A2 Hosting VPS and Shared Hosting Review

Every new website (and migration) starts with a simple question: shared hosting, or VPS? Shared hosting is cheaper, but it skimps on dedicated resources. VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting is more expensive, but you enjoy more control over the server and better performance.

There was a time when choosing a VPS basically meant “here is the server, set it up yourself.” Happily, things have progressed, and managed VPS servers are now available. This makes subscribing to a VPS simpler, but it can also make the choice between shared and VPS a little trickier to discern.

A2 Hosting offers a selection of different hosting types, and varied plans within each. So, as well as shared and VPS hosting, you could opt for WordPress hosting or dedicated hosting. The latter option is quite an expensive proposition in most cases, while the WordPress hosting option is really little more than a shared host with WordPress preinstalled. Once a plan is selected, you can sign up and set up or migrate your site.

The real difference to how users experience the site, however, is in performance. We’ve assessed one of A2’s shared hosting plans and one of its VPS plans, which didn't match up to the best VPS hosts. This evaluation – the results of which you can read below – covers everything from hardware spec and pricing and support to server, database, and benchmarking tests.

A2 Hosting VPS Plan

Available in A2 Hosting’s VPS selection are an incredible six managed VPS plans. We look at its basic Takeoff 4 option, available from $76.99 a month on a rolling contract, and for $35.99/month if you choose to pay for 12 months. The company’s more expensive plans offer increased performance, bandwidth, and storage.

The Takeoff 4 plan gives you a VPS with 2 CPU cores, 4GB of RAM, and 150GB of storage on an SSD. For most websites, this should be adequate, or at least be an enticing introduction to VPS hosting. 2TB of bandwidth (which A2 Hosting calls “transfer”) is available, and there is no limit on database size with the VPS plan. (This is, of course, restricted by the size of the plan’s storage – a database larger than the available storage would not be permitted.)

Hosting companies often apply limits to the size of databases. A2 Hosting’s VPS plan has no limits, however. They told us that “VPS has no limitations for the database size.” Of course, too many databases would be a different matter, as eventually this would breach the physical capacity of the plan’s storage.

The table below outlines the specification of the A2 Hosting managed VPS plans. Note that the Soar packages use NVMe SSD storage, which has superior bandwidth than standard SATA SSD interfaces.

Signing up to the A2 Hosting VPS plan gives you a CloudLinux server, with a free cPanel control panel and automated server backups. Daily system updates are also provided, applied without rebooting the server. The included cPanel is a really nice plus as many other companies charge extra for cPanel and its server-controlling sibling, WHM.

The plan we looked at, from the Takeoff group, comes with a free SSL certificate, Imunify360 security, and LiteSpeed website acceleration. For migrating from an existing web host, A2 Hosting offers free and easy site transfer. The Soar group of plans come with the same additional software and cPanel, but clearly have a higher general spec.

It is worth noting that A2 Hosting also offers a pair of unmanaged VPS hosting plan groups. Launch starts at $2.99/month, while Ascent starts at $29.99/month. These plans have a choice of Linux distro, and root-level command line access for direct server management. You also get manual security and backup options, and complete control over the operating system and its updates.

Control might seem good, but unless you have a preconfigured environment to clone across or know exactly what you’re doing, relying on A2 Hosting’s managed VPS seems far smarter.

A2 Shared Hosting Shared Plan

We tested the StartUp Shared plan which, at press time, was no longer available but which costed $10.99 a month or a ridiculous $35.88 per year when we signed up for it a few months ago. The least expensive shared plan right now is the Ignite plan, which should offer similar features and performance to those we tested. Ignite offers a single website, with 1GB of RAM, RAID-10 10GB SSD storage, and a “comprehensive” security suite provision. Automatic backups are supported, along with performance tools and LiteSpeed Cache, which can help with speed and has plugins for WordPress and other CMS tools.

Curiously, A2 Hosting lists PHP Workers as a feature, but this really just means that PHP is supported and resources are allocated for scripts and website software that relies on it. This doesn’t set the hosting apart from any comparable plans from other providers.

If your web project requires multiple databases, a limit is in place. We spoke to the A2 Hosting sales team, who informed us that “databases hosted as part of Shared Web Hosting are limited to five (5) gigabytes per database.” This, of course, is further limited by the storage available in the plan you choose.

Shared plans from A2 Hosting also include migration from an existing web host.

A free SSL certificate is included with shared plans, and your admin login can be protected with two-factor authentication. Once logged in, the website can be managed via cPanel, from where the software (either manually, or via the Softaculous script repository) you install can be overseen, along with integrations with things like Google Apps. There is support for QUIC.Cloud CDN and CloudFlare, but these are optional, third party extras. Statistics from AWStats, Webalizer, and others are also available, and the shared plans can run WordPress, WooCommerce, phpBB, and various other CMS, online shopping, and forum software.

