A2 Hosting Review: One of the Fastest Hosts Out There

For growing businesses who demand fast loading times, A2 Hosting might be the perfect fit. Business.org examines its various hosting plans, so you can decide if it’s right for your business.

Finding the right web host for your business can seem like a monumental task. Dozens of hosts. Hundreds of hosting plans. Thousands of different technical features. It can be a lot to sort through.

But your web host will play a crucial role in the overall success of your website—right alongside that catchy domain name you chose. Choose the wrong host, and you’ll be stuck with slow loading speeds, website issues, and plenty of headaches.

If your biggest concern is having a website that loads fast, then you’ll find a lot to love with A2 Hosting.

Founded in 2001, A2 Hosting has managed to stay below the radar all these years. It seeks to provide web hosting services that its employees would love to use, which says a lot, considering it maintains a team of highly knowledgeable tech geeks.

But even if you’re not tech savvy (or if this is your first website), A2 Hosting can be a great choice. You’ll find a wide selection of hosting plans that cater to business owners who demand fast loading speeds, around-the-clock customer support, and a generous refund policy.

So you’re ready to start building a business website and need hosting—or maybe you’re just looking to change hosts. Well, A2 Hosting offers a ton of different hosting plans that can cater to a huge range of businesses, from ecommerce sites getting millions of visitors per month to local cafés that aim to serve up fast-loading websites to their customers.

Whether you’re running an online or offline business, you can find a plan here to meet your needs. Every plan is equipped with lightning-fast loading speeds, 24/7 high-quality customer service, and robust site security, so your customer’s information will always be safe.

However, if you do decide to sign up for A2 Hosting, get ready to wade through a sea of upsells. Before you even complete your hosting account registration, there will be multiple offers to consider. Keep in mind that the base level features (without all the upgrades) will be enough for 99% of users.

Still, A2 Hosting packs a lot of valuable features into its hosting packages. If you can get over the upsells—and confusing account setup process—you might find the high-performance hosting services you’ve been looking for.

Shared hosting plans are so cheap because you’re sharing server space with other website owners. This means you have fewer server resources that are dedicated to your website and yours alone. However, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

If you’re just starting out, then this is the type of hosting you want. A solid shared hosting plan (like those offered here) can support your site up until you get hundreds of visitors per day. Plus, you can easily upgrade your account to the Turbo plan if your site traffic increases and you want to maintain fast-loading speeds.

Every plan here is also backed with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which means your site is guaranteed to be online 99.9% of the time: this translates to around 45 minutes of time offline for an entire month of service.

To manage your shared hosting account, you’ll be using a user-friendly control panel called cPanel. Via the graphical interface, you’ll be able to do things like install WordPress, create email addresses, manage your website files, and a lot more.

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems in the world. It makes it easy to build out a content-rich site without any programming experience.

If your site was built using WordPress, then this style of web hosting will be a match made in heaven. See, out of the box, WordPress can be pretty slow. But A2 has taken the steps necessary to optimize their servers, so you get loading speeds that stomp out the competition.

By using a WordPress host, you give your site certain advantages like super-fast loading speeds, enhanced website security, and automated website updates (on the managed hosting plans).

You may have noticed that you get to choose between unmanaged and managed WordPress hosting. But what’s the difference? With managed hosting, the A2 Hosting team will be updating, optimizing, and securing your servers for you. The unmanaged Lite, Swift, and Turbo plans operate more like shared hosting—with a few WordPress-specific add-ons.

VPS hosting probably seems a little confusing and complicated at first glance. However, there are only a few technical elements you need to grasp.

This style of server operates by dividing up a single physical server into multiple virtual dedicated servers—like private offices within a company building. Compare this to shared hosting (highlighted above), which is like an open office space shared among coworkers.

VPS hosting gives you access to a dedicated amount of server resources like storage, RAM, bandwidth, and more. With greater server resources powering your site, you can achieve even faster loading speeds while supporting sites with higher levels of traffic. If you need support for more site traffic you can upgrade to a higher-level plan within your hosting account dashboard.

The VPS hosting plans here at A2 Hosting come in a few different options. For example, the Power+, Prestige+, and Pinnacle+ plans all come in managed and fully managed options. Fully managed means that the A2 Hosting team will take care of complex server management tasks, security, and maintenance, while managed means that their team still handles all the server tasks, but you also have root access. That means you get complete server control (if you have the skills to manage your server from the command line).

