Long ago, when I first decided to build my blog site, one of the main hosting features I was most concerned about was performance . Since I wanted to provide the best possible user experience to my blog readers, the strong performance hype in many A2 Hosting reviews quickly caught my attention.
Now, I’ve been working with this provider for a few years now and have enough experience to give a solid review of their hosting services. I know that choosing the right hosting provider from among the many options out there can be quite overwhelming. Therefore, I put A2 Hosting through a thorough web hosting test.
In this A2 Hosting review, I’ll evaluate the providers based on the hosting features you care about most:
- Pricing: How much will A2 Hosting WordPress plans cost? Are you getting your money’s worth?
- Performance: Is the provider reliable? Do your WordPress site visitors get a top-notch user experience?
- Features: Do you get features like domain registration, SSL certificates, and site transfers for free?
- Customer Support: Is A2 Hosting’s technical support there to help you when you need it?
Now that you know what this A2 Hosting review is going to be about, let’s get started.
A2 Hosting Overview
When it comes to WordPress hosting, most webmasters are probably familiar with hosts like Bluehost and SiteGround . However, A2 Hosting is also a hosting provider that has been firmly at the forefront of the industry over the past few years. This hosting provider is particularly focused on performance.
This is reflected in its brand tagline “Our speed, your success”.
Still, A2 Hosting easily provides you with a reliable and powerful solution, no matter what your web hosting needs are. This web host is a no-brainer in almost every way. If you’re looking for excellent server response times, top-notch security, and a wealth of other web hosting features, you’ve come to the right place.
A2 Hosting plans are also highly scalable. They offer value-rich shared, virtual private servers (VPS), reseller, cloud, and dedicated hosting.
No matter the size of your project, there’s a plan that’s right for you. Plus, every plan comes with servers that have industry-leading features.
A2 Hosting isn’t without its flaws by any means. While the provider makes a lot of promises about performance (partly reflected in server speeds), they can still improve when it comes to uptime. We’ll explore this in more detail in the performance section.
Overall, A2 Hosting is a one-stop solution when it comes to web hosting. There's no doubt about it—the provider performed well above average in almost every area I tested. If performance is your top priority, A2 Hosting is an excellent choice that I highly recommend.
A2 Hosting Pros and Cons
advantage
- Fast servers optimized for WordPress
- Unlimited SSD Storage
- Free SSL certificates, automatic backups and site migrations
- No-Stress Money Back Guarantee
- Competitively priced hosting plans
shortcoming
- Uptime could be better
- Outdated control panel
price
A2 Hosting’s pricing isn’t out of the ordinary—it’s competitive, but not the lowest. As a WordPress website owner, you can purchase their unmanaged WordPress hosting plans, which start at $2.99 per month for the Startup plan. However, for the best user experience, you can consider the more expensive managed WordPress plans, which start at $11.99 per month.
Managed vs. Unmanaged WordPress Hosting
The main difference between A2 Hosting's unmanaged and managed WordPress plans is that unmanaged hosting requires you to be solely responsible for maintaining your WordPress site. In other words, you'll need to pay more to get features like a site pre-launch environment, JetPack personal licenses, easy backups, and more.
Additionally, all managed WordPress plans include turbo-optimized servers, premium Plesk control panel, and high-priority support.
Here are the four available unmanaged (shared) WordPress plans and the server resources provided:
- Starter ($2.99): 1 website and 100GB SSD storage.
- Drive ($4.99): Unlimited websites, unlimited SSD storage, and free automatic backups.
- Turbo Boost ($9.99): unlimited sites, unlimited NVMe (turbo) storage, and free automatic backups.
- Turbo Max ($14.99): unlimited websites, unlimited NVMe (turbo) storage, free automatic backups, and other features.
Every plan includes a free SSL certificate, unlimited email accounts, free CDN, and free site migration. However, only the two top unmanaged WordPress plans offer blazing fast speeds—thanks to new industry-leading NVMe storage!
On the other hand, these three managed WordPress hosting plans are a bit conservative when it comes to server resources.
Here’s what you basically get:
- 1 Site ($11.99): 1 website and 10GB NVMe (Turbo) storage.
- 3 Sites ($18.99): 3 websites and 25GB NVMe (Turbo) storage.
- Unlimited ($18.99): Unlimited websites and 40GB NVMe (Turbo) storage.
