A2 Hosting is a leading developer-friendly hosting provider that offers endless flexibility and all features you need to build a website. They offer the industry's leading anytime money back guarantee, so you can host your site on A2 Hosting, risk-free. They're also well-known for their ultra-fast and reliable web hosting.
A2 Hosting Review
A2 Hosting Review: Is It Worth the Hype?
A2 Hosting has been one of the most reliable hosting solutions out there that offers an anytime money back guarantee, and guru crew support around the clock. A2 Hosting was founded back in 2002, as a developer-friendly hosting company that offers all flexibility you’ll ever need to build a website exactly the way you want.
Every A2 Hosting web hosting plan comes with unlimited disk space and bandwidth. You can also choose from Windows or Linux hosting and install your preferred website script in a single click, including WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
One of the main things that makes A2 Hosting stand out is their anytime money back guarantee. For a full refund, you can cancel your account within 30 days. After the first 30 days, you’ll be eligible for a prorated refund for unused service.
A2 Hosting offers a wide range of hosting services ranging from shared, VPS, dedicated, and everything in-between (like managed WordPress hosting). Every hosting account is also eligible for a free site transfer by the friendly A2 Hosting support team. For the absolute fastest web hosting experience, you can even choose their exclusive Turbo server option.
- High performance turbo servers
- Free SSD
- Two great operating system options
- Anytime money back guarantee
- Regular price $7.99 / mo but our users pay $3.92 / mo!
- Get started with A2 Hosting today!
A2 Hosting Cheap Hosting Review
A2 Hosting’s cheap hosting is an affordable solution for beginners and entry-level websites. Their cheap hosting (also known as shared hosting) plans are based on the number of websites you can host on it.
With cheap hosting, many websites will share a single hosting server. While other A2 Hosting users can’t access your website stuff, you share resources like physical hard drives and RAM, which makes the service cheap and affordable.
With every cheap hosting plan, you get a free SSL certificate by Let’s Encrypt for enhanced website security and protection. The Let’s Encrypt protection is set up automatically on your domain without having you to go through the tedious process of manual configuration.
If you need a much better solution but don’t have the budget to afford VPS, you can choose one of their cloud hosting plans. The cloud hosting plans are available from $15 to $25 for up to 1GB RAM. With cloud hosting, you can choose your preferred Linux OS, pay only for the resources you need, and get administrative-level access for managing your website and hosting account.
Whenever you need assistance, you can get access to their extensive knowledge base consisting of tutorials and recommendations you’ll find immensely helpful.
- cPanel control panel
- Free SSL and SSD
- Two great operating system options
- Anytime money back guarantee
- Regular price $7.99 / mo but our users pay $3.92 / mo!
- Get started with A2 Hosting today!
A2 Hosting Dedicated Hosting Review
For a high-traffic website, A2 Hosting’s dedicated hosting could be the best choice. With dedicated hosting, you get a complete server for your website, which gives you much more control over the server and the operating environment.
A2 Hosting provides three management levels of high performance dedicated server hosting designed for two different types of users.
- Unmanaged fully customizable plan with optional cPanel license.
- Fully managed with free cPanel control panel and without root access.
- Fully managed with free cPanel control panel and with root access.
If you’re a developer or a system administrator who needs root level access to manage your hosting account, you can purchase an unmanaged flexed dedicated server. If you need a fully managed, dedicated server solution, you can purchase managed flex dedicated server.
- Choose your management level
- Developer friendly hosting
- Two great operating system options
- Anytime money back guarantee
- Pricing starts at $9.31 / mo!
- Get started with A2 Hosting today!
A2 Hosting VPS Hosting Review
With A2 Hosting, you’ll find three VPS hosting products built to meet your unique needs. Based on your skill set, preferred operating system, and requirements, you can choose from unmanaged VPS, managed VPS, or core VPS.
With unmanaged VPS, you can configure your VPS the way you want based on the amount of RAM, disk space, and data transfer. Your VPS also comes provisioned with the Linux OS you want to use. That way you only need to pay for the specific amount of resources you’ll need.
Managed VPS plans, on the other hand, allow you to use either Windows or Linux OS. All Linux hosting plans come with cPanel control panel for managing your hosting account. With Windows hosting plans, you get a Plesk control panel for account management.
A2 Hosting also offers core VPS, which is the best solution for users who want managed VPS hosting with root access. The core VPS delivers the best of both worlds: managed and unmanaged VPS hosting.