The final plans, Entry, Mid, and Elite, are completely unmanaged and built more for developers who are launching their own sites and apps.

With a dedicated server, you get access to enhanced levels of security, support for a ton of traffic, and massive amounts of storage.

You have an entire physical server for only your site. Compare that to shared hosting, where a single server is split between hundreds or even thousands of sites.

But all these benefits and features do come with a higher price tag, so dedicated server hosting won’t be right for everyone. Most website owners end up graduating to this level of hosting, moving from shared hosting to VPS and eventually dedicated hosting.

But if you have a site that gets millions of visitors per month, is very large, needs a lot of storage for media content, or has strict security protocols, then a dedicated server is the way to go.

The only decision you have left to make is managed or unmanaged. Most users will prefer a managed server (as highlighted in previous sections).

For all its hosting plans, A2 Hosting offers an uptime guarantee of 99.9%—which, as we covered before, is about 45 minutes of downtime a month—but it continuously clocks in at over 99.9%. However, if your site is offline for more than those 45 minutes, you’ll be compensated for that time. All you have to do is submit a ticket via your hosting account dashboard.

Your loading speeds will impact both your search engine rankings and your customer experience. If you’re making money from your website, then both of these are tied to your bottom line.

Lucky for you, A2 Hosting offers loading speeds that continuously test as some of the fastest compared to other hosting companies across the entire internet.

If you want a quick answer to your pressing website or hosting problems, then you can check out the Knowledge Base, which contains hundreds of helpful articles. But if you require more hands-on support, then you can reach out to A2’s kind support team.

A2 Hosting places a lot of weight behind the quality of its support team, offering support 24/7/365. You can reach customer support by phone, live chat, and email. Plus, none of its support requests are outsourced, and since they’re available at all times, you can call at midnight and still expect an answer.

Finding out your website’s been hacked is an experience you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. Luckily, with A2 Hosting, this will never be an issue.

No matter which plan you’re using, you’ll be protected by a perpetual security tool called HackScan. What this does is scan your website for potential security risks 24/7, so attacks will be neutralized before they've had a chance to damage your site.

Every plan is also equipped with a free SSL certificate. This helps secure the connection between your website and various browsers (like Google and Safari). Basically, it’ll be impossible for hackers to intercept any data or information visitors are sharing on your site, such as personal info or credit card numbers.

Around the web, you’ll find a lot of good things about A2 Hosting. There’s continual praise for its industry-leading loading speeds and its friendly and helpful support team.

The only real downsides are the confusing customer onboarding process and the upsells during checkout. You can make it through these hurdles, but they do make signing up for hosting a bit more complicated than it needs to be.

The web hosting company is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan (this is where the name A2 Hosting comes from). Its main data center (where your website’s files are stored) is located in Michigan, but it has additional data centers located in Singapore and the Netherlands.

A2 Hosting has a generous refund policy. If you decide to cancel your plan within 30 days of starting service, then you’ll receive a full refund. But if you cancel after that 30-day window, you’ll receive a pro-rated refund based on the time left on your service. Just submit a cancellation request from your customer portal.

Like most hosting providers, A2 Hosting offers continual deals on introductory hosting rates. If you’re still not sold on the hosting service, it can be helpful to check back consistently for any hosting specials.

Yes, it has four different reseller hosting plans. With reseller hosting, you purchase hosting in bulk (from a company like A2 Hosting) and sell the service for a profit.

A2 Hosting is an incredible hosting provider that can provide swift loading times that’ll destroy your competition. Plus, with it’s helpful and supportive customer service team, you’ll never experience an issue you can’t get through.

No matter which web hosting plan you decide to go with, you’ll end up with a fast-loading website and extremely high levels of security.

If price isn’t your biggest determining factor in choosing a host, and you place a higher value on loading speeds, uptime, and security, then this might be the web host for you.

Still not sure if A2 Hosting is your top choice for hosting? Take a look at our rankings for the best web hosting providers.

Disclaimer

At Business.org, our research is meant to offer general product and service recommendations. We don't guarantee that our suggestions will work best for each individual or business, so consider your unique needs when choosing products and services.