Founded in Atlanta over a decade ago, a Small Orange (ASO) offers various web hosting services to individual users and small businesses alike. Currently, the firm is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and has a vibrant 80-person workforce. Read our A Small Orange review below.
OverviewFounded in Atlanta over a decade ago, a Small Orange (ASO) offers various web hosting services to individual users and small businesses alike. Currently, the firm is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and has a vibrant 80-person workforce.
A Small Orange provides several affordable dedicated server, virtual private server (VPS), and shared server plans that will appeal to individual users as well as small businesses. Nevertheless, the firm lacks several features and specs found in InMotion Hosting, AWA’s top-scoring Web hosting service.
On a positive note, the firm has ones of the fastest servers among shared hosting providers, so whenever clients visit your website, it performs optimally. To fit the smallest business website to the most rapidly growing business, ASO provides plans at various wallet-friendly rates.
Honest Web Host
A Small Orange is one of the most reputable web hosting providers out there as it always sells what they can primarily provide. In other words, your website will always be performing optimally at all times as promised unlike with other unscrupulous company’s web hosting services.
This web hosting firm doesn’t make assumptions when it comes to their clients’ server usage and the resources they have like some other hosting firms do. Instead, they make sure there were adequate resources available for each customer even when everyone was using them at their maximum.
Company Dedicated To Going Green
A Small Orange is dedicated to going green by matching 150% of their energy usage with renewable energy certificates. The firm also encourages their staff to work from home in a way to reduce energy. Even though all these efforts are unrelated to their web hosting plans, it creates a good feeling to know you are working with a firm that is dedicated to reducing energy use and promote a greener environment.
Bottom Line
Easy to use and affordable, A Small Orange is a reliable hosting firm for those who don’t require a heavily loaded server. Still, the Web host lacks some of the features found in its competition.
Key FeaturesThe reviews of the experts don’t have that yelling, “My website is down!”, flavour to them, perhaps as they have simply tested the service for a short while, and not over an extended period of time, like A Small Orange’s customers have.
So what do the experts like about A Small Orange?
And their negatives?
While the experts are less scathing about A Small Orange, their negatives match up with what the customers of the hosting service say. And if you can’t get someone in customer service on the line quickly when your website goes down, you’re going to be pretty annoyed too.
To be honest, with lousy uptime on their websites, customers aren’t likely to be espousing the actual benefits of A Small Orange that readily. The most important part of a site is that it’s available! But we dug up a few things that customers did seem to like.
Although there are some customers that haven’t had any difficulties with the platform, the majority are heading online to complain about them.
A Small Orange have suffered from some pretty scathing reviews from customers recently – generally around the areas of uptime and support.
Reliability & UptimeA Small Orange has one of the best uptime and fastest server response times of all the web hosts we studied. The time for the duration of which the shared server (and your blog) is up and running is what is referred to as uptime while response time is how fast the server takes to load content when one visits your blog.
The uptime and response time stats are usually tracked by Cloud Spectator and it applauded ASO for the speed and stability of its servers. ASO is highly regarded since it doesn’t guarantee limitless storage and bandwidth. However, it makes you select a web hosting package based on what your website truly consumes.
Like Arvixe and GoDaddy, ASO provides a 99.9 % uptime guarantee, meaning they will pay you for any extra downtime.
Uptime/Response Times: 99.9 % uptime and 549 ms response time. This is up there along with well-known web hosting providers.
So as to give high-quality service, this reputable web hosting firm sustains two different U.S.-based servers in Michigan, Dearborn, Texas, and Dallas. Both data centers boast high-performance, carrier neutral networks.
The data centers consist of an array of security features, including biometric access, and keycard access, physical ID checks; full CCTV surveillance that is backed by digital recording on file; and round-the-clock on-site support technicians.
Both data centers make use of Arbor Networks Peak Flow DDoS detection and have multi-homed, carrier-neutral high-performance IP managed quality networks.
