Name: A2 Hosting
Plans: Shared, Reseller, VPS, Cloud Dedicated.
Website: www.a2hosting.com
Summary: A2 Hosting is a dependable host. They have a lot of features and are decently priced.
A2 Hosting was founded in 2003. Their headquarters are in Ann Harbor, Michigan (AKA “Tree Town”). Their original name was Iniquinet. They decided to rebrand their company name to “A2 Hosting”. A2 Hosting claims that your site will run 20X faster with them. They promise their customers 99.9% uptime and offer “guru support” (for developers by developers). They are an entirely green host. They are supporters of Carbonfund.org and have joined the fight to stop global warming in 2007. Their primary datacenter is in Michigan. They also do own data centers in Amsterdam and Singapore. Let’s get started with this A2 Hosting review and look at the plans they offer.
A2 Hosting Features
A2 Hosting does offer lots of plans. They provide shared, VPS, reseller, cloud and dedicated plans. For VPS and dedicated plans, you can either use managed or unmanaged plans depending on your needs. I am going to go over each one of their plans down below now.
Shared Plans
With A2 Hosting, users get a variety of shared plan options. There are three options, Lite, Swift, and Turbo. These plans currently cost $3.92, $4.90 and $9.31 a month. By choosing either the Swift or Turbo packages, users get unlimited websites, databases, storage and transfer. Free SSD is also free with these packages. The Lite plan does only support one website and five databases. All three packages include an anytime money back guarantee.
Like a lot of other companies A2 Hosting does use the unlimited sales pitch, which I don’t like. Shared accounts are limited to 600,000 inodes and 35 concurrent HTTP connections.
Unmanaged VPS
A2 Hosting offers unmanaged plans that are for your VPS hosting solutions. These plans are great if your site outgrows a shared server, or you need more resources. Users can choose from three available options Entry” for $5.00 a month, Mid starting at $10.00 a month and Top for $15.00 a month. All of these plans include Free SSD hard drives, root access and a 30-day money back guarantee. These plans allow a choice of Linux OS (CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Slackware, or Ubuntu).
I should point out that these prices are great, but they do not include a cPanel license. If you would like to have cPanel installed on your VPS server it’s going to cost you $19.95/month. Therefore, their prices are right on par with GreenGeeks. But, if you don’t want cPanel I can’t think of a better price for a VPS plan for $5-15/month.
Managed VPS
A2 Hosting offers three fine-tuned Managed VPS Hosting solutions. Their plans are the Power for $32.99 a month, the Prestige for $46.19 a month and the Pinnacle for $65.99 a month. Users get a minimum of 75 GB of storage and 4 GB of RAM. All plans include free SSD, Free cPanel control panel and a 30-day money back guarantee.
Optionally, you can purchase Turbo Boost (which helps your website load up to 20X faster, but does cost $14.52/month. Also, you can get Turbo Boost + Turbo Cache (page level caching) for $19.80/month.
VPS plans do come with an inode limit, though. VPS accounts are limited to 1,000,000 inodes. A lot of other host don’t limit inodes on their VPS servers, though. However, 1,000,000 inodes is a fair amount of inodes for a VPS server.
Reseller Plans
The reseller plans by A2 Hosting have lots to offer. This collection of plans comes with four options, Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. The Bronze package costs $13.19 a month; Silver is $18.47 a month, Gold is $24.41 a month, and Platinum is $40.91 a month. Users will get a minimum of 30GB of storage and can opt to pay a little more and receive as much as 200GB of storage for the Platinum package. Other include features for all plans include the following: 40 accounts (minimum), free SSD, Free eNom reseller, and free dedicated IP address.
Except the Bronze package, all plans come with free WHMCS as well.
Cloud Plans
With A2’s quick start cloud there are no confusing price guides or instructions to sift through to get started. Simply design your perfect Cloud VM and quickly re-size your account as resource needs fluctuate. There are three plan options; Start for $15.00 a month, Median for $20.00 a month and Ace starting at $25.00 a month. With A2’s Cloud plans you can design your perfect plan and pay only for the resources you want. Meaning if you want to add more RAM, CPU cores, increased CPU speed, and disk space.
