A2 Hosting Review

A2 Hosting caught my attention a long time ago. Its presence in my ongoing search for the best website hosting company is only logical. A2 appears to be one of those geeky, friendly hosts that value high performance and reliability.

But is it really that good?

The A2 user reviews suggest it is, but I simply had to hook the company’s Swift shared hosting plan to constant live monitoring and check the uptime and speed on a default WordPress installation to draw conclusions; they follow in this data-driven A2 hosting review.

I also found reasons to bother the technical support team, read the terms of service, and checked the pricing structure of this green hosting provider for any hidden fees and upsells.

You can see the result in the lines that follow.

What Is A2 Hosting?

A2 Hosting is a global web hosting provider. Located in Ann Arbor (did you notice the two A’s there?), A2 is an environmentally-friendly company, with four data centers and a very open, friendly attitude.

Despite being around since 2001, this independent website host is not the most popular name in the industry, but this is not a disadvantage.

Truth be told, I am much more inclined to give a relatively small and promising company ago than a gigantic corporation. I have seen more than my fair share of large companies that can’t handle properly their massive customer bases.

What is more, certain big players tend to focus on flashy marketing and not on the things that truly matter, namely infrastructure and a robust hosting environment.

Point in case, while lacking the global recognition and the strong marketing presence of, say, HostGator and GoDaddy, A2 Hosting promises in a very somber and geeky way sublime support and impeccable infrastructure.

And you know what?

The numbers say that A2 delivers.

Check it out.

The Essentials – A2 Hosting Uptime, Speed, and Support

A2 clocks in decent times and provides good support for its growing customer base.

1. Excellent Uptime – 99.99%

Uptime is the name of the game. Having your website up and running is what hosting providers are paid for.

A2 does a good remarkable job in providing stability throughout the year.

So far, my basic WordPress site with the company has been online 99.9% of the time, which is exactly what A2 promises.

When I say promises, the hosting provider guarantees such reliability and gives compensation when it fails to deliver. A2 credits 5% of the monthly fee for every hour of downtime, which is a pretty reasonable policy.

All four data centers enjoy great security, sublime network connectivity, and several power supply mechanisms to guarantee smooth operations.

Average Uptime 2018 – 99.99%

Average Uptime 2019 – 99.98%

Average Uptime 2020 – 99.97%

Average Uptime 2021 - 99.99%

Average Uptime 2022:

• January – 99.99%
• February – 99.99%
• March - 99.98%
• April - 100%

Verdict: A2 keeps its promise of 99.9% uptime and even surpasses it.

2. Awesome Speed

• Response Time – 0.46s (8th)
• Fully Loaded Time – 1.00s (8th)
• Reasonable Under Load – 0.69s (7th)

Website loading speed is what makes or breaks an online presence. It may sound exaggerated but it is true, as both search engines and users penalize slow web pages.

Frankly, losing visitors and ranking due to bad performance is well deserved, as there are many easy optimizations and a multitude of blazing fast web hosts; delivering a poor experience is inexcusable.

A2 Hosting promises spectacular speed, and this is what you’ll get. I signed up only for the medium plan of the company, and my small WordPress site doesn’t enjoy the benefits of the Turbo accelerator.

All the same, the benchmarks I collected from three different sources (average values displayed here) are very respectable. And while the TTFB (time to first byte) ranks A2 at 8th position, the time it takes for the site to load completely is fast, just over a second. These are solid numbers, even though not the best I’ve seen while preparing my Hosting Tribunal reviews.

Over the last three years, A2 ranks consistently at 8th position in terms of speed.

Again, the biggest shared plan has a speed booster that caches the entire HTML content of a page and loads it in the blink of an eye. Additional tweaks like Memcached and OPcache reduce the MySQL and PHP response times, respectively, making the Turbo plan a lightning-fast hosting option, indeed.

Even without all these optimizations, the A2 server performed really well under load. I sent 50 virtual users who established over 250 concurrent connections. That’s a lot for a shared environment, but all queries were served back with remarkable consistency and speed.

In general, I must say that A2 Hosting has a very well configured hosting environment, suitable for sites with a significant amount of visitors.

Verdict: A2 Hosting has reasonable speed and can handle a significant amount of visitors.

3. Stellar Support

Do you remember how I told you that being somewhat smaller than the competitors can be a good thing?

A2 Hosting proves that point aptly.

The company has been growing ever since its inception, but the growth is steady and not forced. As a result, the hosting provider handles adequately the increasing number of customers without compromising its services and integrity.

