of “plans” (Shared, WordPress, Python, Ruby, WooCommerce, Linux, CMS, CRM), but actually , they’re all the precise same shared plan.

With that in mind, and therefore the A2 Lexicon I’ve created for you within the Features section, I trust you to settle on the plan that’s right for you.

Activating Your Account with A2 Hosting
After choosing your plan, you’ll be transferred to the WHMCS a part of the service, where things are not any longer confusing. And yet, not confusing doesn’t necessarily mean easy.

Sadly, my payment was immediately canceled upon signup. Apparently, the “fraud alert” systems didn’t like me in the least – maybe because I test numerous hosting companies. Not knowing what to try to to , and with the service itself not lending a hand , I resorted to talking with support..

A2 Hosting Review: Do i like to recommend It?
Even if A2 Hosting isn't my absolute favorite hosting provider, it’s on the highest 5 needless to say . It’s true that it's some limitations which will make it not ideal for those looking to host really big projects. for instance , the HTTP concurrent connections might not be ideal for a few .

But it also comes with an entire bunch of perks for the worth you’ll pay:

Top speed because of their technology (e.g. SSD drives and server-side caching system)
Unlimited bandwidth
Generous storage
Reliable support
WordPress site owners will love their staging and speed optimization options
You can choose among 4 server locations (in 3 continents)
So if you would like to start out cheap (and have decent renewal prices), A2 Hosting may be a capable provider for those trying to find a solid host.

Connecting Your Domain and Installing WordPress

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Thankfully, after finally getting activated, the difficult part was behind me. Connecting my domain was a breeze, as WHMCS lists the plan nameservers within the clearest way possible, right the plan page. Just copy-paste them to your domain registrar and your domain and hosting are going to be connected in no-time.

Installing WordPress is simply as easy, because of the one-click Softaculous installer. Choose WordPress, enter your dream name and therefore the account details for your new website, and voila. the sole thing to stay in mind is that to enjoy all the pre-configurations A2 has already finished you, you ought to install the “WordPress – A2 Optimized” version, and not the bare one.

PERFORMANCE
4.7
Excellent Performance, Even on the essential Plans
We’ve been promised swift turbo-boosted servers. We’ve been promised performance to be 2x faster, then 5x faster, then 20x. Anything but instant loading would be a small disappointment at now .

So, what’s the verdict? While speeds aren't “instant,” A2 really delivers – as long as you select your data center wisely. There are four of them, one in Michigan (In the town of Ann Arbor , or A2, hence the name of the corporate . Mystery solved…), one in Arizona, one within the Netherlands, and one in Singapore.

Average loading speeds in my GTmetrix tests were 1.3s, which is particularly impressive once you consider that i used to be using the essential hosting plan, and not the turbo servers. Uptime tracked over two months is currently an ideal 100%, which is basically amazing.

Sucuri Load Time Tester

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Sucuri’s tool is employed to live loading speeds in multiple global locations, supplying you with a thought of how well your website performs worldwide. Thing is, it’s been a touch buggy lately, and a few web hosts actively block its requests.

I can’t say needless to say if this is often things with A2, but my Sucuri test results don’t make much sense otherwise. After running many tests and averaging the results, I got 4.285s for the fastest location, 5.05s for the slowest location, and a measly global average speed of 4.836. That’s really horrible, but GTmetrix and other users’ experiences tell a totally different story.

I present you one among these tests, but my suggestion is to not take it too seriously. the matter seems to be with Sucuri.