A2 Hosting Review – Is It Really That Fast & Reliable?

A2 Hosting does offer a ton of features, the important question is How does it benefit you? Do you need all of them ? How should you use them ?

We do see a lot of free and unlimited features, let’s discuss in detail.

Free SSL Certificate

It is the one thing that you will definitely need. An SSL encryption helps in secured communication between the web browser and web server. It helps keep data of the site visitor secured. This feature has become more of a mandate and it also helps boost your organic search rankings.

Unlimited SSD Storage

One of the really cool feature. Very few websites offer unlimited SSD storage and A2 Hosting is one of them. We all love unlimited features but is it really unlimited? The terms of service states clearly that “unlimited” and “unmetered” is defined by their own experience with similarly situated customers.

It is a very grey area as there are no specific boundaries laid out or a clear limit description. Anyways, you do need to be cautious as they have the right to remove immersible materials from the servers at their sole discretion without notice. Well, the terms of service does state this and you can check it too by clicking here.

Free Site Migration

As a part of promotion, A2 Hosting provides a free website migration service. the customer service executives help you to migrate your website from another host to A2 Hosting.

In the shared plans you receive only 1 site migration for free. There is a small thing to take note of here, if your previous host does not provide or have cPanel, then a site migration charge may be levied.

In Reseller, dedicated & Managed VPS hosting plans, you receive 25 free site migrations. The note in the previous paragraph also follows here too.

This feature is of most vital importance as many of you might not be coders, but will be able to move your website without much of a hassle using the customer support team.

Unlimited Websites

This feature is available with swift and turbo plans. You can host multiple websites in the same hosting plan. It is a very helpful feature as when you manage or own multiple websites, you can have all of them in one hosting account.

Though unlimited has a definition, which we have provided in the previous features, it does apply here.

99.9% Up Time Guarantee

A number of web hosting companies claim to have an up time pf 99.9% but there are very few who give a guarantee along with it. A2 Hosting is one f them, who guarantee that there servers will have an up time of 99.9%.

If we take the word of A2 hosting, that they will have the said up time but if they fail? We searched up the guarantee clause and this is what we found.

“This commitment is applicable for any unscheduled downtime of your website for more than 0.1% of the total time per month. We will provide a service credit in the amount of 5% of paid fee for the month, for every hour that your website is unreachable due to an internal network or equipment failure. Downtime must be confirmed by a staff member of our support team. Maximum service credit given will be for the full amount paid for the month of outage, excluding any paid fees for additional services. Submit a ticket to request a credit.”

You can check out the policy by clicking here. If you fail to raise the ticket, you might not get anything.

Perpetual Security

We know that websites get hacked daily all around the globe. As a security feature, A2 Hosting offers perpetual security. This provides free HackScan Protection and keeps your website safe.

Free CloudFlare CDN

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. A CDN stores large files on multiple servers in different locations across the globe. This helps to access and load the site faster as the files are now as close as possible to the visitor’s location. So with this, your website loads faster.

Free Automatic Backups

It is a very important feature. You should have a backup of your website to fall back on in-case something goes wrong. A daily backup is therefore an ideal feature. We still do suggest that you should keep an offline backup of your website too.

Anytime Money Back Guarantee

This is the most lucrative feature. It gives you a complete sense of relief that you can try the web host and later get refunded if things do not work out well, anytime you like. All the major competitors offer either a 30 days or 45 days money back guarantee, but this is completely different.

It says anytime you can ask for refund, looks very nice, but is it really so. We decided to dig a bit further into this and see if it is really so or not.

Well to our surprise, you can claim a refund anytime but there are a few things you need to keep in mind. They do have an unconditional satisfaction guarantee. The things you need to know for this clause,

• If you claim a refund within the first 30 days, you can get a refund of the entire period excluding non refundable amounts.
• If you claim after the first 30 days, a refund is issued on a prorated basis rounded to the next full month. Non refundable items are excluded.

There are non refundable items too,

• All third party fees, domain registration, site migration, setup fees are non refundable.
• SSL Certificates have only a 25 days refund window from time of purchase.
• Free domains are not really free, they cost $14.95 will be deducted but you will retain the domain registration.

So you have the first 25 days to decide whether you want to continue with the service or not for a maximum refund.