I always run into issues when building websites.
They break, stuff never goes as planned,
and sometimes I simply lack the skills to do what they want to do.
During these hopeless moments,
I need to know that the web hosting provider is on my side.
So was A2 hosting on my side when my website broke?
Let's rewind a bit.
A2 hosting says that they're offering up to 20 times
faster web hosting and that they've got you covered with a solution
you can depend on. Sounds nice, right?
But 20 times faster than what?
Exactly.
That's the very first thing I've tried to figure out when doing this review.
What's the reference point for saying they're
up to 20 times faster so I could test their claims.
The support agent explained that the 20 times speed difference
is actually between their turbo and non-turbo plans.
Naturally, I was curious to figure out what makes Turbo
so Turbo because a $5.99/month or $6.99/month doesn't seem
to be a big enough difference to be worth i20 times increase in speed, right?
I've researched all ten listed features of the turbo plans
and noticed that only three are actually important AMD EPYC
CPUs, NCMe storage devices and litespeed servers.
To my knowledge, no other web hosting provider is offering AMD EPYC CPUs and
NVME storage in their shared hosting plans
except for A2 hosting. Why?
Because it's expensive.
AMD EPYC CPUs have been released in 2019
and cost around $5,000 each.
Most other providers simply use Intel Xeon
CPUs from 2012 or 2013 for their shared plans
that come in at under $1,000 each.
This means that in some cases AMD EPYC configuration
can offer up to two or three times better performance,
but they're five times more expensive for the provider.
But that's not all.
This is the hard drive.
Big, clunky and old.
This is a modern SSD drive with no mechanical parts.
So it's much faster.
And I mean this is an NVMe M.2 drive.
These are the ones that A2 hosting is using,
and it holds as much data as this guy, but it's four times faster.
NVMe Storage is around four times faster than regular SSDs
and around 20 times faster than regular HDD drives
For me, as a potential A2 hosting user, this means just one thing.
If I'm not buying the turbo plans, I'm pretty much wasting my time.
Because A2 hosting is not better than any other provider in the low
tier plans, but they really standout as a mid to high tier option
for any reasonable price. Based on this decision
obviously I bought the Turbo Boost plan and I've used the A2 Hosting Control panel
to create my website, which was actually fairly easy
They use the standard Cpanel, so creating a website is just
a couple of clicks. In the round of 45 minutes
I've had this website up and running using Google Page Speed Tools.
I could test how fast my A2 hosting website loads, 75
out of 100 on mobile and 95 out of 100 on desktop.
I've also ran the test on GTmetrix where my website loaded in 1.1 seconds.
Also, here's a demo of me simply browsing the website in real time.
I mean, it's pretty snappy.
I'm switching between pages and loading WooCommerce elements.
Pretty much no problems at all.
This confirms how much of an improvement at this hardware is over
regular web hosting because I haven't optimized my website for speed at all.
It's fast, right out of the box. But that doesn't mean it can't be made faster.
A2 Hosting offers a plugin called A2 Optimizer.
This plugin looks for mistakes or bad practices on your website
and automatically corrects them. With most of the settings enabled
I've used fastorslow.com to determine my website
speed around the world and its scored a 92 out of 100.
India. Korea. United States. Europe.
All regions pretty much showed zero problems.
I mean, I ran every single test I could and the A2 hosting scored
excellent in every single one, but I did run into some issues.
So I think this is an excellent time for me to talk about A2 hosting's support.
I just couldn't get one of the optimizer features to activate.
It was just showing me an error no matter what I did.
So I figured the problem was from A2 hosting, not me.
I've contacted their live chat support, who responded immediately.
I've explained the problem I was having and they offered to fix it for me
without any hesitation.
I've just let them do their thing
and I got the message that my issue was resolved in around 5 minutes.
Overall, the support agents aren't acting like your friends.
The interactions are a bit forced,
like talking to a robot, but they do solve your problems.
Which is kind of the important part. As for the features and the control panel.
Well, take a look yourself.
For me, it looks outdated, but it's not hard to use.
You're able to create separate email accounts for example,
emit@emitsites.tech and access your email box.
I've already showed you that you can create a website pretty easily as well.
The biggest problem with A2 hosting really boils down to pricing.
For example, you don't get a free website name,
so that's an extra cost on top of your plan.
And the renewal fees are quite high.
In some instances as high as three times the original advertised costs.
I would treat A2 hosting as an alternative to siteground.
If you need to host multiple websites,
if you're looking for some excellent performance for the one you're paying for.
I'll leave discount links in the description down below.
However, if you feel like A2 hosting is just too expensive,
you can find a list of the best cheap web hosting providers on
the screen right now.
Click the link