4.4
Very Good
The Best
Reliable speed
Advanced features
The Worst
On-demand backups paid separately
Confusing checkout
Starting From
$10.99 / month
Let's Start Review For A2 Hosting
A2 Hosting is one of the oldest providers around. They are originally from Michigan and started in 2001 under another name (Iniquinet). Later on, in 2003, the name was changed to A2 Hosting.
On their website you can read that 97% of their customers are satisfied and that they promise “Up to 20x faster servers” - we’ll see later if their servers are as fast as the Road Runner (meep, meep) or whether A2 is more like the Coyote. On top of that, their (first-term) pricing seems like a bargain, but what about the renewal fees?
That’s exactly why I decided to review A2 Hosting and tell you all about their products, prices, advantages and flaws.
Let’s dive-in and find out if A2 Hosting is the hosting service you were looking for. But if you prefer to watch an overview of A2 Hosting, check the video below:
What Products Does A2 Hosting Offer?
Like many other popular hosting providers, A2 Hosting has a lot to offer. Let me tell you what products you can get from them and when to use them.
Besides hosting plans, at A2 Hosting you can get domain names too, and their prices are fair. Domain name prices vary. For example, a .com domain name will cost you $14.95 per year. Among other extensions, you can purchase: .com, .info, .net and .org domains. Country specific TLDs like .co.uk, .de, .fr, .es or .au aren’t available.
A2 Hosting is very popular for its shared hosting plans. Their renewal cost goes from $10.99 to $25.99 per month. It’s the one that most projects will need - unless you have a site with huge traffic or need a special server setup, that is.
They also offer managed WordPress hosting plans. These are shared hosting packages that are optimized for WordPress, come with some additional WordPress features (e.g. staging) and their support agents are WordPress experts. A2 Hosting WordPress hosting users will also get automated backups and a free Jetpack License. Managed WordPress hosting starts at $23.99 a month at A2 Hosting.
VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It’s a way to divide a server into smaller individual (sub)servers. This means that you can configure it to your needs and you won’t have to share resources with other clients. They are a good match if you need something in between shared hosting and a dedicated server. A VPS at A2 Hosting goes from as little as $7.65 a month to around $200. See our round up of the best VPS web hosting for more details.
But if your site is likely to get hundreds of thousands of visitors per month, you probably need a dedicated hosting package. In other words, a whole server to exclusively host your project. These aren’t cheap, at A2 Hosting they start at $190 a month.
If you have clients of your own who require hosting, you can opt-in for the reseller program where you’ll be able to sell hosting plans (without A2 Hosting branding) to your clients. These plans start at around $35 a month.
But in this A2 Hosting review, I’d like to explore their shared hosting plans, so from now on, I’ll refer to those in my analysis.
Pricing
What Do Their Shared Plans Include?
Feature | Startup | Drive | Turbo Boost | Turbo Max |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Allowed websites | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Storage | 100 GB | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Max. number of Inodes (total files) | 300,000 | 600,000 | 600,000 | 600,000 |
Bandwidth Simultaneous HTTP connections | Unlimited 35 | Unlimited 35 | Unlimited 35 | Unlimited 35 |
Databases | 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Email addresses | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Support | 24 hours | 24 hours | 24 hours | 24 hours |
Performance | Regular | Regular | Turbo | Turbo |
Resources | 0.7 RAM 1 core | 1 GB RAM 2 cores | 2 GB RAM 2 cores | 4 GB RAM 4 cores |
Backup & restore | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
HTTP/3 | No | No | Yes | Yes |
WordPress, Prestashop and Magento caching system | No | No | Yes | Yes |
First-term prices for 1-year deals | ||||
Renewal price for 1-year deals | $10.99 a month | $12.99 a month | $20.99 a month | $25.99 a month |
* A2 Hosting has an unlimited and unmetered policy, if you use too many resources, you’ll be asked to upgrade or to use fewer resources.
A2 Hosting has monthly, 12, 24 and 36-month deals – the above prices are for a 12-month plan. Obviously, the longer the deal (e.g. 36 months) the cheaper it gets. However, be aware that you’ll be requested to pay the full amount in advance.
But let me tell you what each plan will get you:
Their entry plan, Startup, allows for only 1 website and 100 GB of storage. Sadly, it doesn’t come with the ability to restore the backups that A2 Hosting keeps for you. Bandwidth and storage are unmetered.
With the Drive tier, you are allowed to host as many websites as you want and the storage is unlimited. The backup restore features are enabled too. It also comes with more resources; 1 GB of RAM memory and 2 cores.
The main addition to the Turbo Boost package is its higher performance. Your server will work on HTTP/3, you’ll have fewer server neighbors, and the caching options (A2 Optimized Site Accelerator) are available. Caching plugins for WordPress, Magento and PrestaShop are included too.
The Turbo Max plans have twice as much resources (RAM and cores) than Turbo Boost.
At checkout, they offer a bunch of add-ons that you can purchase separately. For example, if you’d like to create your own backups, you can get 5 GB of backup storage for $1.99 extra a month. Paid SSL certificates, spam filters and Cloudflare (a CDN) are also available.
A2 Hosting Review: Do I Recommend It?
Even if A2 Hosting is not my absolute favorite web hosting provider, but it’s on the top 5 for sure. It’s true that it has some limitations that can make it not ideal for those looking to host really big projects. For example, the HTTP concurrent connections may not be ideal for some.
But it also comes with a whole bunch of perks for the price you’ll pay:
Solid speed (e.g. SSD drives and server-side caching system)
Excellent uptime
Unlimited bandwidth
Generous storage
Reliable support
WordPress site owners will love their staging and speed optimization options
You can choose among 4 server locations (in 3 continents)
So if you want to start cheap (and have decent renewal prices), A2 Hosting is a capable provider for those looking for a solid host. But also check out our round up of the best web hosting.
