A2 Hosting Reviews: 18 Crucial Things To Consider in 2022

Find out if this is the web hosting that suits your needs.

A2 Hosting is 20x Quicker Than Competitor Hosting Sites

Since its inception in 2001, A2 Hosting has provided clients with exceptionally quick speed for servers.

There have been problems with the decrease in uptime, which can be problematic for some users. And while the monthly web hosting is affordable at rates as low as $2.99 a month,  you can face serious expenses with the renewal rates. These rates occur after your first subscription ends.

This A2 hosting review takes a hard look at the likes and dislikes from signing up, to costs, and finally, how well they perform.

Basic Information and  Hosting Specifications

Benefits You Get with A2 Hosting

One of the best hosting providers you can currently find is A2 Hosting. But it’s not widely known.

There’s plenty to love, including super quick speed, knowledgeable customer service, great security features, and an admirable refund policy. Not to mention, they’re also environmentally friendly.

Here’s a look at all the great features so you can make a more informed verdict.

Quickest Provider That Offers Shared Hosting Services (317ms)

A2 Hosting is most known for one specific goal that’s involved in all their services: Speed.

They have quick, consistent uptimes and very little downtime. They use shared servers to ensure your website speed can pass any speed tests.

But all their talk is legit. They are definitely quick. In fact, they are one of the fastest hosting providers available and have been holding that position for multiple years.

We’re impressed with their consistency to ensure that your site loads up fast enough to keep readers around instead of leaving for a different site.

Loading Times of A2 Hosting For the Last Year

Month – uptime – ms response time

• April 2019  – 99.99%/263 ms
• May 2019 – 99.98%/257 ms
• June 2019 – 99.70%/278 ms
• July 2019 –  99.85%/288 ms
• August 2019 – 99.95%/307 ms res
• September 2019 – 99.99%/286 ms
• October 2019 – 99.99%/290 ms
• November 2019 – 100%/326ms
• December 2019 – 100%/302 ms
• January 2020 – 99.99%/424 ms
• February 2020 – 100%/294 ms
• March 2020 –  99.99%/261 ms
• April 2020 – 100%/296 ms
• May 2020 – 100%/264 ms

A2Hosting Average Speed

Helpful & Knowledgeable Customer Service

If you have a question or problem, support has a large collection of articles available in their knowledge base for customers who want to do their own troubleshooting. It’s an excellent service and very user-friendly.

You can contact support 24/7 through instant messaging. Or you can get excellent customer assistance with a phone call. There’s also support ticket assistance which is also a great customer care service.

You might experience slow speed while using the live chat feature to connect with support staff.

Some users experience wait times up to five minutes.

But once you’ve connected with a representative, they’re sure to have your problem resolved quickly.

The customer representatives will be able to answer any questions you have. Most customers find them to be polite and eager to help, no matter what the issue. You’re sure to have a positive outcome.

HackScan Protects Your Site for Free

You don’t always get the benefit of speed and security with your site. Safety features like firewalls, encryption and scanning can cause slower speeds.

But with A2-Hosting, you get the best of both worlds – fastest speed and extra security features to keep your site safe, with the same hosting service.

HackScan, a well-known monitoring service, scans A2 Hosting servers 24/7 to check for and protect against cyber attacks and malware.

Both A2Hosting and HackScan know that it’s better to protect your site early to prevent issues before they occur.

A2 Hosting also has scalable data centers. You’re protected from DDoS – denial of service – attacks. Leaving your site vulnerable to DDoS attacks causes your servers to get knocked offline from a flood of traffic to your servers. With A2 Hosting, unexpected increases won’t bring your site down.

Transfer Your Site For Free (1-25 Complementary Migrations)

If you already have a website with another web host, you can have your site imported to A2 Hosting servers for free with all plans.

To take advantage of this free site migration, contact customer support via phone or chat to connect to the migration team. Be sure you have your cPanel account information available, as they will need this to perform the transfer.

How many sites you can transfer will depend on which plan you’ve chosen. They provide everything you need to know about transferring in their Terms of Agreement.

With the plans Lite, Swift, and Turbo, there is a limit of one site exported. However, the plans for reseller hosting, dedicated and managed VPS hosting, get 25 website transfers.

