A2 Hosting, formerly known as Iniquinet, was founded in August 2001 by Bryan Muthig. In recent years (since 2013) they have introduced a range of technology that makes them one of the most feature-rich and fastest web hosting providers in the industry.
What makes A2 Hosting special, is that no matter what type of hosting you need, they have it. Windows, Linux, Unmanaged VPS, Managed VPS and even Managed VPS with root access. They offer technologies such as LiteSpeed, and LiteSpeed cache, Memcached, OpCache, HTTP/2, Railgun, Anycast DNS, plus much more.
We will endeavor to go through all these features in detail later in the review, but there are only a few companies that offer these technologies on shared hosting, and as such this is one company we are proud to recommend.
Our readers have left many 100's of positive A2 Hosting reviews, so be sure to check those out at the end of the article, or click here to jump to them now.
Editor's note: A2 Hosting is now one of our recommend providers for shared web hosting. Our recommendation is based on their Turbo Plan, which comes with more resources per account, A2 Optimized Site Accelerator, Railgun, HTTP/2 and ESI.
A2 Hosting key points
Editor's picks
Recommended
Top considerations
CloudFlare Railgun, Dynamic Caching, Not EIG Owned, SSD Hosting, Unlimited Hosting
Platform
Linux, Windows
Control Panel
cPanel, Plesk
Server Location
Asia, Europe, US
Developer features
Git, Node.js, Ruby on Rails, WP CLI
Specialist Plans
Wordpress hosting
A2 Hosting User Reviews
Find out what people are saying about A2 Hosting below, or alternatively, if you have experience with them yourself, feel free to leave your review.
Stefanos
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
Both customer support and website loading speeds are excellent!
Pablo J. Malacara
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
The best of the bunch!
Steven Rodriguez
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
So far A2 Hosting is the best option you can choose.
They have fast support and great services.
Lisa Keller
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
I have been using A2Hosting for several years now and I love the customer support I get from them. I started out as a very clueless newbie in the technology world and the support staff with A2Hosting was patient and helpful and all of my issues always got addressed. I have also purchased several domains through them and even though they may be more costly than GoDaddy I do not get any sales phone calls afterward as I do with GoDaddy. I would rather pay the extra and not get bothered with all these calls. Thank you A2Hosting for providing great service! http://www.a2hosting.com/refer/38910
V. Oliver
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
Very quick and easy to transfer my website from my old hosting service to A2. They did the migration for me and there were no problems.
So far, I'm extremely happy with A2. The service has been excellent. Support has been fast and helpful.
Ken McRae
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
A2 does a great job keeping the site up, and when you have a problem they respond fast!
Jeremy Miles
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
Excellent service. Everything works perfectly almost all of the time. When I did have a rare problem accessing my website. The tech team quickly identified the cause and the issue resolved within a few hours. Thank you A2.
Marianne
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
perfect, easy-to-follow instructions for a major newbie. Thank you so much for making it so easy.
Craig Scholl
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
Always helpful!
Craig Scholl
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
OUTSTANDING SERVICE!!
Frank VanDyck
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
THANKS MUCH - IN CHICHEWA ZIKOMO KWAMBERI!!! Now online - For a novice at this stuff, your help has been excellent - friendly and to the point. Well Done!
Elizabeth Burke
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
A2 Hosting were fantastic with our recent site migration. All the staff were great, and the prices were really good with the initial discount. I have already recommended them to friends, and is a far cry from my experience at Bluehost. Glad I moved to them
Lisa A
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
The migration to A2 Hosting was really easy, as was my domain transfer. A2 hosting have been nothing but superb. Their tech support is really good and SO friendly. My new site is really fast, and I am so happy with everything. I have been paying way too much over the years for slow load times. Love A2 Hosting!
Jean-Philippe Martel
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
Their servers are fast, but their support is faster.
Whenever I need support I get an answer within 15 minutes more frequently than not. I am still having issues with writing permissions on my files but even so I know that they will eventually solve the issue so my plugins will work.