All my interactions with the support team – mostly over chat, as you might have guessed – were quick, informative, and pleasant. The longest I waited for a chat to be picked up was about 2 minutes, and that happened on an early Saturday morning. All other chat requests were answered within seconds, and the representatives were very helpful and friendly.

That’s all good and dandy, but the truth is that you might not even need the A2 support team as long as you have some time and desire to learn.

The A2 Hosting knowledge base is a wonderful collection of helpful articles and tutorials, and it is constantly updated and expanded.

Lastly, there are regular blog entries that contain very useful information for new webmasters.

Verdict: Stellar support, backed up by the equally impressive knowledge base and handy blog entries.

The Pros of A2 Hosting

I will admit that A2 is a very likable hosting provider. If you like helpful geeks who know how to build reliable hosting services, and who are concerned with the environment, that is. But to not sound like a teenage girl smitten with love, here are the main advantages A2 Hosting has to offer.

1. Free Offsite Backups

Get yourself a coffee and ask anyone who deals with digital data about the importance of backing up everything; the coffee will help you sit through the inevitable barrage of arguments that will follow.

Backups are lifesavers and some hosting providers charge for the service but not A2 Hosting. The company makes automatic backups for free.

Now, free automatic backups are not that unique to A2 Hosting, but this host takes file recovery a step further. With a simple plugin, you can automate the process of creating local backups. i.e., copies of your website and its databases on to your personal computer.

This is an awesome and much-needed feature that I really hope to see in all web hosting providers. The more backups you have, the safer your data is. You cannot have too many backups and having an off-site restoration point is a fabulous insurance for the longevity of your site.

Admittedly, the feature is a paid add-on, but once your site starts growing you will appreciate its utility.

All the same, if you don’t want to burden your budget, the automatic backups got you covered.

2. Money Back Guarantee… Anytime!

A2 Hosting employs the standard 30-day money-back guarantee, which promises a full refund should you cancel your services within the first month of using them. However, if you wish to cancel a long-term plan before its expiry date you will be entitled to receive a prorated refund for the remainder of the hosting period.

This is something unique among the best web hosting providers. In the vast majority of cases, once the money-back guarantee period is over, you are not entitled to any refunds for premature termination of services.

A2 is very transparent and open about its practices and charges only for services that have been rendered.

3. Excellent Hardware

A2 Hosting is one of the companies that go for sustainable growth over flashy marketing.

Prospective clients can get a really good idea of what they are getting into by checking the plan details. Everything is laid out at a glance because the technology that powers the speedy and reliable A2 plans can make its owners proud.

All A2 servers are equipped with SSDs and SSD hosting is several times faster than hard-disk drives. With no less than 12-core CPUs and the ample 64GB of RAM, even the smallest servers of the company pack a punch.

Add to that excellent network capacity in every A2 data center, and the spectacular uptime and good speed are easy to explain.

4. Modern Technology

The A2 infrastructure is powerful and completely up-to-date.

HTTP/2 might not mean much to you, but to those browsing your site it would translate into better site performance across all platforms.

I mentioned that A2 Hosting looks like a geeky company, and you can see that by the presence of command-line options for WordPress, Python, and Ruby. All shared hosting accounts have access to the standard Linux MySQL database but also to Postgre SQL.

The good news for developers is far from over as Git, CVS, Subversion & Mercurial are also available.

5. Free SSL

SSL certificates used to be reserved for ecommerce sites, but for a few years now Google ranks all web pages with encrypted connection higher than those without. The search engine giant considers encryption important enough to display warnings whenever you browse toward an unencrypted site.

The Let’s Encrypt initiative is a direct result of this Google move. It was quickly supported and adopted by many organizations, including several top quality web hosts. A2 is one of them and equips all its shared plans with free SSL.

Best of all, the SSL is ready to use right out of the box. No need to worry about its installation or renewal.

6. Free HackScan and Enhanced Security

I probably should have made a section called FREE STUFF and rolled with it.

Then again, it would have become a massive wall of text, as A2 has plenty of features that fall within this category.

HackScan is a part of the robust defense system that protects all sites hosted with A2. It prevents malicious infractions from spreading and infecting more pages of the attacked site.

Before the hackers can reach the actual site, they would have to navigate through some serious brute force defenses, dual web hosting firewall, and hardened server defenses.

WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla users can rest assured that their respective CMSs will be up-to-date at all times, as A2 has the Patchman Security Tool in place to install new versions automatically. It can also detect and quarantine afflicted files and pages.