Unmanaged Dedicated Plans
A2 Hosting offers three options for unmanaged dedicated plans. For $99.59, the Sprint package offers 8GB RAM, 2X500 GB Storage, and 10 TB Transfer. $165.99 for the Exceed package provides 8 GB RAM, 2X500 GB Storage, and 15 TB Transfer. For a little more, the MACH package nearly doubles what users receive in the Sprint package. Cost $248.99 a month. All packages include a 30-day money back guarantee. With root access and your choice of a Linux operating system.
Managed Dedicated Plans
A2 Hosting’s managed dedicated plans come with three select Options- Sprint, Exceed, and Mach. The cost for these plans ranges from $141.09 a month up to $290.49 a month. With all these plans users get a minimum of 8GB RAM and 2X500 GB Storage. You do get 10, 15 or 20 GB of monthly bandwidth with their managed dedicated plans. The included Smart System Notifier constantly monitors your server to ensure it remains ultra-reliable.
Security
Sites are prone to hacks from time to time. It’s just the fact of nature when you develop sites. A2 Hosting uses HackScan which is a hosting firewall, virus scanning, and security service that monitors your websites 24/7 to help minimize brute-force attacks.
Free Website Migration
Moving sites from one server to another are always a hassle if you have to do it yourself. A lot of the times people are unaware of the price that it will cost to move your site. A2 Hosting does do free website migrations which I do like. A lot of other companies will charge you a $149.99 fee in order to move your website to their servers.
Now that we have taken a look at the different plans A2 Hosting offers lets take a look at their uptime, performance, and customer support.
A2 Hosting Performance & Uptime
Performance
Performance is a very important factor when choosing a web host. I have talked to webmasters over the years that didn’t realize exactly how important this was until they signed up for a web hosting company and was sadly let down by how slowly their website/websites loaded on their servers. So, how good is A2 Hosting’s performance?
One really cool thing about A2 Hosting is they post their IP address on their website with their three data centers. They encourage you to ping their servers so that you can see how quickly their servers respond. I went to bytecheck.com and ran a test to see how quickly they responded. The IP address I used was 75.98.175.109 Here are the results:
- Total Time: .063
- Time Connect: .032
- Time To First Bye: .063
- Speed Download: 1768.00
As you can clearly see A2 Hosting does have very fast responding servers. I was really impressed with how quickly their servers respond. This is faster than some CDN (content delivery networks) take to respond.
From the research I have done on A2 Hosting it looks like their customers are quite happy with their performance. Websites seem to load quickly and you don’t find of their customers moaning and groaning about how poorly their websites load so your website’s speed shouldn’t be an issue with A2 Hosting.
Uptime
Uptime is a critical factor that you can’t ignore when choosing a web host. Let’s face it if your website is always down then you’re missing out on a lot of lost business. There are a number of hosts that state that they have 100% uptime, but really this isn’t a realistic number. Techs have to perform maintenance, but 99.99% is a more realistic number.
You can check their network status page at any time to see if their are any problems or issues with any of their servers. A2 Hosting does have an uptime policy and they state that they do not accept downtime, because they understand just how inconvenient that is for you, the customer. I did look through their TOS page and couldn’t find out what happens if your downtime dips below 99.9%. A lot of companies will credit your account if ever you have extended amounts of downtime, or if they don’t live up to their 99.9% uptime guarantee.
A2 Hosting Customer Support
Customer support is a critical aspect of running a successful web hosting business. I have stressed this aspect of any web hosting company on tbwhs.com for many years now. How good is A2 Hosting’ customer support?
As I mentioned earlier their customer support is nicknamed “Guru Crew”. You can contact A2 Hosting through live chat, ticket request, or a toll free number. They are available 24/7 to answer any questions you might have. I should point out that their support is U.S. based and they do have an extensive knowledge-base which covers everything from getting started, their customer portal, cPanel, WebHost manager, installing application, A2 Hosting products, security, developer corner, add-on services, etc.
A2 Hosting Review Summary
Do I recommend A2 Hosting? Yes. Their shared hosting plans offer you a great deal when you commit to a three year contract with them. The three year contract price while using the highest coupon code available is only $3.92/month for the Lite plan, $4.90/month for the Swift plan, and $9.31/month for the Turbo plan. A2 Hosting has an anytime money back guarantee. If you decide to cancel within the first 30 days you’ll get a full refund for your hosting plan. Anytime after the first 30 days you would get a pro-rated refund for unused service. A2 Hosting is well worth the prices they charge for the reliability, speed/performance, and piece of mind you get with their web hosting.