However, you have to keep in mind that all the prices listed in this A2 Hosting review are only for a two-year subscription. For example, the cheapest Startup plan is billed monthly and costs $8.99 per month.
Interestingly, all hosting plans allow you to request a refund for unused resources at any time! However, if you want a full refund, you’ll need to request one within the first 30 days of your subscription.
Other Web Hosting Plans
If you’re not into WordPress, A2 Hosting has something for you too. You can choose from VPS, reseller, and dedicated hosting plans. Here are the types of pricing you can expect:
- Unmanaged VPS: $5.00/month to $15.00/month
- Core/Managed VPS: $25.00/month to $99.99/month
- Reseller: $13.19/month to $61.99/month
- Unmanaged Dedicated: $99.59/month to $299.99/month
- Core/Dedicated Hosting: $141.09/month to $349.99/month
No matter which A2 Hosting plan you choose, you can rest assured that you’re getting great value for your money. This is especially true if you can enjoy discounts on longer-term plans.
Now let’s talk about the features that A2 Hosting boasts about!
Performance
One thing is for sure – A2 Hosting takes performance very seriously!
The server speeds I recorded during my testing speak for themselves! I decided to test the server response times over a three-month period, and for a shared host, the results were among the best I’ve ever tested.
What you might be most concerned about when you look at this A2 Hosting review is the claim that it is “20 times faster.” To be honest, I didn’t expect this claim to be true. But it is certain that A2 Hosting’s servers are sometimes up to 6 times faster than its competitors in the same category.
After more than three months of server testing, I recorded the following results:
The average response time of 443 milliseconds is absolutely excellent. A response time below 450 milliseconds is enough to prove that its performance is top-notch. In the worst case scenario, the server response time reached 689 milliseconds.
Unfortunately, the recorded uptime doesn’t inspire much confidence: over a period of about three months, there were 12 outages totaling 42 minutes of downtime.
To be clear, A2 Hosting does deliver on its 99.9% uptime promise. However, given that competitors like BlueHost and DreamHost consistently offer 100% uptime, A2 Hosting definitely has room to improve. Otherwise, they can hardly be called the performance king.
Additionally, I ran a page speed test on the A2 Hosting test site to see its real-time performance.
The PageSpeed score of 97% is simply amazing. Overall, there is little to complain about here. Server speed is among the best in every aspect. While uptime could be improved, stability is still worth looking forward to.
A2Hosting Features
When it comes to features, A2 Hosting offers some of the most robust features of any web hosting provider I’ve seen. If you’re a WordPress site owner, this provider can get you set up almost instantly. On the other hand, if you’re an expert, their “developer-friendly hosting” also supports a ton of development frameworks and programming languages.
WordPress – A2 Optimize
Like most web hosts on the market, A2 Hosting is aimed at WordPress developers. And they do it quite effectively. They allow you to set up cPanel with WordPress pre-installed. You can install various other useful applications such as WooCommerce, Elementor, etc. using the Softaculous App Installer .
You can set up WordPress during the checkout process. Once you’ve selected your domain name, simply fill in your personal information and click “Install .” This seamless way of installing WordPress will save you a ton of time and effort.
It’s hard to recommend a hosting provider if the process of installing a CMS is long and arduous. In this review, A2 Hosting is the clear winner. While this isn’t uncommon among web hosts, it’s always nice to have a one-click install for WordPress. With it, even a novice can easily get started.
With the A2 Optimized for WordPress plugin, you'll get exceptional performance for your web pages. The plugin uses custom settings and other third-party features to make your WordPress site the best it can be in terms of speed and security. The Softaculous app installer also makes setup very easy.
Likewise, you can set up professional email, add domains, and perform other operations in the control panel. Although the interface is a bit outdated, you won't have much trouble navigating it.
A2Hosting Security Features
Another advantage of A2Hosting is security. The provider offers a lot of features to help you keep things under close control. SSL certificates, firewall and distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, and two-factor authentication? A2 Hosting has it all.
Fortunately, these features are also free. The free SSL certificates provided in their hosting plans are powered by Let's Encrypt. I think the level of security provided is enough for most websites. If you have a larger project that requires more security, you can choose other paid plans.
DDoS protection is also included by default. So your website will always be protected from some of the most popular cyber attacks. Combined with the fully integrated Cloudflare Content Delivery Network (CDN), your website visitors will always enjoy best-in-class security and speed.
