A2 Hosting Review For WordPress Hosting – Price, Pros & Cons

When it comes to WordPress hosting, A2 Hosting, like many other Webhost companies, offers 2 kinds of hosting.

1. Shared WordPress Hosting
2. Managed WordPress Hosting

However, this does not mean that just like WP Engine, A2 Hosting provides only WordPress hosting. This web host has a lot more to offer but in this A2 Hosting review, I’ll restrict myself only to the WordPress hosting and before that, I’ll suggest going through this important disclaimer.

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A2 Hosting – WordPress Hosting Review

History

A2 Hosting has been providing services since 2001 by Bryan Muthig who had a strong background in managing UNIX-based systems.

Based in Michigan, just like any other “rags-to-riches” story, A2 Hosting also has its own story of a humble beginning and starting off by managing the hosting of their friends and family’s websites to becoming a full-fledged and well-known web hosting company.

A2 Hosting – Pricing Plans

A2 hosting charges different prices for its shared and managed WordPress hosting. For obvious reasons, the managed WordPress hosting is slightly more expensive than its shared counterpart since A2 hosting takes care of all your backups, updates and your WordPress website is optimized for performance.

I’ll mention the pricing plans of both below:

Shared WordPress Hosting – Pricing Plans

If you want to host your WordPress website on shared servers then A2 Hosting provides you 4 different tiers of pricing. The lowest (Startup Plan) starting from $2.99/month to the highest (Turbo Max Plan) costing your $14.99/month

Managed WordPress Hosting – Pricing Plans

The lowest package where you can host just 1-site starts from $11.99/month and the highest package A2 Hosting offers will cost you $36.98/month where you can host multiple WordPress websites.

A2 Hosting – Features Available for WordPress Hosting

1. 99.99% Up-Time Guarantee

I did a bit of research and found that over the last 5 months (starting from Jun-2020), A2 Hosting hasn’t gone down for even a second.

That’s right. A2 Hosting’s servers have stayed online 100% of the time. If we add a bit of humility here, A2 Hosting itself guarantees 99.99% up-time.

What this means is that if your search of a reliable web hosting company isn’t coming to an end, then you can definitely bank on A2 Hosting.

2. Hi-Speed Turbo Servers

Despite the almost infallible up-time above, A2 Hosting does not compromise the speed of its servers. They fully realize how the swift page download speed affect the search engine rankings and as a whole, your business. Therefore, they make sure that you get the best speed.

Here’s the most recent performance of their servers over 10 different locations:

Additionally, here’s a table showing how soon the servers of A2 Hosting placed in different locations respond to user requests. Sorted from the fastest to the slowest:

Server Location	Response Time (Sec.)
US (East Coast)	0.02
Canada	0.03
US (West Coast)	0.06
London	0.09
Germany	0.11
Sao Paulo	0.13
Japan	0.17
Sydney	0.20
Bangalore	0.22
Singapore	0.22

So what makes A2 Hosting servers so lightning quick?

Well, here are some, under the hood tweaks that give A2 Hosting customers the best speed for their WordPress websites

RAID-10 SSD Storage: The solid-state drive gives you better speed when it comes to data storage. A2 Hosting provides SSD storage for all its customers.

Turbo Servers: A2 Hosting Turbo servers are designed to give maximum speed. These Turbo servers are almost 20 times faster than their competitors.

CloudFlare CDN: A2 Hosting deploys CloudFlare Free CDN (one of the best CDNs out there) for site rendering which boosts up your website and speeds up the page load time by 200%.

Photon Image CDN: For any website, images can be the most resource-savvy media that may not only consume your website resources but may also slow down your website. A2 Hosting provides Photon Image CDN to serve images as fast as possible thus allowing your websites to download swiftly.

3. Daily Backups

A2 Hosting provides daily backups for Managed WordPress hosting customers.

As far as the shared WordPress hosting is concerned, you can restore backups of your data using the Server Rewind option.

