A2 Hosting Review – Lightning Fast Servers But At What Cost?

With claims of “20x faster web hosting,” A2 Hosting aims to stand out in a crowded market. But is their speed and performance truly best-in-class for the price?

I put A2 Hosting to the test across critical categories like speed, uptime, features, pricing, ease of use and support. My goal was to determine if this popular host actually lives up to its bold promises.

A2 Hosting builds its reputation on quality hardware and optimized servers tuned for blazing fast speeds. For site owners prioritizing performance over features or support, their Turbo plans excel.

In this extensive A2 Hosting review, I cover:

• Real-world speed test results compared to guarantees
• Uptime over months of monitoring
• Ability to handle traffic spikes during stress tests
• Security protections like SSL, firewalls and patching
• Usability of the cPanel control panel
• Support wait times and agent knowledge

By benchmarking both strengths and weaknesses, I reveal whether A2 Hosting’s cutting-edge infrastructure delivers the speed, reliability and support needed for your site.

Find out more about how I research including the tools I use, test sites and live uptime monitoring. Learn more about my testing and review process

A2 Hosting Quick Stats

Founded in 2001, A2 Hosting is a leading web host known for its high performance Turbo servers and excellent uptime record.

Some key facts about A2 Hosting:

• 22 years experience hosting websites
• Data centers in US, Europe, Asia
• 99.99% average uptime guarantee
• turbocharged servers for speed
• Optimized software stack for performance
• Easy one-click WordPress installations
• Generous unmetered hosting resources
• cPanel control panel interface

With over two decades experience hosting sites, A2 Hosting has built a reputation as a premium provider delivering excellent speeds and reliability.

A2 Hosting Pros and Cons

While A2 Hosting clearly excels in areas like speed and reliability that matter most for a smooth site experience, no host is perfect across the board.

By evaluating both the key advantages and potential drawbacks covered by real-world testing and customer feedback, you can better weigh up if A2 Hosting’s strengths ultimately outweigh weaknesses for your specific hosting needs.

Pros of A2 Hosting

Cons of A2 Hosting

In the key performance metrics like speed and uptime that provide the foundation for a positive site experience, A2 Hosting shines thanks to premium hardware and extensively optimized configurations.

However, the cons around introductory discounts vanishing at renewal and inconsistent support highlight areas for improvement – but issues less likely to directly disrupt a site’s functionality if already launched and stable.

Shared Web Hosting Plans and Pricing

A2 Hosting offers a range of shared hosting plans to meet different needs and budgets:

StartUp Plan

• Best for a single small website
• Allows hosting 1 website
• 100GB NVMe SSD storage
• 5 MySQL databases
• Unmetered bandwidth and emails
• Free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate
• cPanel control panel
• Daily backups not included

This basic plan provides limited resources suitable for one small personal or business site. The low storage may restrict growth. Lack of backups is also a disadvantage. But it’s an affordable starting point for new sites.

Drive Plan

• Good for multiple smaller sites
• Host unlimited websites
• Unlimited NVMe SSD storage
• Unlimited MySQL databases
• Unmetered bandwidth and emails
• Free SSL, cPanel, and daily backups
• Suited for users with multiple smaller websites

A marked upgrade over Startup, the Drive plan lifts all storage restrictions. Daily automated backups provide protection against disasters. It can comfortably host around 5 smaller sites making it ideal for personal use or small businesses.

Turbo Boost Plan

• Handles professional sites and smaller online stores
• Unlimited NVMe SSD sites and storage
• Unmetered resources including bandwidth, emails, and databases
• Free SSL, cPanel, and daily backups
• Uses faster NVMe SSD storage
• AMD Epyc server processors
• LiteSpeed caching for faster speeds
• Fewer accounts per server

Turbo Boost is where A2 Hosting’s speed claims come alive. NVMe storage, LiteSpeed caching, and fewer accounts per server deliver excellent performance for the price. Easily handles professional sites, smaller online stores, and resource-hungry applications.

Turbo Max Plan

• Best for high traffic professional sites
• Identical features to Turbo Boost
• Adds even fewer accounts per server
• Maximum speed and resources

If the Turbo Boost specs seem limiting, Turbo Max takes performance to the next level. With even fewer accounts sharing resources, speeds and capacity get a further boost. Overkill for many smaller sites but ideal for high traffic blogs, business sites, and large ecommerce stores.

A2 Hosting’s shared hosting plans offer tiered solutions scaling from just $2.99/month to $14.99/month. Turbo Boost hits the sweet spot for most uses with ample speed and resources to handle professional sites and smaller online stores.

