Name: AsmallOrange
Plans: Shared, Business, Reseller, Cloud VPS, and Dedicated.
Website: asmallorange.com
Summary: I do not recommend A Small Orange. Lots of flaws. Needs to be improved. This A Small Orange review will tell you what I think of them. As well as what other site owners think of them.
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A Small Orange is a web hosting company that was started in 2003. I have seen them grow a lot over the last 4 years so I figured I would do a A Small Orange review. Tim Dorr originally started this company. Douglas Hanna then acquired them in 2010. He was a manager at Hostgator for years. I should note that A Small Orange is a company that is also owned by EIG, which owns a number of different web hosting companies like HostNine, BlueHost, and Site5. Generally, I don’t support most companies that are run by EIG.
In this review, I am going to discuss A Small Orange’s features, uptime, performance, and customer support. At the end of the review, I will either recommend them or point you to another company.
A Small Orange Features
Shared Plans
A Small Orange offers 4 different shared hosting plans. The prices for these plans are $2.92, $5, $10, and $20 a month. I do like how they don’t use the words unlimited bandwidth or anything like that. Instead, they will specify how much storage you get per plan; 500 MB, 5 GB, 15 GB, or 20 GB. You will also get 5 – 500 GB of monthly bandwidth with each of these plans.
A Small Orange does give you 2 months free and a free domain name whenever you sign up with them for a 1-year plan or longer.
Business Plans
A Small Orange does offer 3 different plans which are called their business plans. These plans have fewer sites sort of like a VPS plan. They do come with a free SSL Certificate. The three plans are the Startup, Small Business, and the Enterprise. The price tag for these plans is $20, $40, and $60 per month. You get 40,50, or 60 GB with each one. For bandwidth, you will get 600, 800, or 1,000 GB of monthly bandwidth.
Now, I was a little confused on what a “Business” plan is so I did jump on live chat, which did take 20 minutes to connect. I talked with an agent name Jeff G. which told me:
A business plan is a shared hosting package on the VPS platform, but you do not have WHM access, and only have 1 cPanel to host from. The business plan does include a free SSL certificate, and have the same limitations imposed as standard shared hosting accounts:
- 10% CPU Usage
- 5% Memory Usage (or 512 MB)
- 50 Running Processes
- 15 Minute Max Execution Time
- 100,000 Total Inodes
- 500 outgoing email messages per 60 minute period (all excess messages will be discarded and not delivered)
This can all be found on their TOS page. They are very quick to suspend accounts just like Hostgator who is another EIG owned company.
Reseller Plans
A Small Orange does offer a number of reseller plans for webmasters that are looking to manage all their accounts with one company. They offer 3 different plans; Small ($15/month), Medium ($25/month), and Large ($35/month).
- The Small plan will support 20 GB of storage, 250 GB of monthly bandwidth, and 30 hosted websites.
- The Medium plan will support 25 GB of storage, 500 GB of monthly bandwidth, and 50 hosted websites.
- The Large plan will support 50 GB of storage, 1500 GB of monthly bandwidth, and 100 hosted websites.
Cloud VPS
A Small Orange does have 8 different plans for webmasters to choose from. The price range for these plans is between $20 to $150/month. These plans will have between 1 and 8 CPU cores, 30 GB to 250 GB of storage, 1024 MB to 10240 MB of RAM, 500 GB to 5 TB of monthly bandwidth.
Dedicated Plans
A Small Orange does have 8 different plans for site owners to choose from. The price range for these plans is between $99 to $275/month. You can pick the CPU you want which all are Xeon processors, RAM (4 GB to 16 GB), and storage that is 128 GB to 1 TB.
A Small Orange Performance & Uptime
Performance
Performance wise A Small Orange has everything I am looking for in terms of hardware. You can purchase SSD drives, but the amount of RAM you get with them is lower than other hosts. Therefore, you will have to pay more money to get the right amount of hardware to support your website/websites.
I have also read articles from their customers that state the performance is usually pretty good. So, I really don’t have any problems with their performance, other than the fact that you are going to have to pay extra money for the hardware that comes standard with other hosts.
Uptime
A Small Orange does have a 99.9% uptime policy. This ensures their users that their website will be up pretty much all day and all night. I really do like other hosts that have a status page. This allows users to check and see if there are any problems with the server that they are using. A lot of hosting companies have started doing this over the last couple of years. I do like how A Small Orange does have a page where you can check the status of your server. However, you have to be a paying customer to view this. Since I am not a paying customer I can’t login to this.
Their data centers are located in the United States; Dallas, Texas and Dearborn, Michigan. So, on paper A Small Orange looks good, but from the research I have done on them, it doesn’t look like their customers are ranting and raving about the uptime they are getting with them. Various web hosting review sites have reported that customers are unhappy about the uptime, and there have even been threads on WebHostingTalk.com which show that their customers are outraged with the inconsistency of their servers.
A Small Orange Customer Support
First, I want to start off by saying they are active on Twitter and Facebook. They have a strong social media presence and do respond their customers questions and concerns. A Small Orange does have 24/7 customer support. They are scattered all over the United States. Meaning, that their call center is located in-house. This means you don’t have a telephone number you can reach them at. Instead, you must either jump on their live chat or send them a support ticket.
I have tried out their customer support and it usually takes about 5 minutes to connect with an agent. This is a lot slower than I am used to with InMotion. Support tickets do take about 8 to 14 hours to get a response. The quality of responses is pretty decent. However, I really feel that not having a telephone number to call and live chat that takes a minimum of 5 minutes to connect is too long. If you had an urgent problem that needed to be fixed you would first have to wait for live chat and then if it wasn’t solved right away would have to wait for 8 to 14 hours to get a response.
A Small Orange Summary
So, do I recommend A Small Orange? No. Why? Because I typically do not support hosts that are run by EIG. EIG has bought hundreds of host. A lot of them have gone downhill over the years. The prices are close to what other hosts charge. But the uptime seems to be a hurdle that a lot of webmasters have to deal with. Another problem I see with A Small Orange is their customer support is lacking. Live chat takes a minimum of 5 minutes to connect and there is no telephone support.
There are a lot of other web hosts out there that are much more feature rich like InMotion Hosting and SiteGround for your VPS and dedicated needs. However, if you’re looking for shared hosting I would highly encourage that you read my WebHostingHub.com review.
If you have any experience with A Small Orange I would encourage you to leave some feedback in the user reviews section of this review. Thanks for reading.