Server Rewind is just a fancy name given to the facility of restoring your database and website data in A2 Hosting just in case anything breaks. All A2 Hosting Shared WordPress users can use this Server Rewind feature to restore backups of their websites.

4. 24/7/365 Support

Though a little bit lax A2 Hosting provides 24/7/365 support to its customers. They can contact the support team through a portal (“ticket system”) or a live chat.

I tested their support and noticed that they’ve outsourced it off-shore, though I’m not sure about it. The reason I’m saying this is that even though the chat did respond to my query, the response time was a bit slow and it felt like the support rep had to consult either his superior or his database or answer a simple query.

Nevertheless, the support overall is quite decent.

5. Free JetPack Personal License

If you’ve ever used WordPress before then I’m sure the name JetPack is not new for you.

JetPack is a comprehensive set of WordPress-related tools to design, secure and grow your WordPress website.

From free themes to media-rich content, social sharing options to grow your website traffic, or want to implement Captcha security to secure your website. JetPack is essentially a one-stop shop for your WordPress website.

With every managed WordPress Hosting package, you get a JetPack Personal License ($39/year value). Absolutely FREE.

6. Free & Easy Site Migration

Migrating your website could be quite daunting. No doubt about that. This is precisely the reason that A2 Hosting provides a free and white-glove migration facility. Just provide the necessary information to the A2 Hosting support gurus and they will help transfer all your website data to their own servers.

7. Any Time Money-Back Guarantee

Unlike the other web host companies, where you cannot claim a refund for the services that you’ve used, A2 Hosting gives you refunds just in case you feel that they’re not the right host for you.

8. Free SSL Certificate

Since SSL certificates have now become next to mandatory ever since Google has started distinguishing between secured and non-secured websites you have to add SSL certificates to rank well in Google. A2 Hosting provides free SSL certificates to all their websites so you don’t have to worry about the extra cost to manage your WordPress websites.

Pros & Cons of A2 Hosting

To quickly summarize the review, here are the pros and cons that you should keep in your mind when signing up for A2 Hosting’s WordPress Hosting services.

Pros

1. Tremendous up-time record. A2 Hosting servers haven’t gone down even for a second in the past 5-6 months.
2. A2 Hosting servers are geared for hi-speed performance. Its ecosystem of Turbo servers, SSD storage, caching capabilities, and CDNs for content and image rendering ensure that you extract the best speed out of their servers. To cut it short, A2 Hosting offers the best speed as compared to its competitors.
3. Anytime money-back guarantee to ensure that you can try their services without any fear of losing money unnecessarily.
4. Free JetPack Personal License with every Managed WordPress Hosting package.
5. Free SSL certificate
6. Prices are quite reasonable. Comparatively, A2 hosting provides the best value-for-money when compared with its competitors.
7. 24/7/365 support.
8. Free & white-glove site migration. However, there are instances when A2 Hosting will charge for migration. Read very briefly in the Cons section below.

Cons

1. A2 Hosting does not provide free domain on account registration.
2. Though not a deal-breaker but the support is a little lax.
3. A2 Hosting may charge for migration in the case when you downgrade your plan.

Who Should and Should Not Use A2 Hosting?

Once we know all the features, pros and cons of A2 Hosting, I believe it’s better to discuss an important point.

For whom A2 hosting is best? What kind of WordPress users should sign up for A2 hosting services and who should look for the alternatives instead?

Well, here are some very quick suggestions for you to help you decide if A2 Hosting is the best WordPress hosting service for you?

A2 Hosting Is Best For…

1. WordPress bloggers looking for serious high-speed performance.
2. A2 Hosting, to a certain extent, is scalable. Therefore, if you’re expecting to serve a good number of visitors on your website then A2 Hosting will come in quite handy.

WordPress Users Who Should Try A2 Hosting Alternatives

1. Hobbyists who are not serious about blogging and do not expect a high number of visitors to their website
2. Although, I consider A2 Hosting an economical WordPress hosting but still there are even cheaper alternatives available out there. So if you’re on a really tight budget and want to squeeze each and every penny then A2 hosting is not the best WordPress hosting solution for you.