To round it up, A2 Hosting has regular kernel updates that keep its environment as secure as it gets at all times.

7. Free Migrations

I should have gone for a separate section with free features, indeed.

Besides free security checks, backups, SSLs, and prorated refunds at any time, A2 Hosting can migrate over your cPanel site free of charge.

All you need to do is sign up for A2, purchase the plan you wish, and request the migration team of the company to transfer over all your data from the host you wish to leave. This saves a lot of time and effort and normally encumbers absolutely no downtime. Until the operation is completed, your site will be loading from the old provider.

Once everything has been copied over to A2 and tested successfully, you can switch the hosts seamlessly by tweaking the nameservers of your domain.

Having your site moved by the technical support of the receiving company is the best way to make it happen. The main benefit of a migration service, besides the obvious time-saving element, is the added technical expertise.

Copying sites from one server to another is not quite like copying a file from one folder of your personal computer to another. More often than not, the servers of the two hosting companies are configured slightly differently. The tech support of the receiving company can account for the differences and troubleshoot whatever is necessary so that your site works smoothly and without any glitches.

8. Hosting Optimized for WordPress

Practically all shared hosting plans can host WordPress successfully, but, just like SiteGround does, A2 makes sure that the popular CMS performs at its absolute maximum. WordPress is installed within seconds with A2 optimizations that boost speed and security.

Speed is increased with caching and compression configured according to the A2 servers, while the security is enhanced through automatic security updates.

Developers can make good use of WP-CLI as well.

9. Excellent for Scaling

A2 Hosting is a great place to grow your website. The shared plans start at a low price point and scale up nicely toward a really powerful hosting package that can easily handle ecommerce sites.

Sheer computational power is not everything, though. In all likelihood, given that your site grows steadily, you’ll end up needing customizations that shared hosting doesn’t provide. A2 has all types of web hosting covered: cloud, VPS, dedicated, and reseller.

The smaller A2 cloud plans are akin to a low-end VPS. It costs $4.99 (just like the second smallest shared plan) but provides a speed boost and greater control. You get root access on the Linux OS of your choosing. Naturally, you can scale up or even go for a massive cloud hosting provider, but A2 hits a very sweet spot between access and price.

A2 VPS hosting is one of the best options for virtual servers out there. Powerful and versatile, the setup is secure, optimized for speed and reliability, and extremely developer-friendly.

Overall, A2 is a hosting provider that can take you from domain registration to thousands of visitors per week.

10. Green Company

A2 Hosting has been a green company for over a decade now. And I don’t talk only about the color scheme on its website.

The hosting provider has actively reduced its carbon footprint since 2007 and has already achieved 100% carbon neutrality. It also runs programs for planting trees and reducing the plastic used.

All in all, it is a socially responsible host who cares about the legacy it creates. Data centers require massive amounts of energy and cooling, and it is nice to see initiatives that negate the negative impact thousands of servers can have.

The Cons of A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting is a pretty sweet website hosting provider, but there are certain things that can be done better. None of them is a real deal-breaker but are worth mentioning.

1. Turbo Booster only in Biggest Plan

A2 displays here and there the 20-fold speed booster its hosting has, but the truth is that this extra optimization is included only in the largest of the three hosting plans. Admittedly, it kind of makes sense as sites using the biggest shared package is likely to be resource-heavy. They could certainly benefit from a speed upgrade.

Still, the alluring promise of incredible speed is prominently displayed on the A2 home page and looks quite like the upsell.

2. Intro Plan Is Limited

The smallest plan A2 Hosting has to offer is comparatively limited. It can host a single domain with no more than 5 databases and 25 mailboxes.

It is tailored for small, starting websites that don’t have many technical requirements and maintain a relatively low number of people behind the scenes. As far as intro deals go, I have seen much better.

A2 Hosting Plans at a Glance

Do We Recommend A2 Hosting?

Yes, we do.

A responsible, friendly, and geeky, A2 Hosting is a company focused on delivering excellent results above all. And it succeeds in doing so.

The Swift plan I tested for this review clocks in respectable speeds and the Turbo promises even better performance.

Splendid technical support, a good selection of hosting solutions that scale up nicely as the packages grow, and a solid knowledge base made my A2 Hosting review a breeze to research and create, and they also rank the company as one of the best hosting options out there.

Regardless of its relative lack of fame, the hosting provider is well-worth its spot among the best.

A2 Hosting at a Glance