Other interesting security features include 24/7 HackScan protection, dual firewalls, Patchman software, etc. Without a doubt, A2 Hosting has a plethora of features that make it completely trustworthy when it comes to security.
A2Hosting Backup Features
However, what this A2 Hosting review has achieved in terms of security seems to be lacking when it comes to backups. While the provider offers free automatic backups, their backup policy is simply not enough for me.
In my opinion, these terms are rather vague. If the web host doesn't guarantee to back up all my files, what's the point? However, most website owners will find 50GB of backup space to be more than enough. Otherwise, I recommend downloading cPanel backups and storing them locally. After all, web hosts seem to recommend doing this.
A2 Hosting seems to be targeting high-end businesses with such comprehensive security features. I feel like if they could improve their automatic backup strategy, they might be able to better suit their target customers.
Other Interesting Features of A2Hosting
A2 Hosting's claim of "20x faster" may be a bit exaggerated, but A2 Hosting does offer a lot of features designed to make your website run blazingly fast. Perhaps the most important of these is that all servers are equipped with SSD storage drives. SSDs clearly outperform old-school HDDs in terms of server speed and power consumption.
Things are getting even better with all managed WordPress plans using the newer NVMe disks. This technology offers many advantages, but most hosting providers haven’t adopted it yet. That’s why A2 Hosting emphasizes server speeds in its marketing copy.
Developers can also make use of the numerous features provided here. The provider supports almost all major content management systems (CMS), development frameworks, or programming languages.
So if you want to use Drupal, PHP, Python or Ruby on Rails in your next project, they make the process easy, even for beginners. If you have ever tried to manually install a framework or dependencies on your website, you will love this feature.
All in all, this web host has a lot to offer. It’s always refreshing to see a provider that supports so many development technologies and offers a ton of security features for free.
Customer Support
If you want to contact support, there are four ways to do it. You can use live chat, phone support, the email ticketing system, or consult the knowledge base. In my experience, the knowledge base is always a good place to start.
I always find this knowledge base very useful. You can easily search or browse using the different categories. They also have a blog with many articles you may find useful.
However, if you do need to speak with technical support, you may not have the best experience. While live chat and phone support are available 24/7, responses aren’t necessarily fast (at least in my experience). However, when you do finally get through to a support agent, they’re always very polite and knowledgeable.
If A2 Hosting could improve their support speed, I might give them more credit in this regard. For now, I can only recommend the wealth of articles in the knowledge base.
Final Verdict – A2Hosting Review
To sum up this review, A2 Hosting is definitely an excellent host in my mind, alongside BlueHost and SiteGround. Their server speeds are arguably the fastest on the market, and their prices are very competitive. However, performance is not their only advantage.
The provider offers a wealth of security features and software solutions in all of its hosting plans. You probably get one of the best deals for the features it offers, especially if you subscribe to its long-term plans. Even on a month-to-month basis, its prices are still very competitive.
The downside is that uptime leaves something to be desired. Although they insist on guaranteed uptime, many users may find long periods of downtime quite bothersome.
Overall, A2 Hosting remains a feature-rich, robust web hosting solution suitable for beginners and experts alike. No matter the size of your project, at least one option from the various scalable plans will come in handy.
A2 Hosting FAQ
Does A2 Hosting offer managed WordPress hosting?
A2 Hosting offers three WordPress hosting plans. All plans offer optimized Turbo server speeds powered by NVMe storage disks. The cheapest single-site plan starts at $11.99 per month. All plans include a JetPack personal license and the Plesk control panel, among other resources.
Does A2 Hosting have a money-back guarantee?
A2 Hosting offers an impressive anytime money-back guarantee. However, you can only get a refund for the unused period of your subscription. To get a full refund, you must request it within the first 30 days of your subscription.
Are A2 Hosting servers really 20 times faster than other providers?
A2 Hosting servers are among the fastest in the industry. All of their plans that include NVMe storage offer better performance than the competition. Recorded server response times and page load times are six times faster than servers from other providers in the same category.
Do I get a free SSL certificate with my A2 hosting plan?
All shared and managed A2 Hosting WordPress hosting plans come with a free SSL certificate. In addition, you get unlimited email accounts, free Cloudflare CDN, and free site migration.
If you have any questions about A2 Hosting, please let me know and if you are an A2 Hosting user, please share your views?
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