A2 Hosting Review | Is It Best for Your Site?

A2 Hosting’s any-time money-back guarantee is a major pro, but unfortunately, that doesn’t make up for the fact that A2’s prices can be on the expensive side. This is the reason we could only give this provider a 2.6 out of 5 overall in value for money. That’s definitely not a category to ignore – 88% of people we surveyed named pricing their most important factor when choosing a hosting provider.

Do The Pros Outweigh The Cons?

While A2 may not be the best value for money, it offers a ton of great technical features like unlimited storage in its shared hosting plans.

Go To A2 Hosting

Further Information

• Top Web Hosting Providers: Our comparative review of the best hosting providers on the market, including Bluehost, HostGator, and InMotion

Uptime isn’t A2 Hosting’s “wow” factor, but this provider still covers all of the necessary bases to provide a standard service. Basically, A2 Hosting’s uptime will never leave your site behind the curve – it’s just average.

A2 Hosting claims 99.90% uptime, which translates to just under nine hours of downtime per year. From what we’ve seen, the provider actually performed even better, with an average uptime of 99.95%. Both of these are impressive figures given that 100% uptime is impossible to achieve, and no hosting provider can promise it.

However, the most competitive uptimes are in the 99.97-99.99% range, so A2 Hosting is pretty middle-of-the-pack in this area. If uptime is your top priority, it’s worth learning more about HostGator, which offers 99.99% uptime.

Load speed is another factor to consider when choosing a hosting provider. It’s an important one, too, since just over half of the visitors will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. In terms of hosting types, A2 had the best performance in dedicated hosting with a score of 4.3 out of 5. This isn’t that surprising considering that with dedicated hosting you get significantly more resources at your disposal. 

To ensure great load speed, A2 Hosting provides easy Cloudflare setup from your cPanel control panel. Cloudflare is the Content Delivery Network (CDN) recommended by A2 Hosting, and you can choose between its “Free” and “Premium” tiers according to your needs.

Give Me A One! Give Me A2!

A2 Hosting has decent uptime and performance across all of its hosting types, especially dedicated hosting. Try it out today!

I Want To Go To A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting offers six different types of hosting: Shared, WordPress, VPS, Cloud, Dedicated, and Reseller. It can be overwhelming trying to decide which type is best for your site, so we’ve outlined the basics of each type below:

• Shared hosting is the most affordable and beginner-friendly type of hosting, but if you have plans to scale your site, you’ll eventually outgrow it. A2 Hosting’s shared plans averaged 99.95% uptime in our research. Prices start at $2.99/month.
• WordPress hosting is tailored to WordPress websites and blogs, so if you already have a site with WordPress or want to create one, this is your best option. A2 Hosting has both shared and managed WordPress plans to choose from. Prices start at $17.99/month.
• VPS hosting is great for small business sites. It goes beyond the basics of shared hosting, but isn’t as expensive as dedicated plans. A2 Hosting’s VPS plans averaged 99.95% uptime in our research. Prices start at $6.59/month. 
• Cloud hosting is great for scalability and flexibility. Your website is stored on multiple servers, meaning you can pull resources from a variety of different places. This makes it perfect if your site experiences hikes in dips in things like traffic. Prices start from $6.59/month.
• Dedicated hosting is the most expensive, but also the most scalable and powerful type of hosting. A2 Hosting’s dedicated plans averaged 99.94% uptime in our research. Prices start at $109.99/month.
• Reseller hosting means that you rent hard drive space and bandwidth from A2 Hosting, but unlike every other hosting plan, it doesn’t stop there. You would then rent that space to a third party (for example, to a small business) as if you were the hosting provider. Reseller hosting is only necessary for aspiring web hosting companies or developers. Prices start at $24.99/month.

A2 Hosting Features

Every A2 Hosting plan comes with a free cPanel control panel and SSL certificate. You’ll also always have the option of free site migration, which is pretty generous considering some providers charge over $100 for that service! A2 Hosting also offers eco-friendly “green hosting” solutions, and special discounts for non-profit businesses. 

