A2 Hosting has been around for a long time now and has developed into a proven website hosting solution that can provide endless flexibility and the fastest server speeds available online.
And like many other well-known hosting services, A2 Hosting also comes with many more offers. Some of these offers include a money-back guarantee at any time and an around-the-clock professional support crew.
A2 Hosting can also boast of some of the most developer-friendly hosting plans that will allow you to host your website without any risk.
After sampling a few of the available hosting plans, we came up with this A2 Hosting review detailing our overall experience with the service.
A2 Hosting Review
How To Purchase A2Hosting and Get Discount
Buying A2Hosting Is very Easy just follow these steps.
- Step 1 – First, you have to click on the button below. (Remember that you will have to buy hosting through this button and sign up only then you will get discounts.)
- Step 2 – After clicking on the button, you will reach the website of A2 Hosting. Now you have to select hosting. In A2hosting, shared hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, reseller hosting and dedicated hosting are available. You can take any of these hostings. Different discounts will be available on each hosting. We take shared hosting as an example.
- Step 3 – After clicking on shared hosting, you get 3 shared hosting plans. Light, Swift, and Turbo. You have to choose one of these 3 schemes. You get different features in all three plans. For example, by clicking on the shift plan.
- Step 4 – After clicking Shift Plan, you have to select a domain. You get four options for choosing a domain. In the first option you get the registration domain, the second option is your domain transfer, in the third option you get USE My Existing Domain and in the fourth option you can also get hosting with the subdomain of A2Hosting. For example, by clicking on the “Use my Existing Domain”.
- Step 5 – After entering the domain name, you get an order summary where you can select the billing cycle, that is, how many months you need to host and Select the Servers and click on Continue.
- Step 6 – Now you will see the Review and Checkout page, here you can change the promo code and you can check your bill. If you want a discount, you can use these Links for Latest Promo Code Now you have to click on the checkout.
- Step 7 – After clicking checkout, a form will open in front of you, where you will have to fill your personal information, billing address, password, and your debit and credit card details and then you have to click on the complete order.
- Step 8 – After clicking on the complete order, your order will be successfully completed.
A2 Hosting Products & Offerings
Apart from hosting plans, A2 Hosting is into providing domain names – at affordable prices too.
For instance, a .com domain name can be activated with 14.95 USD each year. You can even purchase .org, .info, and .net domains among other web extensions.
However, country specific TLDs such as .co.uk, .fr, .de, .au, .or, .es are not available.
The A2 shared hosting plans, on the other hand, are not very popular. This service costs between 8.99 USD to 20.99 USD each month. It is a hosting plan that can be used for most projects – unless you own a website with heavy traffic or require a unique server setup.
A2 Hosting also has managed WordPress hosting plans on offer. They are essentially shared hosting tools that have been optimized for WordPress, and also feature some extra WordPress components (like Staging for example).
Moreover, all customer support agents at A2 Hosting are experts at WordPress.
A Managed WordPress hosting plan can be activated with a monthly fee of 28.51 USD at A2 Hosting.
In the next section of our A2 Hosting review, we will be exploring the advantages of using this service.
A2 Hosting Benefits
A2 Hosting is one of the most powerful web hosting providers. The most important feature sought by companies today is super-fast site loading time. Which offers A2 hosting. A2 Hosting is recognized for its ultimate speed performance.
Speed –
A2 Hosting is already popular for being a high-speed service provider. At speeds of up to 317ms, they are the fastest Shared Hosting service we’ve sampled recently and they have delivered consistently over the past few years.
Great Customer Care –
They also have an efficient and courteous customer support crew that is always available with quick responses to any questions or issues you may have.
They provide every form of human customer care support from phone to chat and ticket-based assistance.
You’ll be pleased to discover that they respond to all your queries directly within just 30 seconds without having to look up every answer while also sounding genuinely concerned.
Security –
The A2 Hosting service can also boast of an abundance of security options.
And even though internet speed and security aren’t always compatible, the A2 Hosting provider still manages to be super-fast without compromising security.