Ease of Use and Key Features

A2 Hosting utilizes the standard cPanel control panel for managing your website and server. cPanel is an industry favorite for good reason – it provides a huge range of functions in an easy to navigate interface.

While cPanel is highly capable, A2 Hosting uses an older template that looks quite outdated compared to more modern control panels nowadays. It’s purely visual though – cPanel works excellently.

To access cPanel, you first log into your main A2 Hosting account management panel. This lets you view billing, support tickets, and other account-level items. The layout here is rather dated as well.

Fortunately, you won’t have to spend much time in the basic account panel. Just click the cPanel login button to enter the real management portal. This is where you’ll set up and configure your site.

Inside cPanel you get all the standard features neatly organized into sections like Email, Files, and Domains. Everything you need to add domains, install applications, manage databases, email, and more are just a click away.

The right sidebar conveniently displays an overview of your account usage – domains, bandwidth, storage etc. So resources are easy to monitor.

While cPanel may look simplistic on the surface, power users will appreciate advanced tools for security, web apps, config editing, and server administration. Developers have plenty of customization at their fingertips.

A2 Hosting makes great use of cPanel’s capabilities to make the hosting process easy for beginners, yet deeply configurable for sites with more complex needs. Their version may not be the prettiest, but it works great where it counts.

Overall, A2 Hosting provides an excellent user experience through the highly functional cPanel interface. Even with its dated design, it remains a favorite control panel for good reason – everything you need to build, configure, and manage a professional website is included.

Performance Testing – Uptime, Speed and Stress Handling

A2 Hosting claims to offer “20x faster web hosting” – so I put them to the test with uptime monitoring, speed tests, and traffic stress testing. The results? A2 Hosting delivers consistently fast performance and reliable uptime.

A2 Hosting Uptime and Response Times

I monitored an A2 Hosting site for two months. During this time A2 Hosting had only 4 small outages totaling just 7 minutes of downtime – that’s an exceptional 99.99% uptime.

Average response time clocked in at 101 ms, a very respectable number.

What do these numbers mean?

First, A2 Hosting guarantees 99.9% uptime, allowing up to 2h 11m of quarterly downtime. But real-world performance is even better with expected quarterly downtime of only 8m 30s.

Response times also remained extremely stable over the testing period indicating good resource allocation. Sites don’t need to struggle for server resources.

Now let’s look at actual website loading speed.

A2 Hosting Webpage Loading Speeds

The average response times for the 3 months of testing came in at 101 ms – extremely impressive!

My test site hosted with A2 Hosting in the US data center delivered its best speeds domestically with a Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) of 659ms.

Google uses metrics like LCP when ranking web pages. Sites with LCP under 2.5s generally get favorable treatment.

A2 Hosting measurably beats this benchmark across the board. Even in distant regions the site loaded well under 2 seconds.

As expected, the LCP increased, measuring 145 ms in US tests.

That’s an excellent time, leaving plenty of room before hitting Google’s 2.5s cutoff.

While Google cares about LCP scores, actual visitors are more concerned with real-world perceived loading speed. Research shows sites slower than 1 second can increase bounce rates by over 90%.

Here A2 Hosting scored a fully loaded time of 505 ms which gives site visitors a smooth and snappy experience.

A2 Hosting delivers excellent speeds with a real-world loaded time of 505 ms – more than fast enough for most sites.

A2 Hosting Stress Testing

Synthetic tests are helpful but real proof comes from traffic stress testing. I threw 50 virtual users at my A2 Hosting site to simulate a busy mid-sized website.

Two key metrics here are the site’s response time (blue line) and number of users (purple line). As you can see, even with 50 concurrent visitors slamming the server, response times stayed fast and consistent.

For context, supporting 50 concurrent users continuously equals extremely heavy traffic loads. Most mainstream small business websites never reach these levels.

The fact A2 Hosting handled it with ease is a testament to their server capacity and stability even under high loads.

A2 Hosting delivers consistently fast performance with 99.99% monitored uptime. Page response time measured just 28 ms!!!, and strenuous stress tests showed the servers can easily handle heavy traffic without slowing down.

What Makes A2 Hosting So Fast?

So how does A2 Hosting make sites so speedy? It starts with quality hosting hardware. But they use a range of technologies and optimizations to get the most from their servers.