The real star of the A2 Hosting show though is its storage. No other provider gives you as much. Its largest dedicated hosting plan, the Warp 3 Turbo AMD, gives you 15 TB of bandwidth. To give you an idea, remember the Nintendo GameBoy? That little thing could only hold 64KB on it, meaning on the Warp 3 Turbo AMD plan you could have 15,000 GameBoys all running at max capacity on your site and still have space left over for a decently sized website!

As with all providers, other features vary according to hosting type and pricing plan. A2 Hosting gets an overall score of 4.3 out of 5 in our research for features, putting it third behind GreenGeeks and IONOS. But how are the individual hosting category features? Well, for shared hosting A2 scores 4.4 out of 5, but for VPS it only scores 3.5 out of 5. While VPS is the more versatile hosting type, shared is the more competitive option so we can assume A2 is likely to have features that bring in customers, like having unlimited bandwidth.

A2 Hosting’s three VPS plans and four dedicated plans offer a mix-and-match of root access, cPanel control panel, and full HostGuard management – you’ll definitely have what you need, but you may need to pay a little extra to take your site to the next level. 

All of A2 Hosting’s shared and WordPress plans include unlimited SSD storage and transfer, as well as a cPanel control panel. These are pretty standard inclusions across the industry. As you move up the pricing tier of the shared and WordPress plans, you’ll also get unlimited email accounts and automatic site backups.

Are A2's Features A One In Your Book?

If you like mountains of storage and plenty of plans to choose from, A2 Hosting is your kind of hosting provider!

Take Me To A2 Hosting!

Pricing is often the decisive factor when choosing a hosting provider, so we’ve collected all of the price ranges (and their renewal prices) into his helpful table so you can get a better idea of how much each hosting is going to cost you:

Overall, A2 Hosting scores a not-so-stellar 2.6 out of 5 for value for money in our research. While its prices are pretty standard for the industry with its entry plans, it has a real problem with ballooning out as the plans get bigger and bigger, especially for dedicated hosting. When you could be paying the equivalent of over $700 per month on hosting, you have to ask yourself if all that extra storage and power are really worth it. Dedicated hosting also netted A2 its worst value for money score with a rating of 2 out of 5.

Its best value for money score, however, comes from its VPS hosting category with a score of 2.9 out of 5. For reference, top competitors like Bluehost and HostGator have scores of 3.1 out of 5 and 3.9 out of 5, respectively.

Other providers, like IONOS, are cheaper than A2 Hosting, but you get what you pay for. And, in this case, investing a little more money into A2 Hosting means better customer service and a wider variety of hosting types to choose from. 

The best part of A2 Hosting’s pricing is its any-time money-back guarantee. Other hosting providers usually only offer refunds for up to one month, so A2 Hosting far exceeds the competition with this policy. That said, the money-back guarantee does come with the usual fine print: it won’t be honored if you violate the company’s terms of service, and it doesn’t cover domain registration, setup fees, and migration fees. You get a full refund for the first 30 days, and a prorated refund any time afterwards.

Like A Kid In A Candy Store?

A2 Hosting gives you so many options for plans and prices it can be a bit dizzying! Ready to choose your plan?

I'd Like To Try A2 Hosting!

In addition to the free SSL certificate included in every plan, A2 Hosting has created its own Perpetual Security initiative, which goes above and beyond to keep your site safe. As part of the initiative, your account comes with free HackScan protection, working 24/7 to prevent attacks on your site. A2 Hosting Perpetual Security includes a whole host (get it?) of other measures, from the virus scanning you’d expect to more exceptional stuff, such as: 

• Dual Hosting Firewall: In addition to an overall network firewall, your A2 Hosting account includes an additional server firewall to block unauthorized users. 
• Limited Server Access: Instead of passwords, A2 Hosting’s staff members use keys to access servers. Keys are more secure than passwords, because they function like a conversation between the computer and the server, rather than as a simple code (password) that anyone could potentially guess. 
• Server Hardening: This means strengthening network settings and tightening access control to increase the server’s security.
• Reinforced DDoS Protection: Distributed Denial of Service (or DDoS) attacks occur when a large volume of fake traffic gets sent to a web server, using up the server’s resources so that legitimate traffic is unable to access it.