User Reviews

A2 Hosting enjoys healthy review all over the internet. Just looking at the famous review website, TrustPilot, we can see that this web hosting has a rating of 4.1 out of 5 with over 1,000 reviews.

84% of the A2 Hosting users are happy with their services while only 15% didn’t get what they were expecting.

Let’s have a look at the different kinds of user reviews and see what the A2 Hosting users have to say about its quality just to give you a better idea to decide if A2 Hosting is really worth your money.

Let’s start with the negative reviews first.

Negative User Reviews

As far as WordPress hosting is concerned, the majority of the A2 Hosting customers who left an appalling review on the website are not happy with their support.

However, one customer had to face technical issues, and it’s good to see that he was very vocal about it as well.

Positive User Reviews

As mentioned above, there are literally tons of positive reviews for A2 Hosting out there.

Let’s have a look at the few of them.

Mixed User Reviews

And to give you a rather balanced point of view, below are some of the feedback from A2 Hosting’s user who, very intricately, have mentioned what went wrong and how A2 Hosting proved handy for them.

I’ll post only two such reviews because I’m sure that you’ll get the overall gist.

A2 Hosting – Sentiment Analysis

Just to substantiate my point of view about A2 Hosting, I went ahead and performed some sentiment analysis to see what sort of emotions people hold for this web host.

Just a brief review shows that the majority of the “posts” all around the internet are discussing A2 Hosting in a positive light.

Here’s the table that shows this information.

Platform	Positive	Negative	Neutral
Twitter	70%	5%	25%
Facebook	70%	20%	10%
Reddit	29%	8%	63%
DailyMotion	32%	5%	63%
Flickr	46%	7%	47%
Vk.com	28%	1%	71%
Vimeo	37%	11%	53%

So What’s The Verdict? Do I Recommend A2 Hosting?

A2 Hosting is one of those few economical, reliable and trustworthy WordPress web hosting service that I STRONGLY RECOMMEND.

Of course, you won’t find any web host that does not have even a single complaint filed against them but if you really want to see any web host that provides the best value-for-money and gives the best speed at relatively lower cost then A2 Hosting is definitely for you.

Besides, if you’re expecting medium to high traffic on your WordPress website and yet cannot pay for premium WordPress hosting services like WP Engine or Kinsta then A2 Hosting comes highly recommended.

Interested in A2 Hosting Alternatives…?

IMHO, A2 Hosting, for me, is one of the best hosting services among its “weight category”. However, if you want to explore more options then I’ve lined up alternatives that are similar to A2 hosting in terms of price range as well as those hosting companies which, though are even better than A2 hosting but obviously, charge higher.

Alternatives Similar To A2 Hosting

1. InterServer
2. Dreamhost
3. Blue Host
4. GoDaddy
5. HostGator
6. iPage
7. FatCow
8. InMotion Hosting

Better But Obviously Costlier A2 Hosting Alternatives

1. Convesio (Read our Convesio Review)
2. Kinsta
3. CloudWays (Read our CloudWays Review)
4. WPX Hosting
5. Pressidium
6. FlyWheel
7. WP Engine (Read our WP Engine Review)
8. Media Temple
9. Liquid Web

Final Thoughts

Let’s summarize the whole review in a few words now. A2 Hosting is definitely one of the best, most reliable and most economical WordPress hosting services that gives you the best combination of speed, uptime, security and service.

Before signing out, I’ll suggest that just in case you’re still perplexed, as I know that with so many options and technical jargon, a person does get overwhelmed, you can either leave a comment below or contact me.

Tell me your details and I’ll help you in figuring out just the right (WordPress) hosting for you.

In the end, if you’re convinced with this A2 Hosting review and think that it makes sense and fits your WordPress hosting needs then you can start your WordPress blog today by clicking the button below.