The transfer will only be free if you provide your cPanel login information. Without this, you will incur a small fee for the support team to convert your old site over to their database.

Interested in web hosting? Check our in-depth analysis for the best web hosting

Developer-Friendly Applications, Easy Website Creation, and Content Management Systems (CMS)

A2 Hosting makes it super easy to create a website in minutes without having to work with a developer. They are compatible with most CMS, including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, and OpenCart.

To make things even easier, they also have plugins that work with these sites, such as the A2 Optimized WordPress plugin. These features are only available in the larger plans but they help improve your site speed.

If you’re looking for an easy way to create your own website, A2 Hosting offers its own platform called SiteBuilder – pretty on the nose, huh. SiteBuilder is easy to use to design your site to exact specifications without having to use HTML or other code. SiteBuilder does have its own plans that you’ll have to purchase.

Your site stays at top speed due to a Cloudflare CDN account, which will load large files and images separately from the server for faster page loading. All of the plans offered by A2 Hosting are compatible.

A2 Hosting isn’t just for single users. It’s also a favorite for agencies and webmasters who host lots of different sites. Web developers are sure to appreciate the advanced tools, including admin access to servers, complementary server rewind backups, and various types of coding, including Python, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and PHP.

Money-Back Guarantee Whenever

In previous years, customers had 30 days to request a full return of their money, as is typical of most hosting sites like a2hosting com.

With these guarantees, you have a limited amount of time to decide if you like the product or not. After the 30-day guarantee is up, you can’t get your money refunded, even if you have a legitimate reason for asking.

But a few years ago, A2 decided to change their return policy. It is now more adaptable to customer needs. A2 Hosting provides a money-back guarantee anytime.

If you decide you want your money refunded within the first thirty days, no problem. But let’s say you decide to purchase an extended plan for 3 years but you end up dissatisfied a year or so into the deal.

With this hosting company, you can ask for a refund anytime. Then they will give you a prorated portion equal to the remaining time you have left with your contract.

But there are a few conditions. With refunds requested after 120 days, you will only be able to get your money sent back through PayPal. But similar to other hosting companies, services such as domain name registration and fees related to migration or set up are non-refundable.

But you do get to keep the things that you didn’t get a refund for, such as your domain.

Green Service Provider

A2 Hosting resides in Ann Arbor lovingly nicknamed “Tree Town.” There are over 150 parks and have tens of thousands of trees in the entire city.

Their city pride has made this company want to do its part to reduce the effects of global warming.

To do so, A2 joined forces with a well-established organization called Carbonfund.org, which helps with reforestation and sustainable resources. In addition, A2 has put in a lot of effort to offset the CO2 emissions from their servers as part of a FutureServe initiative.

Who doesn’t want to play a part in helping make the world a better place for future generations? Using such an environmentally conscious company is sure to count.

99.9% Uptime

You wouldn’t want to choose a company that promises quick page loads, but that is constantly getting knocked offline.

You won’t have to worry about this problem with a web hosting service like A2. They have had consistently high uptimes, although they have had less success in recent years.

Even at the worst of times, A2 has retained at least a 99.93% uptime.

The average uptime for A2 Hosting over 12 month period:

• May 2019 – 99.98%
• June 2019 – 99.70%
• July 2019 – 99.85%
• August 2019 – 99.95%
• September 2019 – 99.99%
• October 2019 – 99.99%
• November 2019 – 100%
• December 2019 – 100%
• January 2020 – 99.99%
• February 2020 – 100%
• March 2020 – 99.99%
• April 2020 – 100%
• May 2020 – 100%

A2 Hosting: hosting facts-a2.com

Disadvantages of Using A2 Hosting

There’s no doubt there are a lot of advantages to hosting A2 over other hosting companies.

But faster page loads and great customer service don’t make up for where A2 lacks. Let’s check out some of the disadvantages:

Renewal Problems – Short Deadline and Steep Rates

A2 Hosting strives for long-term customers, which could explain why you get a monthly discount for purchasing a hosting plan for multiple years over shorter hosting packages. This reduction could end up saving you a ton of money before the end of your deal.

To lure in new customers, A2 offers low introductory rates that usually turn your balance into half of what you expected.

