A2 Hosting is one of the oldest web hosting providers that’s still extremely popular. What it claims to offer is the speediest performance you can get. So in this A2 Hosting review, I took the provider to the test. I want to see if it’s as fast as promised and if other crucial things like prices, features, ease of use, security, and customer support are worth your time.
“20x faster web hosting” is A2 Hosting’s claim that lures many new web hosting users in.
“Faster than what?” many more skeptical users like me would ask.
So really, it got me curious. Can this seemingly regular, average-priced provider show some extraordinary results?
More often than not, the providers’ homepage copy remains a far-fetched promise. But in the A2 Hosting case, it might be closer to the truth than we could’ve expected. Some of the A2 Hosting’s offered plans are truly hosted on some of the best enterprise-level hardware.
But speed is not the only topic I’m going to cover today. So stick around and let’s find out everything there’s to know about A2 Hosting before purchasing it.
As a last note, I must say this review gets into cracks and crevices of all that’s A2 Hosting, which makes it pretty long.
Pros and Cons of A2 Hosting
Pros
Cons
A2 Hosting pricing
A2 Hosting prices range from rather affordable to entirely premium – shared hosting starts at $2.99/month and goes up to $14.99/month with 3-year subscriptions. Other options include managed WordPress hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers.
The options are many. But as with most providers, A2 Hosting’s most popular solution is shared hosting, and that’s exactly what I’ll be focusing on for this review.
All of the shared hosting plans come with big SSD storage, free SSL certificates, unlimited email accounts, DDoS protection unlimited transfers, and unlimited subdomains. Unfortunately, none of the plans will get you a free domain. That’s an extra expense.
One thing to note is that A2 Hosting offers an any-time money-back guarantee. What this means is that you are eligible for a prorated refund for any unused services. Additionally, there’s a standard 30-day money-back guarantee for a full refund.
All in all, A2 Hosting is more of a premium provider for those people who are looking for the best shared hosting hardware. That – it has. However, you got to be ready for big payment upfront. Do not forget to check out A2 Hosting Black Friday deals for a chance to pay less.
Link to buy A2 Hosting Optimized WordPress
Hosting management – is it easy to use?
All that A2 Hosting uses for hosting management is the good old cPanel. It’s easy to use and functional. The downside – you’ll need to look at an interface that came from the early 2000s. Quite a downgrade in case you’ve tried something more modern.
To reach the cPanel, you’ll need to go through the account management panel. This is where you reach support, renew your plan, and add extra services.
Honestly, this looks quite outdated, so just quickly click on the cPanel Login button. I wonder how A2 Hosting gets away with such awful-looking interfaces and steep prices.
Fortunately, you don’t need to look at this for too long.
All things considered, A2 Hosting’s control panel is very easy to use and you will not have any problems navigating it and setting up your new website. It is also very functional and has every tool needed to create a successful website.
A2 Hosting performance – is A2 Hosting fast?
A2 Hosting claims to be “20x faster web hosting”. So to test this, I have put the provider through a few performance-related tests. All throughout the test period, A2 Hosting has demonstrated very reliable uptime, average server response time, and pretty great website loading time. It also managed to pass my stress test on the maximum load.
A2 Hosting uptime and response time
At the time of writing this A2 Hosting review, I have been monitoring it for 2 months. During this time, it had 4 outages which, in total, resulted in 7 minutes of downtime. That’s an overall 99.99% uptime.
Meanwhile, the average response time came up to 597ms, pretty average if you’d ask me.
So many numbers, but what do they mean for you?
First of all, A2 Hosting comes with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. What you get, though, is much better. The 99.9% uptime commitment means your website is expected to be down for 2h 11m 29s quarterly. However, A2 Hosting outperforms that greatly with an expected quarter downtime of 8m 30s.
As for response times, they remained very stable throughout the monitoring period. This shows that my website did not have to fight for server resources too hard.
Now, let’s look at the website’s loading speed.
A2 Hosting speed
My website is hosted in the US data center, so the best results are expected in the US – with the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) at 859ms. Accordingly, the further away from the server we go, the longer it’ll take for the website to load. Test results further support that.
But why does LCP matter and what does it mean?
Google is starting to consider measures such as LCP when ranking web pages. Initially meaning your site has a better chance of appearing higher on the search results page if the LCP is short. As long as you keep it in under 2.5s, you’ll be just fine.
You can tell A2 Hosting fits in this time slot perfectly with the lowest time of 859ms. Even in India, the site manages to load fast enough to fit in. The time could be better, sure, but you won’t see me complaining just yet.