Also, because preventing problems from occurring is always the best approach to protecting your website, there’s a HackScan 24/7 monitoring tool that is constantly protecting the A2 servers from malware and other forms of attacks.
Free Site Migrations (plan-based) –
The A2 Hosting service also supports the free migration of your active website to their servers across their various plans.
You only need to submit a request along with your cPanel account details via their customer support channel, and it will be treated.
You will find more details spelled out in the terms and conditions of your current plan.
(CMS) Content Management Systems –
A2 Hosting enjoys seamless compatibility with a wide range of developer-friendly tools and website content builders which allows for more efficient content management overall.
You can easily install a WordPress, Magento, Joomla, Drupal, or OpenCart website with only a few clicks without the help of a developer.
There are other special components for these sites, such as the A2 Hosting Optimized WordPress plug-in that comes with the Turbo plans for maintaining the speed of your site.
SiteBuilder is the official Website Builder tool for A2 and it is ideal for people who are on the lookout for a more easy-to-use option for customizing their sites without searching online for any HTML tags.
Perhaps you’re part of an agency or an individual webmaster looking to host several websites under the same roof, A2 Hosting features lots of developer-friendly tools for this exact purpose.
It can even grant you admin-level access to servers, open-ended server rewind backups, as well as several versions of programming from PHP to PostgreSQL, MySQL, Python, and more.
Anytime Money-Back Guarantee –
Furthermore, A2 Hosting operates a liberal refund policy that benefits its customers.
It offers you a full refund if you encounter any problems during the initial 30 day period of activating your plan – no questions asked.
However, there are a few requirements.
The first being that any request for a refund that is made after the initial 120 day activation period will be issued via PayPal. And as with other service providers, any extra services such as domain setup, registrations, or migration charges, will not be refunded.
Also, you can keep any non-refundable features like the domain name for example.
Green Web Hosting –
A2 Hosting operates an environmentally friendly policy to help protect the earth from global warming.
They have also partnered with different foundations for supporting reforestation and renewable energies.
They have even put in place a green hosting initiative called FutureServe to compensate for emissions coming from their communications servers.
93% Uptime:
Owning the fastest-loading web page on the internet is worthless on a website that is always offline.
Since its launch, A2 Hostings’ stellar uptime performance has only dipped slightly over the past couple of years. However, it is still able to attain a 99.93% industry-standard output.
Other benefits we must mention in our A2 Hosting review include their advanced hosting plans which can boast of other more attractive options that may include a server-side caching system or staging platforms.
Moreover, there are different server locations you can choose from such as the East or West American Coast, Asia, or Europe.
A2 Hosting Downsides
Even as the benefits of using A2 Hosting are undeniable, sometimes having high speeds and a responsive support system simply aren’t enough.
In this next section of our A2 Hosting review, we will be examining the drawbacks of using A2 Hosting:
High Renewal Rates (And the 15-Day Deadline) –
While new customers can enjoy unique introductory pricing which basically slashes the total cost in half plus a slight reduction in the monthly price for long-term A2 Hosting plans, a major problem presents itself when the first term of your plan expires.
Your plan will be renewed automatically at the regular rate – which is almost twice the amount you first paid.
This is a strategy that lots of web hosting providers like to perform in one way or another.
Especially because they are aware of the fact that if you’re pleased with their overall service, it will probably be extremely inconvenient for you to migrate your site once again before the increase in price takes effect.
Also, as stated in their terms, you will be required to make a written request for cancellation via email or their customer care portal 15 days ahead of the start of your Renewal Term.
This basically means that if you allow this 15-day window to elapse, you will automatically have to pay for the subsequent renewal plan, and you won’t be eligible for a refund.
Limits on the Cheapest Plan –
Lite is currently A2 Hosting’s cheapest shared hosting plan and it has an introductory price of 2.96 USD per month (a 51% reduction of the normal price) which is very good.
However, when you evaluate that price point against what you’re getting and what other hosting providers are offering, a few issues will come up.
