Did you know that A2 Hosting is an environmentally friendly hosting company that cares about global audience. So basicly the hosting company offers everything from shared hosting packages to VPS and dedicated servers. But still is it good hosting for you?
A2 Hosting company has been around since 2003 and 100% CO2-neutral hosting which has been offered since 2007. Surely the company was already 100% green before it was trending like today.
So basicly you can choose from several types of hosting depending on your needs. This includes standard package so-called shared hosting, managed WordPress hosting, reseller hosting, VPS and dedicated servers for demanding users. The hosting company controls four data centers located in the US, Europe and Asia, or in other words they are worldwide so that they can offer better service.
From their plans you can see that they offer 99.9% runtime, but the company claims the servers are up to 20x faster than in competition. If something is not working properly, you can allways contact „Guru Crew Support“ customer support team which is available 24/7/365 to help you with any problem.
We definitely made a good decision by subscribing to an A2 hosting web hosting package. We tested the most important facts like loading speed and performance, but also tested all the important functions. Read on and you will find out how good they are. Then you can decide is A2 hosting right host for you and your website.
Infrastructure
A2 Hosting has four global data centers in the world. They are located in the United States: Michigan and Arizona, Europe: Netherlands, and Asia: Singapore.
All servers have the most modern equipment so for example they have at least 64 GB of RAM memory with high speed 12 cores CPU. For storage space they have SSD storage devices with RAID 10 redundancy which have a positive connection on stability and speed for any web project. In addition to that, all web servers have connection to a quadruple high secured 10 GB / s network backbone network.
Also the latest web hosting technology works in the background, for example SPDY, HTTP2 and ESI which is for individual caching of the web pages. However, but this is only available for users who use their turbo packages.
Security
The hosting packages from A2 Hosting company have several security feauters to protect your website or any other project from hackers and malware attacks. HackScan function is a tool for detecting and removing threats for example from your website. But what is more important It is free of charge for every user. Patchman is another useful tool for security which informs any user about outdated software and moves infected files to quarantine for you protection. And last but not less important is a double firewall which defense you against brute force attacks.
Performance
When we speak about performance really you can not complain about it and stability of A2 hosting.
From experience With A2 hosting the loading speed for web pages are much above than average. But this also applies for the runtime of the web server. What is most interesting that the 99.9% runtime guarantee from A2 hosting is secured by a credit system. So for example after the first 0.1% lose, you will get 5% credit of your total monthly fees for every additional hour when happens downtime until the full fee.
Some their users have reported runtime problems with in the past, but still in that time the runtime was over 99.5%. Since then there are no problem, and mostly their user are happy with service. Our WordPress website after testing got an A for the page speed in the Sucuri test which is almost highest grade, because highest grade is A +. After many promises on the A2 hosting website, We was at first a little disappointed. But on the other hand we do not use a turbo package so maybe we can not expect super high speeds.
Customer service
Almost like any other hosting company A2 offers customer support by telephone, live chat and support via the ticket system.
So basicly If you need help about your hosting package, then you can contact the A2 „Guru Crew“ via live chat, email contact, ticket system, phone or even Skype which is really amazing because you have a lot of options for contact.
But it is certainly excellent when hosting company offers phone support 24/7. Also a very interesting fact is that for some countries such as the USA, Australia, India and a few others you have a local phone number that you can call which is much easier and cheaper for user. While If live in another country, then it is a recommendation to call the phone number from Great Britain.
If you are not a beginner and have certain knowledge, A2 hosting provides a very large knowledge database which you can read if you need some help. But unfortunately there are no video tutorials which are much more useful than only tech documents because some of them are too technical. Anyway it is very good to have all of these customer support options available.
For example we have contacted the live chat support and we was number 10 in the queue. It took about 32 minutes to get agent. Compared to other hosting companies, this is too long to get response. But the good news is, once when you are connected to a customer support agent, you will get all the help you need.
Conclusion
All in all in our experience with A2 hosting company, we can recommend them to others as a hosting company. The hosting service they provide is very good, the loading speeds are great. They have several ways for customer support including Skype. Especially if you are a beginner then you do not need to worry because their support is great. A2 hosting provider is super fast and at the same time reliable that really outperform their hosting competitors in this regard. Also they have a modern look which gives a more professional feel.