Highly recommend.
A2 Hosting Expert Review 2017
This review is specific to their shared web hosting, and their Turbo Plan was actually used when making this review, including our associated detailed tutorial on how to take advantage of all their technology with WordPress.
It is not often we come across a shared hosting provider with such powerful features. Furthermore, the way they have implemented those features while still allowing you the flexibility to modify cache times and other performance relating settings is about the best we have seen.
All other shared providers that offer the same kind of features do NOT offer this flexibility. Sure, the technology may be there, but it is incredibly powerful to be able to fine tune everything.
We are impressed. Correction... VERY IMPRESSED!
6 Great Reasons to use A2 Hosting Shared Hosting for your website or Blog
Everyone wants a fast, reliable website with the ability to easily get support when you need it without waiting for days on end. You are all busy people, and even if you do have spare time, we are sure you would rather spend it on other things.
We have collated a detailed summary of the most important elements of A2 Hosting, and as you will see, there is a lot to talk about. A2 Hosting are one of the few web hosting providers that really take pride in allowing you to take advantage of the latest technology, and this shows in our list below:
#1 LiteSpeed, SSD, Memcached, OpCache, LiteSpeed Full page cache, HTTP/2
General Speed related features:
- SSD Storage - Solid State Disk storage increases the performance of your website, but decreasing latency, I/O Input and Throughput, as well as increasing reliability. You can read more about SSD Hosting here.
- Turbo Server - More resources, OpCache, Memcached and fewer accounts per server. Definitely worth having.
- A2 Optimized Software - This ends the guesswork of how to get the fastest page loads for your software with preconfigured settings for W3 Total Cache, as well as various security settings.
- A2 Optimized Site Accelerator - This contains the following:
- Turbo Cache - The entire HTML contents of a page is stored by Turbo Cache and served without running PHP for up to 20X faster page loads. This is utilizes LiteSpeed that is placed in a reverse proxy to Apache.
- Memcached - Increases the speed of your MySQL databases by keeping your most important data in memory for quicker retrieval.
- PHP 7 + OPcache - PHP 7 is significantly faster than the previous version 5.6, with some benchmarks indicating it can handle nearly double the amount of requests per second. OPcache accelerates this performance by storing precompiled script bytecode in the memory.
- Performance Plus - Purchase additional resources instead of having to upgrade to the Cloud or VPS.
SwiftServer Features
- Choice of Server locations - Host your content nearer your visitors for increased performance.
- CloudFlare Free - Free CDN and security from CloudFlare. You can read more about CloudFlare here.
- CloudFlare Basic \ Plus - This is a premium version of CloudFlare with additional performance features such as image optimization.
- Railgun - Railgun is a web optimization technology provided by CloudFlare that greatly speeds up delivery of non-cached web pages.
- Anycast DNS -This accelerates the performance of DNS servers, providing faster response times during the initial hits to your websites by storing the DNS information at various points around the world.
- HTTP/2 - This significantly improves the performance of your HTTPS website. In fact, it is worth implementing HTTPS for the speed increase, as well as the SEO benefits.
#2 Auto Optimized Software takes care of all performance settings
After reading point number 1 above, you are probably wanting to implement all those features, but wary about taking on such a big task.
Well, fortunately, A2 Hosting have automated the majority of the process, and for the rest you can follow a very detailed tutorial on how to take advantage of every single bit of performance related technology they have to offer here:
We spent a whole weekend testing various setups at A2 Hosting, and asked quite a few support questions in the process, and are confident you will be extremely happy at the results when following our tutorial.
#3 Great security & reliability
Whether it is preventing intrusion, ensuring uptime, or just making sure you have a backup should you need one, A2 Hosting have you covered with the following features:
- Server Rewind Backups - Available on all but their cheapest plan, you can restore files and databases as required. However, nothing is infallible so you should also ensure off-site backups.
