The slogan at A2 Hosting is web hosting grown up. They say they have reliable support, the latest technology, proven ability, scaleable plans, and they are an established business. They say their operations are well established and their technicians are highly trained. A2 Hosting has been in business since 2003. They have plans that range from basic virtual hosting to dedicated servers. The company states if you want to change plans it isn’t a hassle and they have custom configuration for servers. Their uptime guarantee is 99.9%. Their monitoring and response is around the clock. They have redundant connections and power supply. This is the latest technology: Ruby on Rails, PHP5, cPanel 11, perl, python, MYSQL, postgreSQL 8, SQLite databases are available, magento, OScommerce shopping carts are supported. A2 Hosting uses in-house support without any outsourcing. You can contact support by ticket, live chat or phone.
These are their Linux web hosting plans: the executive shared hosting plan, which includes: un-metered disk space and monthly data transfer, can host unlimited domains, and the setup cost is free. The domain registration is $12.95 a year. It also includes: unlimited domains, sub-domains, parked domains, add-on domains, page hits, and a private IP address is available. The startup shared web hosting has disk space and monthly transfer 10 GB, page hits unlimited, and the setup is free. Its domain registration costs $12.95 a year. The Startup plan costs $4.95 a month and the Executive costs $7.95 a month. A2 Hosting has a New Year special of 20% off on hosting.
They offer reseller hosting with the concept package at $19.95 a month, the Venture package at $29.95 a month, and the Enterprise package at $49.95 a month. A2 Hosting offers four VPS solutions: the Core package at $14.95 a month, the Enhanced package at $24.95 a month, the Power package at $44.95 a month, and the Pinnacle at $79.95 a month.
A2 Hosting is a member of the Better Business Bureau online. They are secured by McAfee and a partner with carbonfree.org. Out of seventeen reviews at WebHostingStuff A2 Hosting got a rating of four out of five stars. Their score for each category: uptime and reliability, customer service, technical support, and overall rating was four. The customers had this to say: excellent, amazing service, competent, reliable, some say no problem with uptime and another says had trouble with it, only good things to say about them, and satisfied customer. Web Hosting Reviews rates A2 Hosting like this: overall rating 90.00%. They gave them a 9/10 for all categories: uptime and reliability, server and connection speed, price value for money, technical support and knowledge, and customer service and billing.
The admin review of A2 Hosting at the Web Hosting Resource Kit says: He opened a small business account with them and they made a solid impression on him. They have a nice range of products and the support system is good. He says that are affordable and have all of the bells and whistles. His rating is 4/5.
My experience with A2 Hosting
I am extremely disappointed with their hosting and appalled at their lack of support. I started hosting with A2 Hosting in December 2007. My first registered support request was March 3rd, 2008. My problem was my website went down several times a week, although the down time was only a matter of minutes each time, I quickly became concerned about the constant problems I was having with A2 hosting.
The support was terrible, they constantly deny the problems and even on one occasion claimed it was a problem with my website. Over a year I couldn’t even tell you how many times my website went down, because it was only down for a few minutes I couldn’t submit a support ticket fast enough to prove to them there was a problem. They claimed they had 24/7 monitoring and they didn’t see any problem.
They finally admitted the server was having problems (how could they not), only after a year of complaining and finally adding an outside monitoring service. They claimed to have fixed the problem however, the six days following their claims I was down again six times. After emailing them again, sending the proof that the server was still having problems, their response was:
“If your still having troubles with intermittent downtime, you might want to consider a VPS, or Dedicated hosting plan.” I couldn’t believe it. I explained to them that I was not going to upgrade my plan because of the problems they seem to have keeping their servers working. They agreed to migrate my site to another server.
So on April 4th, 2009 – I received an email stating that my site had been migrated to a new server. Unfortunately the site was not accessible. I explained to them that The problem appeared to be that the site couldn’t connect to the postgres database server since the migration.
Their response was “Your site is resolving for me at http://www.textcall.com“. I had to explain to them once again that it was a database permission problem on their server. Their response: “I have escalated this issue to our network administrators. They agree it appears to be a permissions issue.” I only had to wait 24 hours for that response.
Here is the most ignorant response I have received from A2 Hosting yet, keep in mind my site and database was working on the other server (when the server wasn’t down) and nothing had changed other then the migration: “The issues appear to be related to permissions on your custom schema. The ‘common’ schema owner has been changed to your ‘textcall’ user, but there may still be permissions issues.
Unfortunately, custom schemas are not something that we support, we cannot further troubleshoot permissions on this.” Again, this was after they migrated from one server to another, A2 Hosting decided that they wouldn’t support the problem they caused.
This is when I made the first phone call to their support line, and where I got hung up on because I wasn’t happy with their excuses. I eventually got the main tech supervisor, the person that oversees the servers and is supposed to make sure everything works correctly. He explained to me that he couldn’t figure out how change the permissions on the server they migrated my site to and my only option was to migrate it back to the original server it was on.
Let me say that again. The person that supervises the hosting support, the person that sets up and maintains A2’s Hosting servers could not figure out how to change the permissions on the server. This is after my site had been down going on three days.
That was on Tuesday April 7th, 2009. This is now Saturday April 11th, 2009, the site has been down twice since then and is now down again due to some kind of “unexpected problem”. I received an email saying everything has been fixed yet my website is still down and support has failed to respond. I’m not trying to make up your mind on whether or not to use A2 hosting as your hosting provider, I’m merely sharing my experience over the last year with this company. If it’s important to you however, that your website is up and accessible then take my experience in to consideration.