A2 Hosting

A2Hosting is among the most reliable service providers in the market. It offers 24/7 guru crew support and anytime money-back guarantee. A2 Hosting was founded in 2002 by a developer-friendly hosting firm that offers all the flexibility that you will require to build a website in an exact way that you want. 

All the A2 website hosting plans come with unlimited bandwidth and disk space. You are also free to choose from Linux and Windows hosting and install the website script that you prefer in a single click including Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. 

One of the key features that make A2 hosting stand out is the anytime moneyback guarantee that the company offers. You can cancel your account within 30 days and you will get a full refund. After the initial 30 days, users are eligible for prorated refunds for any unused service. 

A2 hosting offers a broad range of hosting solutions that range from dedicated, VPS, shared, and everything that in in-between like the managed WordPress hosting. All hosting accounts are also eligible for free website transfer by the largely-friendly A2 support hosting team. To get the fastest web hosting experience, you can go for the company’s exclusive Turbo server option. Indeed, it is among the best web hosting services in the market. In the next section, we are going to look at the key features of the A2 hosting service. 

1. A2 Hosting is Fast 

If you want to own a website, you will be obsessed with the speed. It is good to go for a web host that has the fastest performance. Speed is everything when it comes to doing business online and every millisecond counts. Remember, the time it takes you to blink is approximately 400 milliseconds. How do you think a millisecond is? 

For a web host to be considered to be effective, it should respond to a request within half that time. Google recommends a loading speed of 200ms and you should transfer your data to the screen of the customer within nearly that time. Anything that is slower than this will make the potential customer visit another website. Slow websites are quite boring and the customer will prefer to visit a more effective and faster website. 

When it comes to the element of effectiveness, A2 hosting is very fast and effective. After putting up three test sites, I was extremely happy with the results that came from A2 hosting. We tested for the response time between the location of the server that is pinged from eight different positions all over the world. After averaging out all the numbers and ranked various web hosts, A2 hosting comes out as one of the best services. 

Even though Google recommends a response time of 200ms, a lower one is always the best. Therefore, anything that is ranked below 180ms is ranked as an A+. 181 to 210ms is an A, 211 to 220ms is a B+, 221 to 240ms is a B and so forth. Both the Turbo account and Swift account server speed test came bank with a ranking of an A+. Turbo had a fast rating or 149ms while swift has a worldwide average or 173ms. 

However, these are not the fastest server response speed that is in the market. However, any web host that ranks as an A+ is damn good in our boots. When you combine this with the luxurious features of A2 hosting, you will not regret using A2 web hosting. 

You will love the blazing fast web hosting that comes with A2 hosting. You can host your website on the turbo server of A2 hosting. The choice provides a drop-in Apache replacement that loads pages up to 20 times faster than the traditional hosting. 

2. Super-Fast Turbo Servers 

The Turbo hosting plan of A2 hosting comes with a secret weapon that we call Turbo servers. According to the company, if you host your site by the Turbo servers, its loading speed will be 20 times faster than the regular websites. The reason is that the company limits the number of users per server making it more efficient in handling connections. 

To see how true this is, we run our own page load tests by using the WebPageTest.org tool. We ping the website from various geographical locations. It only took the Swift site 1.066 seconds to load the page completely. On the other hand, it only took 0.9881 seconds for the Turbo site to complete the document. It is a great improvement and there could be bigger disparities in the loading speeds for sites that are heavier. 

3. Fast Loading with SSD Storage 

All the shared hosting plans from A2 hosting come with SSD storage which has a significant contribution to its fast loading speed. You could feel as if this is not a big deal but I can assure you that this is a big deal. If even your site slows by one second, it will lose customer retention and result in a massive loss of sales. SSDs are approximately 30% faster than the regular disks.

Therefore, whenever you see SSDs on your Web hosting storage options, the corners of your mouths will curl upwards as you anticipate for super-fast loading speeds. There is a big difference between HDDs and SSDs and A Hosting delivers the best. All the plans come with a free SSD storage that is proven to boost the performance of your website. 