- Drop My Site Backups - Talking about off-site backups; this is A2 Hosting's solution to ensure reliability of backups, and is available at a small additional cost. That being said, we would still recommend something like VaultPress if you use WordPress.
- Free Hackscan
- Patchman Enhanced Security Tool - This detects outdated software and emails you to upgrade. It also quaranteens infected files, and carries out automated patching of vulnerabilities.
- 99.9 percent Uptime Gurantee - While we believe Uptime Guarantee's to be worthless, 99.9 percent is respectable.
- CloudLinux - Added security and stability due to isolation and limiting of hosting accounts.
- Free SSL with Let's Encrypt - Free SSL certificates, what is not to like?
#4 Good, helpful and fast customer support.
Our experience with their support has been very positive, with responses coming within the hour when using tickets. We never waited more than a minute for live chat and they were quite knowledgeable, which is not always common for live chat support.
They have an A+ rating with the BBB.
#5 Free Site Migrations
A2 Hosting will migrate your website for free. Enough said.
#6 30 Day, Money Back Guarantee
Try them for 30 days and if you are not satisfied request a full refund of your hosting fee (add-on such as domains, CloudFlare plus etc. are not included).
The Downside
There is only one downside to A2 Hosting. That is, in order to get all the technology that makes them great (Swiftserve features), you will need their Turbo plan, and this makes them a slightly more expensive provider.
That being said, $9.31 per month for all the features you get is still very good.
The point is, our recommendation for A2 Hosting is based upon that more expensive plan.
A2 Hosting Shared Hosting Plans
An excellent mix of features on their Turbo Plan
A2 Hosting offers three Linux Hosting Plans, and three Windows Hosting plans. We will deal with each in turn, as the features vary between the different plans due to the different technologies:
Linux Hosting Plans:
| LITE PLAN | SWIFT PLAN | TURBO PLAN | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Space | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Transfer | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Websites | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| SwiftServer Features | Limited | Limited | Full |
| Turbo (more resources) | No | No | Yes |
| Performance Plus | No | $1.47 pm | $1.47 pm |
| A2 Site Accelerator | No | No | Yes |
| Price | $3.92 | $4.90 | $9.31 |
Windows Hosting Plans:
| LITE PLAN | SWIFT PLAN | TURBO PLAN | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Space | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Transfer | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Websites | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Databases (MySQL + MSSQL) | 5 + 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| SwiftServer Features | Limited | Limited | Full |
| Turbo (more resources) | No | No | Yes |
| Performance Plus | No | $1.47 pm | $1.47 pm |
| Price | $4.90 | $5.88 | $10.78 |
51% Off Shared Hosting Plans
A2 Hosting Shared Hosting Deal
This is our standard A2 Hosting offer that gives51% off shared hosting plans. Best to sign up for longer to make the most of this fantastic deal.
Read our full reviewA2 Hosting Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, they offer both Linux and Windows hosting.
A2 is located in Ann Arbor, Michigan USA. They also have also expanded into India, and have an office in Gujarat, India. You can find full addresses, and other contact details here.
Unfortunately, they do not. However, if you require a domain name we would recommend Namecheap anyway.
Yes, they offer what is called an "Anytime money back guarantee".
If you request a refund in the first 30 days they will provide a refund with no questions asked. Otherwise, you can request a pro-rated refund after 30 days, however, please note that you will be billed for any time used at a non-discounted rate (i.e. without any initial discount). Add-ons, such as domain registrations are also not included.
All major credit cards are accepted, including MasterCard, Visa, American Express, and Discover. It also accepts PayPal, 2Checkout, bank transfer, PayU Latam (selected countries), Skrill, check, and money order.
At the present time they do not accept Bitcoin. If paying by Bitcoin is essential we recommend Namecheap, and you can find some great discounts here for them.
Yes, but it works out significantly more expensive to do so. We recommend paying for at least a year, and taking fulll advantage of our exclusive discount.
