In the past one of the best hosting providers around, today A2 Hosting has slightly lost its shine. Pricing is above market average and performance is no longer top of its class. Still, reliability is decent and their attention to detail can be seen in prudent plan revisions on occasion.
Good for: Beginners-friendly, Small Business, International Website, Eco-friendly, Developers-friendly, or eCommerce Hosting
Website: https://www.a2hosting.com/
What We Think About A2 Hosting Hosting
A2 Hosting Pros
- Server locations in North America, Europe, and Asia
- Free website migration assistance
- Developer-oriented features even on shared hosting
- Custom performance optimizations tools available in higher shared plans
A2 Hosting Cons
- Steep price increase during the renewal
- Free site transfers mainly for cPanel installations
- HTTP/2 only on TURBO plans
- Lowest shared plan does not support automatic backup
A2 Hosting – Our Experiences & Findings
| Performance | All shared hosting plans at A2 Hosting come with free CDN and pre-optimized WordPress environment. However, advanced speed features like built-in cache, NVMe SSD, and Litespeed servers are only available in higher plans. |
| Security | A2 Hosting excels in security, offering top-notch measures to safeguard your website. Their platform boasts features like advanced web application firewall (WAF), free SSL, weekly backup, to ensure your data remains secure and your site impervious to common cyber threats. |
| Supports | A2 Hosting’s customer support is distinguished by its knowledgeable and friendly team, providing personalized assistance to ensure satisfying user experience. Help is avaliable via live chat and email. |
| Value for Money? | A2 Hosting is not cheap but reasonable priced when weighed against its feature offerings and long-term cost. At $2.99 per month (renews at $12.99/mo), basic shared hosting allows you to host 1 website with 24/7 customer support, a free domain name, and 30-days money back guarantee. Higher plans with better features like VPS starts at $2.99/mo, cloud hosting at $/mo and dedicated hosting at $109.99/mo. |
| What Other Users Think? | Overall user satisfaction with A2 Hosting appears to be mixed, with several positive aspects and some areas of concern.
Many customers appreciate A2 Hosting’s service quality and performance. Feedback often highlights their outstanding server speed performance and helpful customer support. However, there have been a few negative experiences reported, including issues with website hacking, server downtime, and longer wait times for live chat support on certain days. While these issues do not appear to be widespread, improvements in these areas could enhance user satisfaction. |
| Suitable for Newbies? | Yes, A2 Hosting is well-suited for beginners. Its user-friendly interface and helpful technical support team are particularly useful those new to web hosting. |
| Suitable for Small Business? | Small business owners will also benefit from similar features as newbies do at A2 Hosting. Additionally, its website builder is a plus for small business owners looking for rapid website building. |
| Suitable for Web Developers? | Web developers can benefit from the extended tools A2 Hosting has. Not all web hosts will offer such a wide variety of developer-friendly features that you can get with shared hosting plans including Apache Tomcat server, PHPng, IonCube, Python, and Node.js. The best part is that these come at standard shared hosting price with no additional cost. |
| Onboarding | Signing up with A2 Hosting can be a little bit daunting at first simply because they have so many plans to choose from. There is unfortunately also a bit of in-house jargon which may confuse users, such as “A2 Optimized†and “Turbo Servers†to get used to.
Users who are not very familiar with web hosting may have to spend some time delving through their knowledge base to get used to all of this along with their system. If you are familiar though, the experience shouldn’t faze you. At the end of the day though, remember that A2 Hosting offers free site migration, so why should you worry about the move-in process? |
Learn more, visit A2 Hosting online.
A2 Hosting Plans & Pricing
A2 Hosting offers various hosting solutions, including Shared, VPS, Dedicated, and Reseller hosting plans. Additionally, the company also provides specialty hosting services, such as Managed WordPress, Email, and Minecraft hosting.
When evaluating your options, it’s crucial to remember that many hosting companies offer substantial discounts during the initial signup period, but the pricing often increases significantly upon renewal. You should thoroughly research and compare the renewal prices, not just the introductory rates, to understand the true cost of hosting over an extended period.
To help you make a more informed decision, we have prepared two tables below which compare the initial signup and subsequent renewal costs of A2 Hosting services with several other providers that we actively monitor.
