I recommend Hosting.com (formerly A2 Hosting) to anyone looking for a reliable managed WordPress hosting provider. There are many reasons why, starting with the fact that it barely paywalls any features. This means that a small blogger and a large ecommerce operation get the same great experience with 95% of the same tools available to both. All plans also benefit from Hosting.com’s world-class performance and security features, including Cloudflare Enterprise CDN and a WordPress-specific firewall with built-in malware rules.
The main downside is that pricing skyrockets upon renewal. Although, depending on your perspective, that could also be interpreted as getting a really big discount on your initial contract.
To learn more, stick around for the rest of this Hosting.com review, focusing specifically on its managed WordPress plans. I’ll cover their features, customer support, performance, pricing, and overall pros and cons.
Let’s get started with an overview, and then we’ll get into the heavier details:
Hosting.com
Pros
Ridiculously fast speeds
Knowledge base for WordPress users
Cloudflare Enterprise CDN on all plans
WP Rocket performance suite (from tier two)
Cons
Steep renewal pricing (highest plan almost triples)
Orbi AI support bot sometimes provides inaccurate information
The ranking above is based on rigorous testing by myself and other members of the Themeisle team.
An overview of Hosting.com for WordPress
| Load times | 0.94s (US) | 1.3s (EU) | 2.62s (Asia) … |
| Uptime | 100% (avg. over 3 months) |
| Support | 24/7/365 support for all managed WordPress plans via AI chatbot, live human chat, and a ticket system. Also a knowledge base with helpful documentation. |
| Key features | 99.99% uptime guarantee, free SSL certificates, enterprise CDN, automated daily backups, a web application firewall, malware protection, unlimited PHP workers, and a staging environment are included in all managed WordPress hosting plans. |
| Price | The cheapest managed WordPress plan is $4.49 per month for the first 12 months. It lets you host 1 website and comes with 20 GB NVMe Storage and supports up to 30K visitors per month. |
| Best for | Individuals and small to medium-sized businesses looking for a balance between performance, reliability, and affordability, with a focus on fast loading times and strong security. |
Hosting.com (formerly A2 Hosting) vs main competitors
| Hosting.com | Kinsta | Hostinger | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rating | 4.5 / 5 | 4.8 / 5 | 3.8 / 5 |
| Load time avg. | 1.34s | 0.99s | 0.94s |
| Uptime avg. | 100% | 100% | 99.99% |
| Price from | $4.49 | $29.17 | $2.69 |
| Free domain | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Email hosting | Available as separate, paid service | Not available, must use external provider | Free for one year, then paid |
| Free SSL | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Hosting panel | Custom control panel (Hosting Panel) | Custom control panel (MyKinsta) | Custom control panel (hPanel) |
| Visit |
| Hosting.com | Market average | |
|---|---|---|
| Load times US | 0.94s | 1.12s |
| Load times EU | 1.3s | 1.16s |
| Load times Asia | 2.62s | 1.88s |
| Uptime | 100% | 99.9% |
Hosting.com (formerly A2 Hosting) review – specific features
As a WordPress user, any web host you’re considering should be held to a much higher standard. Given WordPress’ massive popularity, hosts should offer specific features geared towards its users – Hosting.com doesn’t disappoint in this aspect:
- Optimized WordPress installations: Hosting.com offers optimized WordPress installations to maximize speed and security. This enables you to focus on growing your site without worrying about performance.
- Fast loading sites: This provider’s main claim to fame lies in its speeds. Faster loading sites lower your bounce rates and keep users happy, so they’re definitely a good thing. We’ll discuss performance in-depth later on, so keep reading.
So far, we’re off to a decent start! Let’s move on to see how Hosting.com fares with its customer support.
Support options
| Support Type | Hosting.com |
|---|---|
| AI chatbot | ✅ |
| Live human chat | ✅ |
| Phone | ❌ |
| ❌ | |
| Support tickets | ✅ (submitted through control panel) |
| Knowledge base | ✅ |
I had heard good things about Hosting.com’s customer support, so I was excited to test it firsthand. Before diving in, I took a long look through their documentation. Their knowledge base includes over 40 WordPress-specific articles, including how to use Google Analytics and administer WordPress from the command line.
Next, I tested Hosting.com’s chat support. After clicking on the Chat button at the bottom right of the screen, I was greeted by “Orbi,” Hosting.com’s AI support agent. I then proceeded to pepper Orbi with a few basic questions about some of the features listed on the managed WordPress hosting page:
It did not go smoothly. The agent responded to a question about email hosting by citing irrelevant information, applicable solely to legacy accounts. I discovered the error by coincidence because I asked a follow-up question about which control panels are available, and the chatbot contradicted itself. When pressed on the error, it conceded that the initial information it provided was, in fact, not applicable to new customers.