No matter what your management requirements are, your VPS will be hosted on their high-performance SwiftServer platform. Your VPS servers are also backed by 99.99% uptime commitment. As the company offers an anytime money back guarantee, you can give the service a try completely risk-free.
- Both managed and unmanaged options
- Perpetual security
- Configure VPS the way you want
- Choose your data center location
- Pricing starts at $5 / mo!
- Get started with A2 Hosting today!
A2 Hosting WordPress Hosting Review
If you’re looking for a fast and reliable WordPress hosting service that comes at an affordable price, then A2 Hosting could be the best choice for you.
Unlike other hosting providers, A2 Hosting offers both shared WordPress and managed WordPress hosting services.
Obviously, shared WordPress hosting is the most budget-friendly for beginner users. But if you need to create a staging site instantly, and want a free Jetpack personal license, easy default WordPress backups and WP-CLI pre-installed, then their managed WordPress hosting is the best bet for you.
All WordPress hosting plans come with WordPress setup right out of the box along with Let’s Encrypt SSL.
Regardless of the plan you choose, your account will get the free HackScan protection to create an extra shield of defense for blocking hacks.
- Shared and managed WordPress hosting available
- Staging site included
- Easy WordPress backups
- Free Jetpack Personal license
- Regular price $7.99 / mo but our users pay $3.92 / mo!
- Get started with A2 Hosting today!
A2 Hosting Reseller Hosting Review
If you want to add a complimentary hosting service to your web design and development portfolio, you can consider A2 Hosting’s web hosting reseller program. All plans come with a WHM control panel and a free eNom reseller account.
With an eNom reseller account, you can resell domain names to your customers. With a Silver level or higher plan, you get free WHMCS that enable you to manage every aspect of your customers’ hosting accounts.
Your reseller account is fully white labeled so your customers will never know that they’re actually being hosted on A2 Hosting.
Besides a custom control panel, you can also offer free custom nameservers which further allow you to rebrand your hosting services.
- WHM control panel
- Free eNnom reseller account
- Optional WHMCS access
- Both Windows and Linux hosting available/li>
- Regular price $19.99 / mo but our users pay $13.19 / mo!
- Get started with A2 Hosting today!
Features
(5.0 / 5.0)A2 Hosting is well-known for their ultra-fast and reliable WordPress hosting, and guru technical support. It is an excellent choice for webmasters who need 99.9% uptime guarantee and plenty of room to scale.
After trying their hosting plans, here’s what we liked about A2 Hosting’s hosting:
Blazing fast web hosting
You have the option to host your site on A2 Hosting’s turbo server, which provides a drop-in Apache replacement that loads pages up to 20 X faster than traditional hosting.
Free SSD
All plans come with free SSD storage, which has been proven to boost your site’s performance.
Two great OS options
No matter your hosting options, you can choose from Linux or Windows operating systems.
Anytime money back guarantee
In addition to their 30-day money back guarantee, they also provide an anytime money back guarantee. That means after the first 30 days, you’ll be eligible for a prorated refund of any unused services.
Performance
(3.0 / 5.0)A2 Hosting Speed Tests and Uptime Guarantee
Choosing a reliable web host is the first step towards making your site ridiculously fast.
To test the performance of A2 Hosting‘s hosting servers for our A2 Hosting review, we’ve created a test site with WordPress, using the default Twenty Eighteen theme and dummy content for theme development, including images.
We used 3 different testing tools – Pingdom, Load Impact, and Bitcatcha – to see whether A2 Hosting lived up to their promise.
According to our Pingdom’s website speed test, we found that our test site loads in just under two seconds for a user based in New York. That means the site is faster than 84% of all tested sites.
We also wanted to analyze whether A2 Hosting could handle a traffic surge during peak load.
For our traffic surge test, we used a popular testing tool, Load Impact, and sent some virtual users (VU) to our site. They gradually built up to 50 visitors at a time to see how the server handled it.
In the chart below, you can find blue (VUs active) and green lines (VU load time) which represent the number of virtual visitors sent to the testing site and the time it took to load the web page for the respective number of users on the site.
Our test site performed consistently until there was around 40 visitors on the site. It slowed down for a while and then returned to normal.
A2 Hosting Server Response Time
From the above two tests, we’ve analyzed how our site performed, and also recorded the uptime and response time. In those tests, we loaded all the content of our web page, including images (which can also have an impact on page load time). This makes those tests slightly inaccurate when measuring a server’s response time.
