A2 Hosting Review 11 Pros & Cons You Should Consider

A2 Hosting Pricing

What Do Their Shared Plans Include?

* 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 Pros & Cons

There are some cases where using A2 Hosting will be a smart choice, but other times it may make little sense to use this hosting provider. Let me clarify those for you.

When to Use A2 Hosting

If you are after a medium-priced provider that’s generous with storage and bandwidth, A2 Hosting is a reliable choice.

On top of that, it comes with some features that similar competitors won’t offer, for example, built-in server-side caching, staging areas and speed optimization plugins for CMSs like WordPress, PrestaShop or Magento.

Indeed, despite the fact it’s not the cheapest option, these extra features meant that A2 did very well when we tested the best affordable WordPress hosting providers.

So, I can imagine that A2 Hosting would be a good fit for new bloggers who need a reliable host, for small and medium-sized businesses who are after a serious hosting service, or digital solopreneurs (e.g. SEO consultants or WordPress developers) who need storage for their website and potentially their clients’.

When Not to Use A2 Hosting

However, there are a couple of limitations that make me reluctant to recommend A2 Hosting for larger projects. Having a concurrent HTTP connections limitation may be a deal-breaker for those getting more traffic.

A2 Shared Hosting Details

A2 Performance Tests

Along with support, performance is one of the most important aspects of a hosting provider. Having the most advanced technology and features is pointless if your hosting provider can’t keep up with your website’s needs.

That’s why I’ve intensively tested A2 Hosting’s speed and uptime. Let me show you the results.

A2 Hosting Speed Test

Slow websites aren’t cool, and a fast hosting provider is vital for supporting a quick site. As you can imagine, your site’s speed is crucial for having better user engagement, and many studies have correlated slow sites with lower conversion rates.

On top of that, Google and other search engines dislike slow sites. So even more reasons to have a fast hosting provider.

There are lots of things you can do to fix a slow website. And there are particular steps you can take to make WordPress faster.

But the biggest contributor to a fast (or slow) website is your hosting provider.

Over the last year, I closely monitored A2 Hosting’s speed and uptime (against that of other web hosts) using tools like Pingdom, WebPageTest.org, GTmetrix, Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

A2 Hosting performed very well in our tests and was one of the most reliable and fastest web hosts. Its average loading time was 1.30 seconds, (the second fastest out of 15 competitors!).

You can see how their page load time compares to other web hosts in the chart below:

And here’s an overview of their page load speed results over the last three years:

If you are worried about speed, A2 Hosting is a trusty provider. Much more Road Runner than Coyote indeed.

Is A2 Hosting’s Uptime Good?

Another point search engines monitor closely is the Uptime - this measures how many interruptions your site had. In other words, how much time your website was offline. If you don’t have a decent uptime (e.g. 99.95% or higher), your organic rankings could suffer.

As you can imagine, projects that highly depend on their site being online all the time (e.g. online stores), can be deeply harmed by a server that has constant periods of downtime.

In the chart below, you can see how their uptime over the last year compares to other web hosts:

Here’s an overview of A2 Hosting’s uptime over the last three years:

A2 Hosting guarantees a 99.9% uptime for all their clients in their Terms of Service. That’s a good start, but competitive projects will need a tiny bit more.

In the past (2019) A2 Hosting has struggled with uptime ratios, but in our last tests, as you can see in the table above, they had outstanding uptime results in recent tests.

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.

> Check out A2 for 30 days for free

A2 Hosting Alternatives

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For many, A2 Hosting will be a good option, but as I mentioned before, some businesses will find it to be limiting. Let me mention a couple of alternatives:

• Check out DreamHost or our guide to cheap web hosts if you are looking for the best bang for the buck
• A2 Hosting offers reliable support, other providers with great customer care are SiteGround, InMotion Hosting and DreamHost
• Along with A2 Hosting, SiteGround, Kinsta and WP Engine has the most advanced WordPress features

> But feel free to test A2 Hosting without any risk for 30 days and decide if it’s a good alternative for your project.

Thanks for reading this A2 review, I hope it helped you get a better idea of what you’ll be getting with A2 Hosting. However, if you have any questions, please leave a message and I’ll try to help you.