It’s worth mentioning that you can also ask Orbi to speak with a human and it will connect you without having to jump through hoops. The human support agents are helpful and respond quickly. For example, I asked one of them for some information about a feature called Relay, and they provided the answer within two minutes with a link to learn more about it:
Performance
Raw performance is one of the main criteria you need to consider when choosing a web host. Here are the main features that Hosting.com offers to improve user performance:
- Solid State NVMe Drives (SDDs): All of their WordPress plans offer SSDs, which cuts down on loading speeds across the board.
- Cloudflare Enterprise CDN: All of their managed WordPress plans include Cloudflare’s Enterprise CDN, which significantly speeds up how fast your website or websites load across the globe.
- WP Rocket (starting from tier two): This is a premium suite of performance optimization and caching solutions for WordPress.
However, with the above in mind, every web host claims to offer bleeding-edge speeds and technology – so you shouldn’t take those claims at face value. Let’s do some testing of our own and see how Hosting.com performs.
Page speed tests with Pingdom
For these tests, we use a bare-bones WordPress website without any customizations after setup. Then, once a month, we test how quickly our site loads from multiple locations to get comprehensive results. The results from the most recent test (the previous month) are below:
| East Coast USA: 0.88s ⭐ | West Coast USA: 1.05s |
| Central USA: 0.90s ⭐ | London, UK: 1.40s |
| Paris, France: 1.20s | Mumbai, India: 2.62s |
Overall, Hosting.com consistently gets decent results – so let’s see how their servers can hold up under stress!
Page speed tests with Load Impact
Load Impact enables us to test how any given site would perform under moderate amounts of stress. Unlike the tests above, we do not conduct these every month. The most recent time we ran the test, we configured it to simulate 25 concurrent users, added one by one, over a five-minute period. Below were the results:
- Load generator: Ashburn, US
- Test server: Chicago, US
- Minimum response time: 230.83 milliseconds
- Maximum response time: 289.49 milliseconds
Let’s be clear here – these response times were a shock! Loading a website in under 0.3 seconds is quite a feat, even more so for a website under load. It’s fair to say that Hosting.com delivers when it comes to speed.
Pricing
Hosting.com offers four managed WordPress hosting plans. All of them include a 99.99% uptime guarantee, free SSL certificates, enterprise CDN, automated daily backups, a web application firewall, malware protection, and a staging environment. The other details are as follows:
- Small Plan (starting at $4.49 per month): 1 website, 20 GB NVMe storage, 100 GB/mo bandwidth, and up to 30K/mo visitors.
- Medium Plan (starting at $4.99 per month): 5 websites, 50 GB NVMe storage, 300 GB/mo bandwidth, up to 120K/mo visitors, and for up to 3 sites.
- Advanced Plan (starting at $10.99 per month): 15 websites, 100 GB NVMe storage, 600 GB/mo bandwidth, up to 250K/mo visitors, and WP Rocket for up to 3 sites.
- Turbo Plan (starting at $24.99 per month): 50 websites, 200 GB NVMe storage, 1,200 GB/mo bandwidth, up to 500K/mo visitors, WP Rocket for up to 3 sites, and Relay.
In addition to their managed WordPress hosting plans, Hosting.com also offers more affordable shared hosting plans that still allow you to install WordPress on them.
The cheapest one is called the Starter Plan. It starts at $1.99 per month and supports a single website with 15 GB of NVMe storage, and gives you a free domain in the first year. It’s perfect for users that don’t require support for multiple sites.
Overall pros and cons
It’s almost time for this Hosting.com review for WordPress to come to an end, so let’s take a minute to recap the good and the bad we’ve discovered so far.
Pros 👍
Ridiculously fast speeds. This is one of the fastest web hosts we’ve seen, period.
A thorough knowledge base for WordPress users.
Strong bundled features on all plans that cover both speed and security
Free migration services.
Cons 👎
Their prices are a bit higher than some other managed WordPress hosting plans and the same is true for their shared hosting plans. Then again, you can get some good deals if you pay for longer periods in advance.
Orbi, the AI support bot, can sometimes give outdated or inaccurate information.
Hosting.com review for WordPress: Conclusion 🧐
It’s difficult to overstate how important picking the right web host is. After all, the wrong one could easily sink your site due to a lack of proper support and shoddy services.
That being said, our Hosting.com review for WordPress found none of these red flags here. In fact, their reasonable prices and high speeds make them an excellent choice for WordPress users!
Regardless of our review, it’s always a good idea to compare and contrast hosts based on your own requirements. With that in mind, you may want to check out some of our past hosting reviews in case you want to shop around a bit before settling down:
Do you agree with the results of our Hosting.com review for WordPress? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below!
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