A2 is an American web hosting company that provides web hosting to individuals and business. They also work with resellers and affiliate marketers. A2 provides hosting for WordPress and most content management systems (CMS), and shopping carts. A2 subscribes to the CloudFlare content delivery network (CDN) and makes that available to customers. Read our A2 Hosting review below.
OverviewA2 provides managed WordPress hosting plus Drupal, Joomla, and other CMS hosting services plus virtual machines as a cloud company would.They do not target any particular market except perhaps those who focus on WordPress.
Because of their wide variety of packages, their hosting is suitable for small companies or individuals, with the limited website administrator skills, and larger web and eCommerce sites, with more expertise.
Regarding technology, a check of one of their customer’s site showed that they use the LiteSpeed web server for their hosted domains although they say users can also pick Apache or Nginx instead. LightSpeed is a paid web server built for performance and security.
That includes the increased ability to fend off or mitigate DDOS attacks which are a major problem for hosting companies. LiteSpeed says their web server is the 4th most commonly used a web server on the internet.
With unlimited storage and bandwidth, there is adequate scalability and room to grow. The company has a solid reputation for the majority of its customers responding favorably to a survey that we cite below and mainly positive reviews of their product from independent reviewers.
Should you not be pleased with their service, A2 lets customers get their money back within the first 30 days. There is no contract and no difficult moving a domain to another hosting company.
The company says 92% of their users would recommend the service to a friend.They also say they are recommended by CubeCart, Drupal Association, PrestaShop, OwnCloud, Cloudflare, and Zend Server.They do not say what that recommendation entails.
One wonders why CloudFlare, for example, with lots of web hosting customers, would recommend anyone lest they offend someone.A2 says that among 3rd-party reviews they have a 5-star average.
Key FeaturesThe experts also rate A2 hosting very highly when it comes to your website hosting needs.
Here’s what they had to say about A2 hosting:
In fact, the experts don’t have any bad things to say about A2 hosting! While there may be other hosting options out there that can provide a better deal, experts recommend that if you can’t be bothered hunting down to the Nth degree, A2 is a superior choice in comparison to most of the other hosting companies out there.
Customers of A2 report being very happy with the services offered by the company. Of course, there will always be outliers, but by and large, the customers are touting the benefits of A2.
For the most part, A2 customers are fairly happy. So what are the things that can go wrong with this provider from their perspective?
Reliability & UptimeRegarding uptime & reliability, the company says they have a ”quadruple-redundant network, ” whatever that means. This is not the first place where they exaggerate their offering, but most companies do that, yet some damage their credibility when they do that too much.
A2 like most other providers has redundant data centers. As for redundant network that must mean that they provide several paths to the internet in case they have a problem with their ISP and multiple network cards in their servers with various routing to keep those working in the case of a widespread network outage.
They were quick to provision our new account. It only took a few minutes for the email to arrive after we requested that.
Features & Tools Here is a list of functions that represents the total of what web hosting customers might need and whether or not A2 provides those.
| Feature | Overview |
|---|---|
| Control Panel | They use cPanel. |
| Disk Space | Unlimited storage, except customers, can pay for dedicated servers in which case storage is 250 GB. |
| Bandwidth | Unlimited except managed VPS, reseller, and dedicated server plans have bandwidth limits |
| Database Support | MySQL 5.5. If you wanted another database, you would have to install yourself, which you can do since you have command-line access. If you did, that means you would have to program your exports (backups) too. |
| Free Domain | Only on their domain as in (subdomain).a2hosted.com |
| WordPress Hosting Packages | Yes. They market it as WordPress A2 Optimized which is a set of plugins designed to deliver a stable and speedy server. |
| Data Backups | Yes. And, like other vendors who use cPanel. You can download the entire home directory, just email filters, or the database only from the cPanel. And you can make a point-in-time recovery to from there too. (See Site Backup below.) |
| SSD (Solid State Drives) | This part is interesting. It is possible because of the plunging cost of solid state storage. All of their storage is SSD except there are some magnetic disks used in particular dedicated server packages. SSD has no moving disk controller, so it has the lowest possible seek time and should provide the fastest possible server response. However that is not always a panacea as the end-to-end user experience, like with any hosting company or app, varies depending on items that are largely outside the vendor’s control, like the user’s PC or mobile device speed, internet latency and congestion, bad programming, etc. |
| SSD (Solid State Drives) | They install and configure all of these with one click: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, CubeCart, CMS Made Simple, Elgg, and B2evolution. Also, there is automatic installation of these popular platforms, where the user would have to do some manual configuration later: |
| Email Accounts | 25 included in the Lite plan. Unlimited with others. |
| Security Features | Clef two-factor authentication is the main item here. There are a lot of the large hosting companies, like BlueHost, for example, who do not have this crucial security feature. Anyone not using 2FA is putting themselves at great risk of having their site hacked. |
| Website Builder | No. |
| eCommerce Solution | Yes. See shopping carts below. |
| Malware & Spam Protection | Apache SpamAssassin and Barracuda Spam Firewall. |
| Programming Languages Support | PHP, PHPng, IonCube, Perl, Python, Ruby, Node.js |
| Site Statistics | Access to raw log files, Webalizer Visitor Statistics, website statistics, Analog Visitor Statistics, and AWStats |
| Site Backups | Not with the Lite plan, which leads one to wonder why the users with the least skills would suffer the greatest exposure. |
| CDN services | CloudFlare. $3 Monthly. |
| Additional features & tools |
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Plans & Pricing | Lite | It says $4 monthly, but when we signed up, they charged us $4.71. That’s pennies on the dollar, but they should charge us what the website says. The list of features by package varies a lot. We can summarize by saying that Lite offers 1×21 GHz CPU, 5GB memory, and basic CloudFlare CDN. |
| Swift | $4.90. Because we signed up from outside the USA, it quoted all the prices in euros. So we have converted them to dollars. 2×2.1 GHz CPU. |
| Turbo | $9.32. 2×2.1 GHz CPU plus extra items like a WebSocket proxy to enhance gaming speed. |
Add-ons Prices
| Railgun (network compression) | Railgun (network compression) |
| Priority support | $20. |
| cloudflare CDN | $3, except basic CDN is free for all packages. |
| dedicated servers of various sizes |
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There is no setup fee. Their cost for ordering a domain is $15 which is about the same as using a domain registrar like GoDaddy. In case you do not like the service, which is doubtful, they offer a 30-day money back guarantee. You can add new options later too. To transfer your domain to another service you need to move the domain registration to your new provider so it is best to use a 3rd-party registrar company for that
Customer Support 
Ease of Use How easy is it to use? Let’s take a look at what we did to set up an account.
Conclusion Based on our experience and the consensus among other reviewers that their service is solid we can recommend their service. But don’t believe everything you read. For example, they say their Turbo Servers load “up to 20x faster than alternative hosting,” which is just silly.
You might want to handle your domain registration elsewhere as that is always recommended so that you can switch web hosting companies and email providers when you want to
Most people would not want their email and web hosting together as many would want to us use Zoho, Google, or Microsoft for email since those have more features, like office, and much better spam engines.
Alternatives
Expert Reviews
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