To test the A2 Hosting server’s response time, we’d have to conduct a more accurate test by ignoring the content of our site.
We decided to run a test using a tool called Bitcatcha, which works a bit differently from other website speed testing tools. With Bitcatcha, you can analyze server response time around the globe by ignoring the content of the site.
It averages the loading speed from eight different global locations: New York, LA, London, Brazil, India, Singapore, Japan, and Australia. The speed for each location is measured three separate times, and then the results are averaged.
With this test, we’d get a broader overview of how our server responded globally to the page requests.
Here are the results:
The response time was particularly great in the United States. However, it was comparatively slower in Asian countries.
Support
(5.0 / 5.0)A2 Hosting Customer Support
A2 Hosting’s guru crew support team is available to assist you with any questions you have, 24/7. You can contact the technical support team via phone, live chat, or email.
A2 Hosting has a vast knowledge base that helps you learn how to host, develop, and maintain your website with ease. It also helps resolve any problems you may have with your hosting account.
The support team can also help you with free site transfer to your hosting account from a competing hosting provider. All you have to do is to contact the support team and request a free site transfer.
Ease of Use
(5.0 / 5.0)A2 Hosting provides both Linux and Windows hosting.
All Linux hosting plans come bundled with a cPanel control panel that lets you easily manage your hosting account, including your hosted domain names, site files, databases, and more.
With Windows hosting, you get Plesk, which is an alternative to cPanel for managing your hosting account.
Pricing
(4.0 / 5.0)A2 Hosting Plans and Pricing
No matter which of A2 Hosting’s hosting plans you’re choosing, you’ll get a 99.9% uptime guarantee along with 24/7/365 guru crew support.
To make it even better, they’re offering our users an exclusive discount if you use our A2 Hosting coupon code.
When you’re starting out, you can choose their shared hosting plan. As your need evolves you can upgrade to a higher plan.
PLAN | DISK SPACE | BANDWIDTH | PRICE |
Shared Hosting Lite | Unlimited | Unlimited | $2.99 / mo. |
WordPress Hosting Lite | Unlimited | Unlimited | $11.99 / mo. |
Unmanaged VPS | 20 GB | 0.5 TB | $2.99 / mo. |
Unmanaged Dedicated Flex Server | 2 x 1 TB | 6 TB | $105.99 / mo. |
Reseller Bronze | 60 GB | Unlimited | $17.99 / mo. |
FAQs
Having helped thousands of users choose a web hosting plan and start their websites, we’ve answered just about every question you can think of. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about A2 Hosting:
Why should I choose A2 Hosting to host my site?
A few advantages of hosting on A2 Hosting over its competitors are:
- You get free SSD storage with every plan
- Choose from Linux or Windows hosting
- Anytime money back guarantee
- 99.9% uptime commitment
- Free site migration
Which A2 Hosting plan should I get?
The answer depends on your individual hosting needs. When you’re just getting started with a brand new website, we recommend starting with A2 Hosting’s shared hosting plan. As your need evolves, you can easily upgrade to a higher plan.
Where are A2 Hosting’s servers located?
A2 Hosting exclusively owns all their web hosting servers. Their data centers are located in Michigan, Arizona, Amsterdam, and Singapore.
Can A2 Hosting handle high traffic?
A2 Hosting can most definitely handle high traffic. If you’re hosted on a shared hosting plan and consume more resources than you’re allowed to, you’ll be asked to upgrade to a higher plan.
Can I upgrade my A2 Hosting plan later?
Yes, it’s highly recommended to start with a smaller plan and upgrade it as needed. A2 Hosting makes it very easy for you to upgrade.
Does A2 Hosting offer a month-to-month payment option?
Yes, A2 Hosting offers a month-to-month payment option. The best thing is that you don’t have to pay any setup fees even if you’re selecting a month-to-month payment option. That being said, it’s worth noting that they offer a significant discount for longer-term deals.
Do I have to register my domain name with A2 Hosting?
No, you do not necessarily have to register your domain with A2 Hosting. You can use Godaddy, NameCheap, or any of your preferred domain name registrars.
Do I really get unlimited resources with A2 Hosting’s hosting?
Even though the plans are advertised as “unlimited” disk space and bandwidth, the reality is that they’re not actually unlimited. It simply means “unlimited” usage based on the Terms of Service of the company.