Features & Tools ASO offers some excellent features, and the hosting packages come with automatic script installation, an SSD-driven hosting environment, and daily backups, unlimited POP3, MySQL, Subdomains, Email Forwarders, Mailing Lists, and FTP Accounts, which is an offer that not many hosting websites have.
| Feature | Overview |
| Bandwidth and Disk Space | A Small Orange offer limited bandwidth and disk space and vary with various hosting plans. However, this comes as a surprise to many as various hosting websites offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space with all of their hosting packages.
Although, you can choose from a range of hosting packages available, you must upgrade to a VPS or dedicated hosting plan if you exceed your disk space limit which can be quite frustrating to a few people. |
| Control Panel | ASO provides all its clients with cPanel (and WHM, if applicable) for Linux, the most popular control panel. However, you have to double check the cost of a license before signing up since this isn’t necessarily free from the more robust plans. ASO doesn’t support Windows. The control panel allows you manage various aspects related to your website from one location. For instance, you can install applications like WordPress or Joomla, monitor how much bandwidth and storage you are using, and put in new files to your website. ASO has a few neat extra features to cPanel likeR1Soft backups access, SiteLock security, Cloudflare one-click install, Page Speed Optimizer, PHP selector, as well as their Ghost Installer (via Softaculous). With its rather an active Client area for billing and support, ASO offers you access to their broad knowledge base and video tutorials. |
| Website Builder | Small business owners are afforded a smooth transition from website creation to website hosting with the help of ASO’s built-in small business website builder by the name Weebly. You can create one website for free using the built-in tool, and also, create as many web pages as you wish. Weebly has numerous templates and a drag and drops tool that allows you create a professional looking website fast. You can save money by using the built-in tool on ASO since if you used Weebly separately, they charge for their services if you have your domain. ASO provides design services for a one-time cost of $800 or $1100 in agreement with the complexity of your website for those who want a professional to design their website. They will use WordPress or another content management system to create the site. |
| WordPress Websites | Logically, WordPress is also supported. From the Softalicious app section from within CPanel, you can install the content management system (CMS). Once installed, you can use WordPress to create slideshows, pages, posts, and other content. WordPress powers over 24 % of the entire web, thus it’s not surprising that a lot of hosting websites provide optimized managed WordPress hosting plans. Unfortunately, A Small Orange does not offer managed WP hosting. If your small business has a WordPress site that receives massive traffic and is central to the business, then we highly recommend using managed WP hosting. Managed WP hosts take care of the technical backend of WordPress for you. For instance, the host performs WP software updates for you, run your site on WP-optimized servers, give a platform to test changes to your WP site, and do daily backups. Our top pick for managed WP hosting is WP Engine. |
| Web Applications | A Small Orange offers an unrivaled selection of web applications that will customize your website. If you want to start a blog, select WordPress or one of the other available blog apps and install it with a click of a button. If you are interested in getting some CMS software, want a calendar or a forum on your site, or are thinking about hosting some online games, ASO has got you covered. There are also various tools intended precisely for eCommerce websites and others meant for educational sites. You can create wikis and survey tools – the options are infinite. Whatever type of site you intend to start, it’s a quite obvious that ASO provides more than a few apps that could significantly boost it. |
| E-commerce Solution | If you plan to offer products or services, A Small Orange has got you covered. This hosting firm provides Linux-based Business hosting plans (Startup, Small Business, and Enterprise) that incorporate a free secure-socket layer (SSL certificate), Payment Card Industry (PCI) and dedicated IP address compliance to safeguard transactions. |
| Security Features | The hosting plans come with a couple of security features. Even with the most basic plan, you are confident of finding password-protected directories, hotlink/leech protection, and IP-blocking included. For even more security, you should choose SiteLock (going at $20 per year). SiteLock usually performs daily malware scans, automatic malware removal, file change monitoring, and more depending on the hosting package chosen. |
| Unlimited Email Addresses | A Small Orange allows website owners to create an unlimited number of email addresses associated with each domain hosted by them. This is a valuable feature, particularly for business, as each staff member can then be allocated their personal email. This hosting firm also permits you to have a regular email, which is valuable if someone happens to the email address at your domain that isn’t present. It helps to make sure that you get all messages that are sent to your website. |
| 90 Day Money Back Guarantee | It is among the longest in the industry, allowing enough time to check out the service. Remember, domains are not included in this offer, so the standard domain cost will be deducted if you refund after taking advantage of free domain. Many in the industry do this. |
| Fully Scalable | Simply upgrade and downgrade as you wish. |
| Two Months Free | You get a free domain as well as two months free hosting if you pay for a year upfront |
| Unlimited Everything Else | Unlimited FTP Accounts, Subdomains, Mailing lists, Emails, Email Forwarders, and Databases come as standard |
| Daily Backups | It is highly recommended to perform your off-site backups, even though automated daily backups are taken |
| Ruby on Rails | Unlike many hosting websites that use a cPanel plugin for Ruby, they use Passenger for their Ruby, thus, it is always up to date with the latest Gem’s installed |
| Ghost Blog Hosting | They are one of the few shared hosting providers that have Node.js installed. Thus, the new Ghost Blogging Platform can be installed.. |
Plans & Pricing A Small Orange’s Shared hosting plans make it easy to find an option that fits your budget and needs. Moreover, this is a reputable hosting firm that doesn’t oversell you on anything but rather provides actual unlimited hosting.