Note that A2 Hosting has limits on inodes, or files. So, a limit of 300,000 exists on the Ignite plan, and 600,000 on the other plans. The impact of this is that your project will need to be – and remain – pretty compact if you have chosen the Ignite plan. In the case of WordPress sites, any plugins and themes that are not used will need to be deleted, and image optimizing plugins are best avoided. The sheer volume of files in a WordPress site will push the 300,000 very quickly. If you need something a little more elaborate, Accel or one of the Turbo plans would be more suitable.

In addition, A2 Hosting offers managed WordPress hosting plans, which are not reviewed here.

Database, WordPress and Scripting Performance

A2 Hosting’s range of shared and VPS hosting plans potentially offer everything you need to launch a website and ensure it grows as intended. But hardware specifications don’t always deliver on the expected performance. To find out if A2 Hosting is suitable for your project – whether VPS or shared hosting – we designed a series of tests to carry out on each plan.

The first of these required us to install a copy of WordPress and then upload dummy content. Once this was done, we attempted to insert 87 million rows of Tom’s Hardware page view data into the WordPress database. A successful result would be fast – the faster, the better.

As you can see, both A2 plans were markedly slower than the competition, both shared and VPS. Next, we pushed things further with the addition of 87 million random numerical values into each of the rows.

Again, A2 is much slower than competitors. However, interestingly, the shared plan was more than twice as fast as the VPS plan.

We follow with a more test that judges the database server’s ability to efficiently JOIN two tables as a MySQL query. Bringing the traffic and data tables together, a SQL SUM command is then executed, with the result hopefully delivering page views for each article on different dates.

Testing the WordPress software specifically provides information about the installation. Running this right after installing the CMS provides a good baseline for comparison should performance issues occur later. We used the WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool (WPB), a freely-available WordPress plugin. When run, it provides a score on key benchmarks, rated 0 to 10. The test we ran looked at network speed, database speed, and file system speed.

A VPS should perform well with WordPress benchmarking, with most of the competing hosts we’ve looked at scoring 7 and above. A2 Hosting has managed a pretty low 6.3 by comparison. The Shared hosting package, meanwhile, managed 3.5 – other shared hosting plans on the market have scored between 6.5 and 7.5 in the same test.

This is disappointing.

A2 Website Loading Speed, Script Timeout

A commitment is given on the A2 Hosting website for 99.9% uptime. This implies that spikes in traffic and cyberattacks on the web server can be handled with the minimum of downtime.

To see how quickly our sample WordPress site loaded, we used Dotcom-Tools’ Website Speed Test, which records the load time, time to first paint and time to network response.

Here, A2 performed reasonably well. The Shared and VPS sites loaded in 1.4 and 1.5 seconds with the time to network response being just 0.5 seconds.

It’s also important to know that if you need to run a script at the command prompt, both the shared and VPS plans do not have a script timeout. When we ran an endless script that logs the time for many hours, neither stopped it.

A2 Hosting Support

Pricing, features, and server performance are important, of course, but what about customer support? No one wants to sign up to what appears to be an excellent web host, only to find that when the worst happens, there is no one around to help you pick up the pieces.

A collection of support tools are available with A2 Hosting. The most prominent of these is its knowledge base. This is a searchable resource that includes explanations and solutions to everything from adjusting WordPress memory limits to managing secondary accounts on cPanel.

Beyond the knowledge base, A2 Hosting also publishes a regular blog. Here, you’ll find a combination of web hosting and web management articles and webinars. While these may not provide direct answers, the articles in particular can provide useful background information.

Direct support can be accessed via the support page. Here, you’ll find FAQs for shared hosting and VPS packages, as well as direct access to the support team. You can chat within a chat box, or call A2 Hosting. Support is stated as being available 24/7, 365 days a year. If you sign up and are unhappy within the first 30 days, you’re eligible for the money-back guarantee.

Our experience with the support team was good, and they quickly answered our questions about database limits.

Bottom Line

With such a wide selection of hosting options for both shared and VPS plans, A2 Hosting at first seems a great option. Surely, there is something for everyone here?

But poor benchmarking performance and inconsistent results in the other tests are something of a red flag. Low WordPress Benchmark scores and leave us thinking that A2 Hosting probably isn’t suitable for performance-sensitive websites.

While its support provision seems knowledgeable and reliable, this cannot outweigh those performance concerns.

Price-wise, A2 Hosting’s VPS plans are more expensive than better-performing competitors while its shared plans are not impressive either. Ultimately, better performing hosting options are available, both for shared and VPS plans, particularly if performance and reliability are top priorities.