4. Uptime Guarantee of 99.9%

We have people who don’t understand the meaning of the word uptime. Wikipedia defines uptime as the direct opposite of downtime and this is super helpful. By definition, uptime is the amount of time that your website has available and up for viewing by your precious clients. Since it is practically impossible to get an uptime of 100%, most web hosts in the market provide an uptime guarantee of 99.9%. 

The difference between A2 hosting and the other solutions in the market is that it offers uptime guarantees of 99.9%. if unscheduled downtimes take place to your website that is over 0.1% of the total time every month, A2 will give you a service credit of 5 percent from the total amount that you pay every month for each hour that your website is down because of equipment or internal network failure. It just shows you the level of confidence that A2 has in its web hosting services. The host will remain online for most of the part. 

However, like the other hosts, this does not apply to ISP problems, DDoS attacks, or other issues that come from outside forces. However, it is a good thing to learn that this guarantee is there in the first place. The confidence that the company has on its website increases your confidence as a customer. We used uptimerobot.com to track the information from our website. The results were quite amazing when it comes to the uptime guarantee. 

5. Unlimited Features

Online businesses are not so different from the brick and mortar stores because you will be looking for ways to minimize your expenses. It is very annoying to pay additional money whenever you want to add another email or get an additional domain name. A2 Hosting has so many unlimited hosting for both the Turbo and Swift accounts. 

These include unlimited email addresses, transfers, raid 10 storage, total databases, websites, parked domains, subdomains, and addon domains. There is so much that you can get for free in addition to these unlimited features. These are DNS management, patches enhanced security tool, site migration, and the railgun optimizer on the Turbo plan only. Between the unlimited and free benefits, we finally noticed how it feels being treated like a king. The good thing with A2 hosting is that you won’t have to worry about additional costs. 

6. 24/7 Guru Support

For any respectable web hosting company, having a solid support team is the key to success for any business. All the hardware and speed in the world will not do the customers any good if there isn’t a person to help them in troubleshooting the problems that come their way. 

Cleverly, A2 has branded its customer support team as technical experts Gurus who can solve any problem that you encounter at each moment. We have an experience that is quite pleasant with the brand. The tickets are resolved quite fast and you will speak to helpful, knowledgeable, and friendly gurus on the live chat. 

However, it may take a bit longer before you are connected to an agent. However, it will no longer be an issue once the company hires more support staff. There is no need to worry because it is in the pipeline. 

7. Datacenter Locations for Fast Data Delivery 

Data locations have a crucial role to play in the speed loading times of your website. No matter what type of hardware or tech Webhosting companies crow about, when it comes down to the data delivery speed, it narrows down to the closeness of the datacenters to your target audience. 

If you are targeting North America and your data center is located in Singapore, your data will have to travel for a long time before getting to the screens of your customers. This will result in slow loading times and this may not get the job done well. 

Most web hosting companies only have their data centers in the United States. A2 hosting has four datacenters globally 1 in Singapore, 1 in Amsterdam, and 2 in America. Therefore, A2 hosting covers Asia, Europe, and America comprehensively. All you need to do is choose the closest data center for hosting your website in relation to your clients. It will help your clients to enjoy a quick loading speed. 

8. Software 

Some people enjoy tweaking their software and tinkering with the settings to be able to squeeze out every performance drop.  We also have others who like it when things work out of the box and having the best possible settings. 

A2 Hosting punches above its weight with this attribute and the software are pre-tuned for top performance and maximum security. As per now, you can apply this optimization option to popular software like Joomla, Drupal, PrestaShop, and WordPress. Therefore, you won’t have to worry about the page loading speeds. 

In the own words of A2 hosting, it takes away guesswork in how you get more secure settings and the fastest page loads. It will allow you to run your business without any worries whatsoever. To give you an idea of how better your software will with the optimized software of A2 hosting, the optimized software runs six times faster in comparison to non-optimized websites. 

