A2 Hosting Review

Last Updated: August 30th, 2018

Note: Some images are subject to copyright to A2 Hosting
Heard of A2 Hosting?
I think you must have. A2 Hosting was established in 2001 one as a small start-up which has now grew up to be a large hosting provider. They have their servers in USA-Michigan, USA-Arizona, Europe-Amsterdam, Asia-Singapore. I found one thing special in their servers, their servers have a anycast DNS by this the DNS gets duplicated in their global networks and reducing time to resolve DNS. We will soon check how does this host perform against competition.

We brought an unbiased review of A2 hosting by running our own test to state our experience along with stats.

A2 Hosting is the one of the fastest web hosting provider we have tested in this budget.

A2 Hosting does also have all SSD servers which decrease the load time. As this brand is optimized Cloudflare partner, hence they are optimized for Cloudflare CDN and you will also get Cloudflare Railgun for cheap rate.

Key Features

• Staging enabled.
• Free HackScan.
• Anycast DNS.
• Free and unlimited site transfer.
• Free Cloudflare basic or plus plan.
• All SSD servers.
• Anytime money back guarantee.

Performance

We have noticed that A2 Hosting has done lot to achieve a consistent load time. They have focused to use all SSD servers, which is faster than HDD based servers. You do get the benefit of using their anycast DNS to reduce your connection time.

When we were monitoring their servers had we got and response time of 390ms. You can increase your performance by implementing Cloudflare CDN. All the servers are A2 Optimized and preconfigured to get fastest page load, better security and better overall performance. You can see more here.

The lite plan get single 2.1GHz core and physical memory of 512GB and 4GB virtual memory. The swift and turbo plan gets dual 2.1GHz cores in case of memory swift gets 1GB physical and 8GB virtual memory whereas the Turbo plan gets 2GB physical and 8GB virtual memory.

Uptime

As I always say uptime matters, so I do test hosting providers in this field vigorously. You can see the present data in below link. A2 Hosting performed well in our test. We got an average uptime of 99.95% which ranks well in competition. More data can be seen here.

They have something called 99.9% uptime commitment. In any case if you face a downtime, they will provide you 5% of your paid monthly fee for each hour of downtime. It is good to see that a brand is giving such an uptime commitment. They also did a special thing to make your site be live while testing, you can use their staging feature to create a replica of your site and test plugins or themes on your duplicate site instead of live one.

Support

It need not be said that A2 Hosting has a very good and sound support team. They call their support team Guru Crew Support. In our test we found that the team has experienced support providers rather than noobies. You will get reply of your every support enquiry within few minutes with the appropriate solution to your problem. They’re available 24/7/365 through email, chat, phone or ticket submission.
We tried reaching them and as expected we got an instant support from them.

Pricing

Strategic pricing is very much important if you need to be a perfect provider. A2 Hosting has perfectly set the prices beginning at $3.92/mo. which includes unlimited SSD storage. All plans have an unlimited storage option and free website migration. They are also providing an anytime money back guarantee.

Shared Pricing

What’s good about A2 hosting

Staging Enabled

Live sites are not meant for experimenting any plugin, theme or code. This can affect your uptime. A2 hosting has staging enabled in all their hosting packages so that you can make a duplicate copy of your site, test as per your need and push the changes when stable.

Free HackScan

Are you always under a fear of you site being hacked? Well, every webmaster is, keeping this in mind A2 hosting has provided free HackScan in all its plan. This helps to block hack attempts, stops brute force attacks and secures the server using dual firewall and server hardening.

Free CDN and SSL

CDN and SSL has grown to be very useful over these days. A CDN makes sure that your site made fast by utilising multiple datacentres across the globe, it also makes the site secure by using their own WAF.

SSL makes sure that all the data transfer between your visitor and server is done in encrypted manner. A2 hosting provides you a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt.

A2 Optimized Software

A2 hosting does lots of in house testing to tune their servers for best performance. They auto tune their server application and make sure, so your site gets best out of the resources.

Anytime moneyback guarantee

A2 hosting has an incredible refund policy like no other host we reviewed. You can get your money back whenever you wish too. Let me explain with an example, suppose you purchased a hosting plan for 12 months but after 2 months you feel like to change the host, so you can get a refund of rest 10 months. Isn’t that great?

What’s not good about A2 hosting

Expensive than Average

Though A2 hosting has lot of great service and speed but the price remains high. A2 hosting do provides a one-time 51% discount but the prices go high on renewal.

Few Resources limited to higher plan

A2 hosting offers few features like A2 optimized site optimizer and WordPress LiteSpeed cache only to the Turbo plan which is priced higher. So, if you need to take full optimization then you need to buy the higher plan.

Our Verdict

A2 Hosting is one of the fastest hosting provider which we have tested and have a very consistent hosting. They do have some very special features, like staging so we can test new features on duplicate site instead of live. They do also provide free HackScan protection too. A2 Hosting is a sure go from us.

Bonus Info: Always use a CDN with your website, it helps to make it faster and secure. Free Cloudflare plan is also recommended.