A Small Orange separates its hosting into five kinds of plans: Hybrid/ dedicated, cloud VPS, business, reseller, and shared. This firm offers only Linux-based hosting.
A Small Orange understands what clients want. They’re frank about monthly package pricing rather than display lower, annual plan prices on their front page. Once they have notified you of their monthly costs, they offer two months free and a free domain if you subscribe for a whole year.
Even though the idea is the same (sign a contract to pay less), it feels less like chastisement when the host is upfront about their pricing to start with.
Customer Support Customer support is one area that lets down A Small Orange. It is like they only spend most of their time working on every other aspect of the business that they haven’t had a chance to incorporate continuous customer support.
It is not clear about the size of A Small Orange’s technical support team since almost its entire staff work from home. This hosting firm doesn’t have in-house personnel working within arm’s reach of its servers like other hosting companies.
A couple of clients have come forward and claim that they didn’t get enough advice or answers to some of the most technical queries.
Support is provided via ticket and email 24/7, all year round. Even though there is no telephone support, live chat support is provided but only on weekdays. Then again, this is possible because they don’t possess in-house personnel like other providers.
Though there exist a customer support, ASO discourages people from using this supporting tool to get technical assistance.
Ease of Use Though the website is wonderfully well designed, it is simple to use as you can easily access everything from the homepage. You can either choose bundles or ‘find your perfect plan’ which lists all the packages being offered. The website is plain simple and incredible, and thus, there is no clutter and unnecessary content and images.
If you’re moving from a different web host, A Small Orange possibly provides a familiar interface. Like many hosting firms, they use cPanel, a graphical interface that makes things easier as far as the process of hosting is concerned. They also have the most complete and well-written dictionaries and tutorials we’ve ever seen from a web host.
Though most plans come with CPanel, you should always double check this before purchasing as it looks as if some plans don’t include cPanel. CPanel is an excellent control panel tool for starters and experienced users and just makes managing your site and hosting stress-free.
Conclusion You will love A Small Orange if the speed of your website is your primary worry. It has the fastest uptime and server response times. ASO doesn’t guarantee unlimited resources, thus, your site’ bandwidth and disk space is limited to avoid overload. This is why its websites can be accessed quickly. ASO has a range of hosting plans that have various prices to fit your wishes and financial plan.
Its only failure is it doesn’t have the same level of security features that other hosts provide and doesn’t offer 24/4/365 call support. You’d be better off with a host like Arvixe or GoDaddy if you like to have constant access to phone support or run an e-commerce business.
A Small Orange makes it easy to create a website fit for personal or small business use, and it’s reasonably priced, too. That said, the Web host lacks features (like managed WordPress, Windows-based servers) that are provided by Dreamhost, Arvixe, and Liquid Web (the Editors’ Choice for Enterprise-level hosting).
If you have actual high-end website ambitions, those are the services to use as a foundation. A Small Orange is for those with more modest needs.
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