If you’re running a small website or blog, there’s nothing to be concerned with because you’ll get enough system resources to operate it. If you exceed usage, you’ll be requested to reduce your usage or upgrade to a higher plan.
Does A2 Hosting offer free SSL?
Of course, A2 Hosting offers free SSL with all of their plans.
Do I need to purchase the addons that A2 Hosting is offering me?
No, you do not need to purchase any addons when completing your order. You can always purchase any addons later, if needed.
A2 Hosting vs Other Hosts
Wondering how A2 Hosting stacks up against other web hosting companies? See our side-by-side comparison to see for yourself.
Final Recap
A2 Hosting is a well-known web hosting provider due to their ultra-fast and reliable hosting, and guru technical support. It’s a developer-friendly hosting provider that provides you with all the flexibility and features you need to build a website. Whether you’re a small website owner, a startup that anticipates growth, or a developer, you’ll find A2 Hosting’s plans immensely helpful.
What we really like about A2 Hosting is that they provide endless possibilities to choose a customized hosting platform for your individual needs. They also offer the industry’s leading anytime money back guarantee, which gives you peace of mind when subscribing to a hosting plan.
If you’re looking for a blazing fast and reliable web host that offers excellent customer support, A2 Hosting could be the best bet for your needs.
- High performance turbo servers
- Free SSD
- Two great operating system options
- Anytime money back guarantee
- Regular price $7.99 / mo but our users pay $3.92 / mo!
- Get started with A2 Hosting today!
1. My hosting service was suspended due to extreme incompetence on the part of their billing department which claimed non-payment of an invoice that did not exist.
2. After the invoice was created and immediately paid; 24 hours later, the service has still not been restored nor has any update been provided.
3. This is the second time in as many years that my hosting got disrupted and all my sites were down for more than 24 hours for no fault of mine.
4. The promise of “99.9% uptime commitment” appears to be just an advertisement gimmick.
5. I’ve been their customer for 6 years now but it seems to mean nothing to this hosting company.
6. They have a service number that just keeps you on hold and plays music for 6 minutes before informing you that no one is available to take the call (despite it being regular office hours).
7. Words fail me to describe my extreme disappointment at the quality of service offered.
8. They just leave the customer hanging!!
Hey James, that’s sad to know. Sorry for the inconvenience. You may check out our recommendations in this complete web hosting guide and we hope it helps you find the best hosting for your site.
I have used A2 hosting for about a year. And they limit your resource use and they BLOCK your service for a site if it uses a lot resources. They do not tell you what resource use or anything, they JUST BLOCK your service.
Fixing it is mission impossible. I started with shared, they recommended me to UPGRADE to VPS: BUt the same result. They KEEP blocking my service.
I added WAF and CDN with stack path. But A2hosting don’t have whitelisted the stack paths IPs, so they BLOCK your service anyway. Making them Whitelist the IPS takes days.
Then unblocking the service take an additional day! SO MUCH Downtime!
***************AVOID AT ALL COSTS*******************
Companies response to problem resolution is completely non existant.
When they do reply often it is done so with scarcasm and insults. There are few few technicians within their system that are ok, professional, however this company has an overall approach towards the client that is insulting.
Often it takes 4-6 hours, of not 12-24 hours before they reply. All of this time our site may be down or our emails are non operational
If your company can afford to simply be placed in a que, waiting for one of their tecnicians to decide to resolve your disaster then this is the company for you.
If you need your site up, emails operational and have any expectation of a professional response, or any response for that matter that I highly recommend that you find another hosting company
I agree with many of the reviews here. Their server goes down and it takes days to get back up. But I can understand things like that. What drove me nuts was the unbelievably incompetent support. I begged them for help but all I got in return were replies that sounded like they came from a robot that didn’t understand my problem. After many agents, finally one replied to my specific request, so I replied back with some info to help him solve the problem. 2 days later, instead of an answer, I got the old stock reply that since they haven’t heard from me in 48 hours they assume the problem is resolved. I almost pulled my hair out. I’ve never been ignored and treated like this by any company. I’ve demanded my money back. I expect to hear from them again in 48 hours that everything must be resolved.
Server is down every week , the worst hosting company i ever used. I used them for almost 3 years but they had down time problem again, again and again. You can check their server status before u join. Dont recommend at all.
Do NOT recomend.
It impacted me with 3x slower load times, bounce rate was 300% higher, the visitors drop within a month to half.
Service just awful and 3 days downtime by switching from SiteGround to A2. (Never Again!)
