When looking for web hosting, many WordPress users go straight for the most popular web hosts – while others do meticulous research and end up going with smaller, more focused providers. However, there’s one host that’s often overlooked by both groups – A2 Hosting! Despite not being as popular, A2 Hosting has made a name for itself for those who are in the know, thanks to its rapid speed and great support. By the time you finish reading our A2 hosting review for WordPress, you’ll be in the know too.
We’ve rigorously tested A2 Hosting to see how it plays with WordPress, and whether its support and speeds are really all that. Let’s get started with an overview, and then we’ll get into the heavier details.
A2 Hosting
Pros
Ridiculously fast speeds
Knowledge base for WordPress users
Friendly and fast-acting support team
Let's you choose between 4 server locations
Cons
Long commitment to get the lowest promo price (3 years)
An overview of A2 Hosting for WordPress
Load times | 0.74s (US) | 1.27s (EU) | 2.18s (Asia) … |
Uptime | 99.96% (avg. over 3 months) |
Support | 24/7/365 support for all managed WordPress plans via live chat, phone, and ticket system. Also a knowledge base with helpful documentation. |
Key features | Daily backups, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email addresses, free SSL, free website migration, and unmetered bandwidth included in all managed WordPress hosting plans. |
Apps | Jetpack plugin, Imunify360 for security, Redis caching, SEO tools, and a deluxe WP toolkit that comes with cloning + staging capabilities. |
Price | The cheapest managed WordPress plan is $11.99 per month for the first 36 months. It lets you host 1 website and comes with 50GB NVMe Storage and 4GB Memory (RAM). |
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 excellent customer support. |
A2 WordPress hosting vs main competitors
A2 Hosting | WP Engine | Hostinger | |
---|---|---|---|
Rating | 4.5 / 5 | 4.7 / 5 | 3.8 / 5 |
Load time avg. | 1.16s | 1.07s | 1.08s |
Uptime avg. | 99.96% | 99.99% | 99.99% |
Price from | $11.99 | $20.00 | $2.24 |
Free domain | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
Free email hosting | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
Free SSL | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Hosting panel | WordPress Toolkit in cPanel | WP Engine user portal | hPanel (Hostinger’s version of cPanel) |
Visit | A2 Hosting | WP Engine | Hostinger |
A2 Hosting | Market average | |
---|---|---|
Load times US | 0.74s | 0.92s |
Load times EU | 1.27s | 0.95s |
Load times Asia | 2.18s | 1.68s |
Uptime | 99.96% | 99.96% |
A2 Hosting review for WordPress – 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 – A2 Hosting doesn’t disappoint in this aspect:
- Optimized WordPress installations: A2 Hosting offers optimized WordPress installations to maximize speed and security. This enables you to focus on growing your site without worrying about performance.
- Your choice of server location: One thing that not many hosting providers let you do is choose the location of the server that will house your website. This is not the case with A2 Hosting. You can pick from two U.S. locations, an E.U. location, or an Asia location – all during the checkout process.
- 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 A2 Hosting fares with its customer support.
Support options
We’d heard good things about A2 Hosting’s customer support, so we were particularly excited about testing it first hand. Before diving in, we took a long look through their documentation. Their knowledge base includes over 40 WordPress-specific articles, including using Google Analytics and administering WordPress from the command line.
Moving on, we tested one of A2 Hosting’s support agents using the live chat function (although they can also take emails and phone calls). After clicking on the Live Chat button, we waited a mere 20 seconds before having an agent assigned to us. We then proceeded to pepper them with a few basic questions about some of the features listed on the managed WordPress hosting page:
The conversation went smoothly, and our agent answered the questions satisfactorily – which is exactly what we were looking for to gauge their attention to detail.
Performance
Raw performance is one of the main criteria you need to consider when choosing a web host. Here are the main features that A2 Hosting 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.
- Turbo feature: All of their managed WordPress plans offer an exclusive Turbo feature, which claims to cut down on loading times enormously. Their shared hosting plans (which you can still install WordPress on) offer the Turbo option on the two highest tiers.
Aside from these features, as mentioned earlier, A2 Hosting offers data centers in four locations:
- Michigan
- Arizona
- Amsterdam
- Singapore
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 A2 Hosting 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: 0.64s ⭐ | West Coast USA: 0.88s ⭐ |
Central USA: 0.71s ⭐ | London, UK: 1.31s |
Paris, France: 1.23s | Mumbai, India: 2.18s |
Overall, A2 Hosting 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 A2 Hosting delivers when it comes to speed.
Pricing
A2 Hosting offers four managed WordPress hosting plans that appear as follows:
- RUN (starting at $11.99 per month): 1 website, 50 GB NVMe storage, 4 GB RAM, free standard SSL certificate, unlimited email addresses, daily automated onsite backups, and more.
- JUMP (starting at $18.99 per month): 5 websites, 250 GB NVMe storage, 4 GB RAM, free standard SSL certificate, unlimited email addresses, daily automated onsite and offsite backups, and more.
- FLY (starting at $28.99 per month): Unlimited websites, unlimited NVMe storage, 8 GB RAM, free standard SSL certificate, unlimited email addresses, daily automated onsite and offsite backups, daily malware scanner, and more.
- SELL (starting at $41.99 per month): Unlimited websites, unlimited NVMe storage, 16 GB RAM, free premium SSL certificate, unlimited email addresses, daily automated onsite and offsite backups, daily malware scanner, traffic surge protection, pre-installed WooCommerce, and more.
In addition to their managed WordPress hosting plans, A2 Hosting also offers more affordable shared hosting plans that still allow you to install WordPress on them.
The cheapest one is called STARTUP. It starts at $2.99 per month and supports a single website with 100 GB of storage, 1 GB of RAM, unlimited bandwidth, and a free standard SSL certificate. It’s perfect for users that don’t require support for multiple sites.
Overall pros and cons
It’s almost time for this A2 Hosting 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.
A friendly and fast-acting support team, who know their stuff when it comes to WordPress.
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.
A2 Hosting 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 A2 Hosting 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 A2 Hosting review for WordPress? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below!
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