They have gone ahead to throw in their A2 optimized Site Accelerator for the Turbo plan users. They have pre-configured caching options that will help your website to load faster. It has 3 caching options which include the Turbo cache, OPcache/APC, and the Memcached. 

The Turbo cache gives you up to 20 times faster loading speeds. OPcache/APC cuts the PHP page response times into two. Memcached stores your data in memory for quick retrieval. The page load speeds for the Turbo Cache are quite amazing. 

With the Turbo Cache on, there will be an overall improvement in the site loading speed of the host. However, it may not hit 20 times faster as it is advertised. All said and done, with the Turbo Cache On, it will shelve of a few milliseconds. Even though it may not appear to be much, it adds up in contributing to the loading speed of your website. 

If you have a heavy website with so many images, you will see the 20 times loading speeds coming into play. With the 1-click setup support from A2 hosting, you will be able to install your favorite website easily. This is very useful and convenient, especially if you are installing the check-out counters for your e-commerce websites. 

9. Anytime Moneyback Guarantee 

To add on the 30-day money-back guarantee, you will also get an anytime moneyback guarantee. It means that after the initial 30 days, you will be eligible for the prorated refund of all the unused services. 

10. Operating System Options 

A2 hosting has two options for hosting your website. Regardless of your needs, you can choose between the Windows and Linux operating systems.

A2Hosting is the best web host if you are looking for the one that has an intuitive client login interface. Navigating around the user interface of A2 hosting feels natural and easy. The company pays a lot of attention to user experience by making everything convenient to use and intuitive.

You will get everything that you wish to use at the top of the panel. It is laid out clearly in contrasting colors that will catch the eyes. Everything is where you expect it to be and the search bar is prominently placed at the center to help you get access to the impressive knowledge articles of the company. 

Using it feels natural and the color combination feels quite pleasant. It does not hurt the eyes and all the important icons and links stand out and hence you will not search too hard for them. To cut the long story short, you will really love the UI of A2 hosting. 

To make your website work ridiculously fast, you should start by choosing a reliable web host. We tested the performance of A2 hosting servers for the sake of compiling this review. Our experts used three different tools; Bitcatcha, Load Impact, and Pingdom to check whether the host lives to its promise. 

The loading speed is among the fastest in the industry. The other thing we looked at is whether A2 hosting can handle a traffic surge during the peak loads. The site also performs well on this particular metric. It has great performance even when there is an increase in the number of visitors. 

It explains why the company has an uptime guarantee of 99.9%. The site performs consistently even if you increase the number of visitors. Even if it slows down the performance, it will get back to normal within no time. 

A2 hosting has some of the best response time in the market. From the two tests, we analyzed the performance of the website and recorded the response time and uptime. We loaded all the content on our web page including the images because they have a great impact on the loading speed. However, they can make the results of the response time of the server slightly inaccurate. 

That is why we decided to use the Bitcatcha tool because it works a bit differently in testing response time. Bitcatcha allows you to test the response time of your website while ignoring the content. Therefore, there are delays, it will be upon you to edit the content on your website. The tool averages the loading speed from 8 different locations all over the world. These include Australia, Japan, Singapore, India, Brazil, London, LA, and New York. It measures the speed of every location three different times before getting the average of the results. You will really love A2 Hosting when it comes to its performance ability.

A2 has a guru crew support team that is available to help you with any questions 24/7. You can get to the technical team through email, live chat or phone. The company also has a vast knowledge base that will help you learn how to develop, host, and maintain your website easily. Also, it will help you to resolve any problems that you could be having with your hosting account. 

The other thing that the host will assist you with is free site transfer to your host account to a competing host service provider. All you need to do is contacting the support team and requesting for a free site transfer.

A2 hosting provides both Windows and Linux hosting. All the Linux hosting plans come when they are bundles with a cPanel control panel that allows you to manage your hosting account easily including your databases, site files, and hosted domain names among other features. With the Windows hosting plan, you will get Plesk, that is an alternative to the cPanel to use in managing your hosting account.