With all of these measures in place, A2 Hosting’s servers are well-secured both on and offline.

We wanted to know how good A2 Hosting’s support really was. So we decided to put it to the test ourselves! Our team tried A2 Hosting’s email, live chat, and knowledge base and rated each one based on our experiences.

In our investigation, it was A2 Hosting’s knowledge base that really let it down – it was difficult to find answers quickly using its search feature. While it might be okay for simple queries, we don’t recommend A2 Hosting’s knowledge base for complex issues! Overall, we gave A2 hosting a help and support score of 3.5 out of 5, but its shared hosting help and support got the lowest score for this research category: 2.5 out of 5. Considering this is the hosting type that beginners are most likely to choose, it’s a shame A2’s knowledge center couldn’t be stronger.

A2 Hosting’s live chat support also failed to impress us. Common complaints from our users included blunt, short answers from support agents, impersonal messages, and information such as links or screenshots sent as answers without any context.

“The conversation felt quite impersonal, and the operator’s answers became quite brief – I felt as thought I was being a nuisance by asking so many questions.”

On the whole, we would’ve liked more detailed information from A2 Hosting’s live chat, and more engagement from the support agents to help answer our questions!

It’s not all bad, though. A2 Hosting’s email support exceeded our expectations, making it A2 Hosting’s best support channel. The email responses we received were informative, enthusiastic, friendly, and easy to digest – replies were quick, and usually contained helpful links to more information.

This member of our testing team summed up A2 Hosting’s email support perfectly: 

“The A2 Hosting representative replied very quickly (within 35 minutes) and answered my questions carefully and thoroughly, linking to resources where I could read more if I wanted to. The structure of the reply made it easy to match the answers with my original questions. At no point did I find the interaction too salesy – the tone was easy-going and friendly, and made it clear that I could get in touch for more information.”

At times we wanted more tailored recommendations, for example when suggesting a hosting plan, but overall we were impressed with A2 Hosting’s email support. We recommend starting with email if you need help, rather than using the live chat or knowledge base.

A2 Hosting also lags slightly behind in ease of use. Once you choose the hosting plan you’d like to sign up for, A2 Hosting asks you to either register a domain, use an existing domain, transfer your domain from another registrar, or use an A2 Hosting subdomain.

This section doesn’t mention the price it will charge for a new domain –  this is less than ideal, since you may get deep into the signup process before realizing that you’re overpaying for a domain.

During the sign-up process, you’ll be confronted with all kinds of add-ons (dubbed “Configurable Options”) to choose from. Unlike most popular web hosting companies, A2 Hosting doesn’t auto-select paid options that you have to manually uncheck, which is convenient. But this also means the good stuff won’t be checked for you, either. For example, remember to select the free tier of A2’s own website builder if that’s a service you’re interested in.

Another handy configurable option is auto-install for applications such as WordPress or Drupal. Prepping these in the sign-up process before you even get to the control panel is a great option that removes an extra step – a great help for new users.

More Information

• Read our full WordPress Review to learn more about the platform
• Find out how much to expect from domain name costs
• See how A2 Hosting fares in our ranking of the Best PHP Providers

You can’t really go wrong with A2 Hosting, but that doesn’t mean it’s the top provider for everyone. Overall, A2 Hosting’s score of 4.1 out of 5 in our rankings is well deserved, and it has some very specific strengths. 

We’d recommend A2 Hosting for you if lots of storage and security are important factors to you. Being online can be a lot like being in the African savannah, and A2 Hosting is in many ways like the rhinoceros; big, strong, and safe. However, it also might be a little slow and might get expensive to keep. We’d also recommend A2 if you’re interested in cloud or reseller hosting, as not many providers offer these types of hosting.

If you’re really not sure how you feel about A2 Hosting, its any-time money-back guarantee makes it a great low-risk provider to try out firsthand. 

If you do have strong hosting opinions, leave a comment and let us know what you value most in a provider!

Are You Ready For A2 Hosting?

With solid technical features and great security, A2 Hosting is a safe bet for users who value safety and size above all else.

Try A2 Hosting Today!