Review A2 Hosting Signup Price
| Web Host | Shared | VPS | Dedicated | Cloud | WordPress | Windows |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A2 Hosting | $2.99 – 14.99/mo | $2.99 – 99.99/mo | $109.99 – 529.99/mo | $ – /mo | $11.99 – 41.99/mo | $ – /mo |
| BlueHost | $2.95 – 13.95/mo | $29.99 – 69.99/mo | $89.98 – 139.99/mo | $ – /mo | $2.95 – 13.95/mo | $ – /mo |
| Hostens | $1.00 – 4.00/mo | $5.25 – 21.00/mo | $49.99 – 89.99/mo | $ – /mo | $ – /mo | $13.13 – 52.50/mo |
| Hostinger | $2.49 – 8.99/mo | $5.99 – 17.99/mo | $ – /mo | $8.99 – 29.99/mo | $2.49 – 8.99/mo | $ – /mo |
| Hostgator | $3.75 – 6.25/mo | $34.99 – 93.99/mo | $89.98 – 139.99/mo | $4.50 – 13.95/mo | $4.50 – 13.95/mo | $4.76 – 14.36/mo |
| Vice Temple | $3.75 – 44.00/mo | $28.00 – 418.00/mo | $165.00 – 2420.00/mo | $ – /mo | $ – /mo | $ – /mo |
Review A2 Hosting Renewal Price
| Web Host | Shared | VPS | Dedicated | Cloud | WordPress | Windows |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A2 Hosting | $12.99 – 29.99/mo | $8.99 – 239.99/mo | $199.99 – 749.99/mo | $ – /mo | $25.99 – 61.99/mo | $ – /mo |
| BlueHost | $11.99 – 28.99/mo | $79.99 – 142.99/mo | $179.99 – 259.99/mo | $ – /mo | $11.99 – 28.99/mo | $ – /mo |
| Hostens | $4.00 – 16.00/mo | $7.50 – 30.00/mo | $49.99 – 89.99/mo | $ – /mo | $ – /mo | $18.75 – 75.00/mo |
| Hostinger | $11.99 – 24.99/mo | $13.99 – 49.99/mo | $ – /mo | $24.99 – 64.99/mo | $11.99 – 24.99/mo | $ – /mo |
| Hostgator | $9.99 – 19.99/mo | $79.95 – 149.95/mo | $179.99 – 279.00/mo | $8.95 – 17.95/mo | $8.95 – 17.95/mo | $12.99 – 21.99/mo |
| Vice Temple | $3.75 – 44.00/mo | $28.00 – 418.00/mo | $165.00 – 2420.00/mo | $ – /mo | $ – /mo | $ – /mo |
Bottomline: Is A2 Hosting Right for You?
A2 Hosting offers a mix of positives such as diverse server locations and developer-friendly features (even in lowest shared plans) but faces steep renewal prices and specific technological limitations. This makes it a mixed bag for users who value initial cost savings and developer tools but may be concerned about long-term costs and performance upgrades.
One the cool hosting i had started with for my third blog. The plans they offer are super attractive and within the budget.
I can strongly recommend it to any level of blogger. But if I have to particular any one can begin their blog with A2Hosting to tryout their luck in blogging arena.
Along with offering the space, I like their turbo cache feature, which lets the blog load faster without installing any caching plugin. Instead I saved few dollars on Wp-rocket. I love it!
I would recommend A2 host to anyone who wants a reliable hosting service. I really like the support, which is very quick and helpful. The support team helped me fix some issues with my website in no time at all. All of the features they offer are perfect for me, and it’s great that there are so many plans to choose from, so you can find one that fits your needs perfectly.
I switch from SiteGround to A2 looking for better performance as advertised. But is one of my worst decisions in that topic. It impacted severely our website dropping visitors, raising bounce rate and SEO. We had 3000 visitors a day before switching and it dropped to approx 1000 a day. One year later we are still struggling to get back to where we were. I assume my part of not noticing the performance degradation before. But it was just an awful experience. I don’t desire this for anyone.
I had a question about my account billing, when I first signed up with A2 Hosting. I received an email reply to my website inquiry within 24 hours, from a real person who was actually answering my question (not just a copy/paste of a generic response). I then had a suggestion for how they could improve their invoicing, and again I received a response from a real person, who said they would be forwarding my suggestion to the appropriate department-and again, within 24 hours I received a response from that other department, thanking me for the suggestion.
Thanks, Jerry, I found A2 Hosting via your reviews here, and I am super impressed with them. BIG contrast to my former host (let’s just say there were issues of epic proportions). Lots of shenanigans were going on, and I was losing access. But even with these limitations, A2 came in swiftly and migrated everything — for free — like a breeze. Ahhh. What a relief to have landed at such a safe, intelligent, and chock-a-block-full-of-info web host. Excellent support access, and oodles of Knowledge Base articles to self-empower one’s online capabilities. Thanks to all!
Once again the A2 team have helped us. We had a problem transferring a website from another host and the migrating team did a very fast and efficient job in sorting it out.
Wow. I have never had a switch of web providers go so smoothly! I kept waiting for the disaster as per usual. It was seamless. I am just in disbelief. I have found my new home and think I will be here for a long long time!
3 WordPress websites (2 as subdomains) transferred from old service to A2.
BOOM..everything works. My blood pressure has returned to normal! Thank you!
I like to prefer people to buy a2 hosting because of some good features like regular site backup, money back guarantee, a2 optimized features and the speed is quite good but there are something which a2 hosting company can improve to do well in the market.
First: the live chat session takes sometime 30-40 minutes of waiting. And customers are always in hurry so company should look into it.
Second: sometime when we try to open a ticket and resolve the queries may take upto 24-48 hours of replying which I personally felt very frustrating. So company should look into it.
Third: speed is good but not excellent someone can rely upon.
So this is my honest review of a2 hosting.
Buying from A2 Hosting: I wish the WHOIS privacy service had been broken out as a separate line item from the domain registration itself on the purchase website and the invoice, so I could have seen what I was paying for. That would have avoided confusion, and required fewer Support tickets.
Beverly V. did a good job explaining the situation. She shouldn’t have had to if the A2 Hosting purchasing and invoice process were in any way sensible.
I’m using A2Hosting from a long time and I’m very happy with their hosting. They have good speed and nice customer support. I shifted from iPage to A2Hosting and that was my very best decision.
I’ve seen many users get speed issues in their hosting. But I’m not getting any speed issues. I get very good speed on my blog. It’s all about the optimization of the site. Please blame Hosting but that’s not only thing by which you can increase your speed, you have to optimize your site also for better speed.
Thanks –
I using this hosting for the last 2 years and I will recommend you to use A2 hosting because it’s speed and features are so simple to use.
If you want to do affiliate marketing with blogging, this is the best option for you.