My A2 Hosting Review: A Look at Crucial Elements

Over the course of the last two month I’ve been experimenting with A2 Hosting, so it’s about time to put my thoughts on ‘paper’.

I signed up to test the Swift Shared hosting service as I think this is the most widely used service.

Services

The shared hosting that I’ve tried offers basically all the standard features that we can get from most web hosts, and there are features that distinct them.

The fact that they utilise Solid State Drives (SSDs) for example is such, but we shouldn’t forget about the free backups either.

Depending from how deep we look at the services, we can find other as well which makes them unique – but most of the time difference comes not from a different service but from the services being delivered in a different way.

Customer Support

Support is one good example to this. Besides being US based, they also have a priority support for a flat fee as detailed in a review on Webhostingsworld.

This is ideal for individuals/businesses who want to make sure they are on top of things all the time. Obviously wait time is cut down even during peak times when conventional support for the masses can be stretched to the limit.

The live support is a blessing, so is the live network status monitoring. This is really helpful in case there is an issue and clients would like to know if A2 Hosting are working on it already.

Performance

As mentioned earlier, they have global coverage with data centers around the world. This ensures the same user experience for all visitors around the globe depending from which data center we choose as target depending from customer base.

The Swift plan would be the most widely used in my view, not offering above the average performance boosters, so it gives a good opportunity to test like to like.

Based on this I can say that running on WordPress it is about 50% faster than most the similarly priced plans that I’ve tried with other web hosts.

If you’re going to go with shared hosting, I’d say definitely choose Swift at least. The small difference in fee gives a significant difference features.

With this being said, the difference between the shared plans can be seen in the below table.

Money Back Guarantee

A2 Hosting has a pretty decent trial period and they actually give customer’s money back without hassle which cannot be said about a number of well-known web hosts.

This is valid for 30 days and it is not applicable to the domain and other features that are included for free but would be charged independently otherwise.

A Big Plus

One of the biggest advantages besides speed is the fact that they make sure clients can use the latest versions of web technologies. So you can use the latest version of PHP, MYSQL, APACHE, PERL and PYTHON among others.

cPanel is also a tool that I’m fond of and used to working with it, so I like that they provide that as well.

Briefly, this is what I think about the service I’ve tried.

I understand I haven’t used the service to its fullest, and there could be more to cover. However these are the most important elements that the average user will use in my opinion.