The truth is that they’re shared hosting accounts and even, dare I say, their reseller accounts are not fit even for the most basic of WordPress websites. Sure, if your site just sits there, and serves pages, no problem. But if you need to do any kind of developing, you’ll be throttled in a heartbeat. And speaking of heartbeat, when you do indeed get throttled and your site goes down for a day off and on, until whatever arbitrarily low CPU usage limit you hit is cleared, they’ll say that you need to disable the heartbeat API, and to optimize your site. While that is excellent advice and I highly recommend that to any developer out there, that’s not the cause of the problem. What’s causing it is by saving pages in WordPress, MySQL spikes up. It’s unavoidable. It’s just WordPress. And if you use a robust theme like Divi which I use, a single page save will spike MySQL past their limit and you’ll be throttled. Then when you say, “but I’ve disabled heartbeat, removed unused libraries, disabled WooCommerce cart fragments, etc, etc.” They’ll say to you, “You should seek help from an expert developer or upgrade to a VPS”. Not helpful. So bottom line…. For WordPress websites, there are a ton of good hosting alternatives out there for basic and advanced needs. Don’t even try with one of their shared plans, you’ll be sorry. WPEngine out of Austin is a great choice for clients with single websites. And if you have many sites and insist on sticking with A2, don’t settle for anything less that a full on VPS with min 4-6GB ram and maxed out cores. (approx $100/mo).
I moved all my domains, web services to Asphostportal. Their service becoming more unreliable. I have 5 websites with them, 3 for ASP.net site and the other subdomains for WordPress. Their server crashed and been down for more than a week. They are unable to recover the files, support is virtually non existent, chat support is joke. The never answer your phone call, maybe someone will answer, but after an hour or so, you get disconnected. I really disappointed with their service. Unbelievable!
do not trust in any way what they say about 99.9% Uptime the server go down all the time 1 time a week…. we was whit them for 2 years and we always had problems and they dont care at all of what you are loosing….. trust me and avoid this provider
Transferred 10 sites over to them yesterday and 5 to go.
Speed is ok but support is diabolical 2/10.
Clear and easy server (Tomcat) configuration with quick deployment and low starting prices. Prompt reply from technical department showing concern and giving the feeling that one can rely on them.
Working with A2 Hosting is always a pleasure. They get your answers in a timely manner. Thank you.
You Have to experience yourself to believe on how good the a2hosting service and support really is
Support fast and Very good, A2hosting value 5 stars
Support is wonderful! They were quickly trying to get me over to my new swift server! I really appreciate how seriously they were taking my request for ASAP switching over as I have an anxious client that wants my site up ASAP!
Customer Service means everything when it comes to services one depends on. In this regard, A2hosting excels. Support (both tech and billing) has always been friendly, efficient, and responsive. The whole feeling of the group at A2hosting is one of cooperation and high standards.
I give this company highest marks — on customer service and on every aspect of web-hosting, speed, reliability, cost, available plans, and, most of all, that one feels valued as a customer — it’s not “just words,” they do just what they promise!
Switched our small Church WordPress website to A2. Whole process took less than a day with A2 doing all the migration work for free. Installation of Let’s Encrypt ssl certificate amazingly easy. Very pleased customer!
Good for wordpress users, fast server, and offer free SSL. They transfered over all my cpanels and email from other hosting fast and efficiently.
Great support, with fast and accurate replies, thank you
A2 has been super helpful in my early days… Quick support from very nice people. A+ all day long!
Awesome support. My query was solved in 2 hrs. My query was attended in 90 secs on phone that’s awesome
A2 hosting is extremely comprehensive and detail oriented. Support is almost always immediate, with clear and precise explanations.
Great hosting and Great support.
A2 is the best in the business!
A2 hosting has the best support and migration team in the business. Because of the nature of my primary site and 11 add-ons, I knew the migration may not be easy, and it was not. However, between the migration and support team the problems were over come quickly and I’m up and running. Communication was excellent. I was quickly kept informed by way of e-mail every step of the way. Their explanations and instructions were clear and very easy to follow. I have already moved two clients over to A2 and will be moving more to A2 in the near future. I could not be more pleased with their service and I look forward to a long relationship.
Incredibly fast support, detailed replies within minutes or even seconds. After upgrading from swift to turbo shared hosting, my webpage loading speed exploded from 5 seconds to less than 1 second in 10 countries….I was blown away!