So, where’s the issue? Well, once your original plan ends, you are automatically renewed at the normal pricing. This cost is usually close to twice what you paid the first time.

Unfortunately, this is a common practice among many web hosting companies. After all, no one wants to spend time and probably money to move your site to another hosting provider. When you enjoy a product, you’ll pay the extra fees to continue gaining access.

But here’s where we find an issue with A2’s terms.

In order to prevent the automatic renewal of your account, you must provide a written request for cancellation 15 days before your new term begins. This request has to be submitted through the customer portal or by sending a message to the email address [email protected].

If you miss your 15-day period, there’s nothing you can do. You’ll be stuck paying the automatically processed, increased renewal price, and you won’t be given a refund.

If you’re the type of person who forgets to cancel free trials, you might run into trouble using the service A2 hosting offers.

Check this comparison between A2 Hosting and SiteGround to find out who is the winner

Cheaper Plans Are Limited

Nothing good comes free, or cheap. But the low cost of the Startup shared hosting plans start at just $2.99 a month, which is as close to free as you can get.

The price point is a great draw but it means you’ll be limited on what you get with the package, especially compared to hosting options offered by other web hosting providers.

The Startup plan gives you one website, unlimited storage, free SSL certificate, free site migration, and a guaranteed full refund if you’re not satisfied, anytime you want it.

But what you don’t get are the benefits that A2 takes pride in, such as 20x faster page speeds, backups at offsite server locations, Turbo servers, or server rewind. The larger plans come with these, which are more expensive. Turbo Boost plan, which gives you 20x faster page loads costs $6.99 a month.

The Website Builder plan also has some flaws. They do have a cheap monthly plan for $2.99, but it only supports websites with one page. If you want to design an entire website with multiple pages, you’d have to at least get the Basic plan, which offers 10 pages for $8.99 monthly.

A2 Features: Costs, Hosting Plans, and Trivia

A2 has four monthly shared web hosting packages for clients to choose from:

• Startup – $2.99 a month.  You get a single website, 100 GB of storage, free SSL and SSD, 5 databases, and free site migration. You’re also protected by their money-back guarantee. And don’t forget 24/7 Guru Crew support
• Drive – $5.99 a month. You can have unlimited websites, storage, databases, transfers, and free rewind backups, SSD and SSL, tech support, money-back guarantee, free one-site migration, and access to Cpanel control.
• Turbo Boost – $6.99 a month. You get unlimited websites, storage, transfers, databases, server backups, and free SSD and SSL,  plus free site security. This package is when you get the 20x faster speeds due to the Turbo server. And you also get an A2 optimized site accelerator for faster load times.
• Turbo Max: $12.99 a month. You’ll have access to the same unlimited features as the Turbo package, but you also get 4 MB of memory. The extra memory is the only difference between the Boost and Max packages.

A2 does accept coupons, so do your research to find discount codes that will help you spend less money on your subscription.

• How to sign up: Signing up is as simple as three steps. You’ll be designing your site in no time.
• Ways to pay: A2 uses multiple payment methods such as credit card, PayPal, or paid by check, money order, bank transfer, Skrill, or PayuLatam.
• Activation Type:  Instant
• Dashboard: cPanel
• Upsells: Not very many
• Apps/CMS Install: Available at checkout
• Unexpected costs and stipulations: When requesting a refund, money cannot be returned for domain names. And there is a deadline to cancel your renewal before you get charged for the new price. Cancellation has to be done 15 days prior to your new renewal date or you’ll be charged. And you can only get one site transferred without having to pay migration fees.

Is A2 Hosting Recommended?

Yes, it is.

A2 Hosting is a reputable web hosting company with fast, reliable speeds and an excellent customer service team. Each shared plan has a free SSL certification and one free site migration. And they have consistent impressive uptime.

Refunds can be issued at any time with zero hassle. All you have to do is contact support and say that you want to cancel your membership. They will issue a return for any unused balance.

But don’t forget that the rates are higher when your membership automatically renews.

And no matter which of the plans you pick, they’ll only cover one free site transfer, even if you’re paying to host an unlimited number of sites.

Some people might find these disadvantages enough to choose a competitor over A2 Hosting. This web hosting service is great but there are better ones out there as well.

Also, check our suggestions for the best Minecraft server hosting – 2022