1. Cutting-Edge Hardware

A2 Hosting configures servers for maximum performance:

• Global data centers – Choose the closest option to reduce latency: Michigan, Arizona, Amsterdam, Singapore.
• SSD Storage – SSD disks aremuch faster than old hard disk drives (HDDs). This is where the “20x faster” claim comes from.
• NVMe Servers – Turbo plans use NVMe, an advanced SSD technology with extremely fast read/write speeds.
• AMD Epyc CPUs – Turbo plans use AMD’s latest high-performance Epyc server processors.

This enterprise-level hardware provides the backbone for A2 Hosting’s blazing speeds.

2. Software Optimizations

A2 Hosting tweaks configurations for optimal performance:

• PHP 8 Support – Choose PHP 8 for 2x-4x faster PHP speeds.
• HTTP/3 – HTTP/3 + QUIC protocols offer up to 30% faster page loads.
• LiteSpeed Cache – The built-in LiteSpeed cache delivers content faster.
• A2 Optimized Software – WordPress, Drupal and PrestaShop are optimized out-of-the-box.

Combine cutting-edge hardware with performance-driven software tuning and you get the fast speeds A2 Hosting is known for.

Security Features and Tools

Security is clearly a priority for A2 Hosting. All plans include robust security tools like free SSL, firewalls, malware scanning, and more.

Free SSL Certificate

A2 Hosting provides a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate on all plans. This enables essential HTTPS encryption to protect sites and visitor data.

SSL certificates are a web hosting standard nowadays. A2 Hosting properly auto-installs certificates and force HTTPS redirection for decent security right out of the box.

DDoS Protection

A2 Hosting includes reinforced DDoS protection on all plans. DDoS attacks bombard sites with junk traffic to overwhelm and crash them.

A2 Hosting uses Imunify360 to detect and neutralize DDoS attacks and other malicious efforts to take down your site.

Server Firewalls

A2 Hosting deploys two firewall layers:

• ModSecurity Web Application Firewall – Monitors and filters incoming/outgoing site traffic.
• ConfigServer Firewall – Server firewall to block attacks and unauthorized access attempts.

Together these firewalls provide complete protection from web attacks and intrusion efforts.

Patchman for Security Patching

The Patchman tool automatically detects outdated software and applies the latest security patches.

For example, if vulnerabilities are found in WordPress or PHP, Patchman will instantly update code and mitigate the risk. This prevents sites getting hacked through unpatched vulnerabilities.

Proactive Malware Scanning

A2 Hosting scans sites daily for malware and hacked files. Any infections are automatically quarantined before they cause harm.

This removes the need to manually scan sites for malicious code. Patchman keeps sites clean automatically in the background.

Automated Backups

All A2 Hosting plans beyond StartUp include automated daily backups. These provide a safety net if your site gets hacked.

You can quickly restore from a clean backup in one click if anything goes wrong. Just be sure to download your own backups periodically for redundancy.

Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)

A2 Hosting allows enabling 2FA for your account. This adds an extra verification step using your mobile device when you login.

2FA prevents attackers accessing your account even if they have your password. Strong security for a service you depend on.

With this robust security stack, A2 Hosting is one of the most secure shared hosting providers available today.

A2 Hosting Customer Support

A2 Hosting provides 24/7 customer support via live chat, phone, and tickets. Overall they deliver decent support, but wait times and quality vary.

I tested sales and technical support chat. Wait times were very short despite estimates of 15-30 minutes.

The sales agent helpfully gathered details of my site and made informed hosting recommendations. No pressure to upsell packages I didn’t need.

For technical questions, the first agent provided useful advice on improving site speed with Cloudflare CDN. However the second agent merely linked unhelpful documentation without further guidance.

So while two chats were pleasant, one left me high and dry. This highlights the inconsistent support quality you may experience.

Fortunately support channels like live chat and phone are readily available, though tickets are sometimes pushed. The knowledge base contains ample tutorials and how-to articles as well.

A2 Hosting’s support quality is mixed but they score points for multiple contact options and short wait times. Be prepared to sometimes guide agents towards helpful answers.

A2 Hosting Uptime Guarantee

All A2 Hosting shared plans come with an uptime guarantee promising:

• 99.9% uptime or you get 5x credit
• 99% uptime gets 2x credit
• 95% uptime gets 1x credit

Credit can be used for service extensions or bill discounts.

Other A2 Hosting Options

While shared hosting is A2’s most popular solution, they offer a full range of hosting services.

A2 Hosting VPS

A2 has budget-friendly unmanaged VPS starting at just $2.99/month. Managed VPS plans are also available if you need support.

