Today we gonna go to battle for both A2 hosting vs SiteGround and everything you should know about both web hosting platforms. We gonna review both of them and see which one is for you.
They are popular for their shared hosting plans and their speed and a lot of customers have a lot of positive things for both.
A2 hosting vs SiteGround general overview
A2 hosting has 99.92% uptime on their services, while SiteGround has 99.99% uptime. We tested them both with tests sites and that’s the results we got.
Both are phenomenal, also when you have that high up-time you gonna keep all the visitors happy.
It means a lot for your site when it is working all the time and you won’t be missing any customers too.
Plans
A2Hosting offers on all of them free SSL and SSD drives. The image above is from Shared Hosting Plans.
They offer Lite, Swift and Turbo shared hosting plans. In the most expensive plan (Turbo) you gonna get 20x faster websites which google loves, but this plan is for bigger traffic and more websites, or if you have the budget to use it.
Unlike A2 Hosting, SiteGround doesn’t offer unlimited web space for the Shared Hosting Plans.
If you are beginner this doesn’t matter for you.
Each Plan explained:
- StartUp – this is great for newbies, can handle up to 10.000 visitors per month, unlimited bandwidth.
- GrowBig – unlimited websites, 20 GB web space, can handle up to 25,000 visitors monthly.
- GoGeek – unlimited websites, 30 GB web space, can handle up to 100,000 visits monthly, plus priority support.
Speed
A crucial thing if you want to rank higher in the google ranking. Research has shown that 53% of the visitors leave if the site doesn’t open within three seconds.
One reason more why you want to have a fast website. There are not many things you can do to speed up the host, you can try with compressing the images, but the slow host still gonna be slow.
With A2Hosting and SiteGround you not gonna worry about this, both are excellent and they have amazing features and we gonna explain them below.
Customer Support
We’ve been using them for the past year and a half, we test different hosting providers and we do everything to find the best ones.
Customer support on A2Hosting and SiteGround was always very friendly and always did their best to help us.
Both of them provide fast answers and there are none delays in the answers.
Free migration
Both A2 Hosting and SiteGround offer free migration for only one website. They can transfer the files from the old host by giving them Cpanel credentials and they will do the job easily.
SiteGround has a WordPress plugin called SiteGround Migrator to help you migrate yourself.
Free SSL Certificate
Recently google chrome started warning visitors if the website doesn’t have an SSL certificate. A lot of hosting providers charge for this feature but it is really important today to have SSL because helps to protect any data sent back and forth between visitors device and the website, that can be personal details or credit card numbers.
When this is left out, a lot of attackers can get this information easily. So Chrome is doing a favor for the visitors to keep their data safe.
Thankfully both, A2Hosting and SiteGround offer this for free on all plans.
Uptime Guarantee
I explained above that SiteGround has 99,99% uptime. This cost them a lot of money to be up and running.
In their Service Level agreement, they guarantee that their hosting plans will be a 99,9% on yearly bases. If this gets lower, you gonna get compensated with free hosting.
Note: there are few conditions if there are scheduled or emergency maintenance issues this is exempt.
It is exempt if you cause the downtime, maybe exceed resources, plugins that don’t work etc, then SiteGround doesn’t take responsibility.
Also, this can be when are external attacks on their servers.
Money-Back Guarantee
SiteGround offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on their shared hosting plans. On the other plans, SiteGround offers 15-day money-back guarantee.
Meanwhile, A2Hosting offers an anytime money-back guarantee on all other hosting plans (Shared, VPS, dedicated and etc) which is a huge thing if you are not happy with their services.
Site Monitoring
A2Hosting offers free site monitoring 24/7, also offers a feature called HackScan that is scanning for malware all the time. Their servers are protected and their data is protected too, you are safe if there is any DDoS attack!
Green Web Hosting
A2Hosting does a great thing for humanity, their hometown in Ann Arbor, Michigan is known as tree town. According to their website that has over 150,000 trees and 150 parks, they feel a moral obligation to help to protect the globe from global warming.
This should not be a factor to sign-up under them, just to let you know that they think about the future.
Cons
Both A2Hosting and SiteGround have higher renewal rates. This is common with a lot of websites when you pay up-front.
That’s why I advice paying upfront for 12months or more.
Limited cheap plan
Both hosting providers suffer from this.
For SiteGround you get one website with 10gb of space and to handle 10,000 monthly visits. When you hit those numbers you have to upgrade the plan or your performances will suffer. If you are beginner you don’t need to worry about this for a while.
On A2Hosting the cheapest plan will get you one website with unlimited storage and transfer, with no turbo and with 5 databases, which is better what SiteGround offers regarding storage.
Do we recommend?
Yes. we recommend both hosting providers.
You are probably asking with who to go. If you have more websites and getting a lot of traffic per month, go with A2Hosting by using the Turbo Shared Hosting Plan.
If you are just starting you should go with the StartUp Shared Hosting Plan from SiteGround because is faster than the Lite plan on A2 Hosting.
But you can choose which one is most comfortable for you. Hopefully, you enjoyed this A2 Hosting vs SiteGround battle and decided with which one to move forward.
The advantage of the long term, because pricing is really good. Share your experiences if you have any from both hosting providers to try to help the visitors.