A few months ago we wrote an article called 5 tips to keep in mind before choosing a web hosting provider and in that, from experience we can without a doubt recommend A2 Hosting. In this article, we’re going to look at A2’s offering in more detail and more importantly, why we recommend them.
A2 dates back to 2001 so off the bat, you know they have been in business for a long time and will not disappear overnight with your website. So how have they grown in that timespan? Well, looking at their LinkedIn page they’re currently at 80 employees, and that doesn’t account for those not in LinkedIn.
They are also the recommended provided by a lot of software platforms and blogs (including us) simply due to the quality of the services they provide. For example, they are featured on OpenCart’s and LiteCart’s download pages, as well as many WordPress related plugin apps and blog sites so you know they are doing something right to keep these partnerships alive.
A2 is super-fast:
If you visit A2’s website or come across one of their advertisement banners you might notice they advertise up to 20X faster hosting. But how true is this? Well, I can say on our test site and running their Turbo plan our standard WordPress test site performed significantly better than at other providers. This was even more true when we took a look at their additional features such as the in-house built A2 Optimized plugin for WordPress.
We are not the only one to find this to be the case. There have been plenty of case studies and benchmarks released out which you can take a look at. Or of course, you can try A2 yourself and if you are not happy they do offer an anytime money back guarantee!
99.9% uptime:
Performance is not the only thing you want to be paying for. You pay for uptime. Without it, your website is essentially useless of course but even worse, it can damage your search rankings overtime.
One important thing to remember, EVERY provider has outages. It is how they communicate those outages that matter. In A2’s case, they have a dedicated @a2hosting_alert Twitter feed and a status page to keep users informed and they back their 99.9% uptime guarantee with SLA credits so we’re very happy with that.
Guru support:
Support is the final consideration users actually want to complete the trio (uptime, performance and support). A2 calls their team ‘Guru Support’ which is interesting and unique .
A huge plus that initially brought me to signup with A2 was the accessibility of support. You can submit an email, submit a ticket, call in, live chat, Skype and they even have some representatives across the web keeping an eye out for any issues and they will reach out to you to get issues resolved. You can find these reps in FaceBook groups, forums, Twitter and more so they genuinely care to have invested that much into protecting their brand.
Anytime Money Back Guarantee:
We get it. This review is overly positive to the point you might be thinking we’re not being genuine. Truth be told, we are being genuine but at the same time, what works for us might not work for you.
A2 is once again unique with their money back guarantee as they offer an ANYTIME Money Back Guarantee. That isn’t a typo! The way it works is within the first 30 days you will get a full refund no questions asked. After 30 days you’ll get the unused remaining time of your plan.
In translation, if you signup and pre-pay for 1 year to take advantage of those cheaper rates, if after 2 months you was not happy they won’t make you stay with them until your plan ends, they’ll refund you the 10 months you haven’t used.
Services Offered
This is big for any provider. It has to offer you the right solutions. If you are starting out your website you may be OK with regular shared hosting, overtime your site may get large enough to the point you need a VPS and then a dedicated server. With A2, that isn’t a problem as they have you covered from shared hosting, Managed WordPress Hosting all the way up to Dedicated Servers.
Conclusion:
Not a lot of companies grow to the size that A2 is and maintain the quality they started with. Most companies either start to crash and burn or get acquired by a larger company. I can count in a single hand the number of large growing companies that really do make it through independently and A2 is without a doubt one of those.
If you are looking for web hosting services, do check out A2 Hosting. They are one of the best in the business so we have no problems recommending them.