Unmanaged VPS are more complex but give server root access. You handle all software, updates, security for your virtual private server.

A2 Hosting has 3 standard and 3 turbo VPS plans. Turbo get NVMe storage and better processors.

A2 Hosting is one of the cheapest VPS hosting providers with generous server resources. But unmanaged VPS hosting requires technical expertise.

A2 Hosting Dedicated Servers

Similar to their VPS, A2 offers managed and unmanaged dedicated server hosting. Best value is with unmanaged dedicated servers starting at $99/month.

With unmanaged dedicated hosting you get full control and root access over the physical server. You handle all management, software, updates, security, etc.

Dedicated servers are only needed for large traffic or resource-intensive websites. But they provide guaranteed resources and control for developers and businesses.

Again, A2 Hosting delivers affordable dedicated server hosting with ample specs. Just be ready for a technical challenge managing everything yourself with unmanaged plans.

A2 Hosting Managed WordPress

A2 also offers WordPress-optimized managed hosting plans starting at $9.99/month.

These include pre-configured caching, staging, automated updates, backups, and speed optimizations. All servers are Turbo for fast WordPress performance.

The plans are fairly basic compared to WP specialists like Kinsta but fine for users seeking a turnkey optimized WordPress environment.

A2 Hosting offers a range of hosting options beyond shared. Unmanaged VPS and dedicated servers offer the best value for money but require more skill.

What You Need to Know About A2

When considering A2 Hosting, there are a few key details worth noting that may impact your website and plans. Below are answers to commonly asked questions to help you make an informed decision.

A2 Hosting Alternatives

While A2 Hosting is a top choice overall, other leading hosts like Hostinger, SiteGround, and InMotion are worth considering as potential alternatives too.

Hostinger is an affordable option offering great value managed WordPress hosting starting from just $2.99/month. With features like custom site migration, automatic updates, and SSD storage included on all plans, Hostinger competes well with A2 Hosting.

Read Full review Visit Hostinger

SiteGround is another managed WordPress specialist known for great customer support and security features. Prices are competitive starting from $2.99/month. However, renewal pricing is considerably higher.

Read Full review Visit SiteGround

InMotion Hosting is a popular alternative using both SSD and NVMe storage for good WordPress speeds paired with very knowledgeable support. Reliable uptime, free site migration, staging, managed security and competitive pricing makes them a great A2 Hosting competitor too.

Read Full review Visit InMotion Hosting

While A2 Hosting stands out from the crowded hosting market in many regards, exploring top-of-line rivals like Hostinger, SiteGround, and InMotion provides invaluable context.

Take Hostinger – with automatic updates, free site migration, and SSDs provided even on its cheapest plans, it delivers immense value specifically for users prioritizing price and scalability over best-in-class speeds.

Meanwhile, SiteGround’s exceptional service reputation and robust security features cater specifically to less technical users willing to pay a premium for tailored support and complete peace of mind from website threats.

A2 Hosting – The Final Verdict

In my extensive testing and review of A2 Hosting, I found them to be a premium hosting provider that excels at delivering fast page speeds and robust security.

The key highlights are:

• Exceptionally fast performance – A2’s Turbo plans use NVMe SSD storage and AMD Epyc processors that drive incredible site speeds. Pages loaded in under 1.4s in testing.
• Reliable uptime – Monitored testing showed over 99.99% uptime with minimal interruptions. Speed and reliability give sites a smooth experience.
• Strong security features – A2 includes a full suite of security tools like firewalls, daily backups, patching, malware scanning and more. Protection is a priority.
• Quality hardware – Data centers utilize cutting-edge server hardware for optimal speed, unlike many budget providers using older equipment.
• 1-click WordPress installation – Get optimized WordPress installed instantly with built-in caching active out-of-the-box. Excellent for WP sites.
• Generous resources – All plans come with unmetered bandwidth, SSD storage, emails and other resources. Handles increasing demands.
• 24/7 support – Assistance is available round the clock via live chat, phone and tickets. Wait times are short. Some agents are more knowledgeable than others.
• Room for improvement – The cPanel interface is dated visually. Support quality varies. Intro prices jump sharply at renewal time.

Overall, A2 Hosting is a premium choice ideal for users prioritizing blazing fast website speeds and robust security. Shared Turbo plans offer the best value for small business sites.

Neil Beckett

Neil is an accomplished web, designer and developer with over 15 years of experience in creating and optimizing websites for small businesses and online entrepreneurs. Read full bio

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