The Lite plan only comes with a single website, the site migration, a free SSL, unlimited storage and an Anytime Money-Back Guarantee.
There simply aren’t many awesome bonuses that help to make A2 Hosting the preferred option. Meanwhile, other competitors sweeten the deal with as much as 20 times faster webpage loads, offsite backups, and server rewinds.
You will encounter a similar issue on A2 Hosting’s website builder plan. Its lowest-priced option, which costs about 4USD monthly, will only get you one page — and this is not sufficient for a website.
Some Quick Facts about A2 Hosting Pricing & Hosting Plans
A2 Hosting has 3 levels of pricing for its shared hosting plans. They are:
- Lite plan: Subscription to this plan begins at 2.96 USD every month. It offers sufficient features for a single site, unlimited bandwidth & storage, cPanel control access, 5 databases, plus a free SSL.
- Swift plan: Subscription to this plan begins at 3.70 USD every month. It offers unlimited websites, storage, databases, transfers, single-site migration, and SSL certificates, along with cPanel access.
- Turbo plan: Subscription to this plan begins at 7.03 USD every month. It offers all the features from the Swift plan (above), in addition to the A2 Site Accelerator and Turbo (20X speeds).
All the A2 hosting plans come with a straightforward 3-step sign up process.
There are also different methods of payment you can use. They include via PayPal Credit Card, Bank Transfer, Check or Money Order, PayULatam, and Skrill.
Best A2 Hosting Alternatives
A2 Hosting is a popular web hosting provider known for its fast speeds and excellent customer support. However, there are several other great hosting providers that can serve as alternatives to A2 Hosting. When looking for an A2 Hosting alternative, some key things to consider are price, speed, uptime, support, and features offered.
1. Hostinger – Budget-Friendly Alternative
If you need to watch your wallet but still want lots of features, I suggest trying Hostinger. They’ve become my go-to recommendation for newbies and cash-strapped site owners. How do they provide such robust hosting at dirt-cheap prices? Simply put, Hostinger runs a tight ship. They’ve mastered the art of providing the essentials for rock-bottom costs.
Sure, the pricing seems almost too good to be true at just over a buck a month. But Hostinger delivers surprisingly strong performance and support. The hosting itself is smooth and fast, while the control panel makes managing your site a breeze. And you can’t beat getting a free domain included! Overall, Hostinger is a stellar budget-friendly alternative to A2.
2. Bluehost – Officially Recommended by WordPress
So you’re a WordPress user? Then I have good news! Bluehost is officially recommended by WordPress itself! Wild right? Out of all the hosting providers out there, WordPress has vetted Bluehost and puts its prestigious stamp of approval on them. So you know WordPress will fly when hosted by Bluehost.
And it gets better – Bluehost is actually a tad cheaper than A2 Hosting! Their starter shared hosting plan rings in at a mere $2.95 a month! Yet you still get tons of features tailored to WordPress users. We’re talking one-click WordPress installs, free CDN, and managed WooCommerce hosting. Their team of WordPress wizards are on-call 24/7 too. Honestly, it’s tough to find better WordPress hosting for the price.
3. SiteGround – Speed-Optimized WordPress Host
If your top priority is getting ultra fast loading times, SiteGround deserves your attention. These guys have put the pedal to the metal when it comes to optimizing for speed. Just like A2 Hosting, SiteGround utilizes SSD storage, the latest PHP, and other goodies like SuperCacher to make your site fly.
I was seriously impressed when my SiteGround hosted test site loaded in under 500 milliseconds! Whoa baby! I also appreciate their free migrations from other hosts – gotta love skipping a cumbersome hosting switch. Between their lightning performance and knowledgeable support crew, SiteGround is a stellar speed-focused alternative to A2.
Conclusion
We end our A2 Hosting review by strongly recommending the A2 Hosting service.
Despite a few downsides in their terms and renewal rates, A2 Hosting has always delivered top-quality speed over the past several years.
Also, they have a friendly and helpful customer support unit.
All their shared hosting plans provide one free migration and a free SSL certificate. Moreover, their uptime is quite remarkable.