A2 Hosting Reviews

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A2 Hosting Expert Review 2018

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:

• Tutorial: How to optimized WordPress for Speed and Performance at A2 Hosting

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:

Windows Hosting Plans: