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There are a plethora of high performing hosting companies in the world, which can lead to a difficult choice in choosing the right hosting provider for your business. In this A2 Hosting vs SiteGround comparison, we will help you with choosing the best hosting option for ecommerce and blogging.
If you check Reddit or any other forum online, you will know that these are two popular options for hosting. Today we will be reviewing more than just the features of each company.
Today we will be reviewing the cost of hosting with each platform. We will also take a look into the support options and the performance reports of each company. At the end of this comparison we will help you with making the wisest choice. We will also help you to set up your new site in just minutes.
Let’s find out about each hosting service.
SiteGround started back in 2004 by a group of college students. Today the hosting company is the hosting provider for over 1,000,000 domains around the world.
CEO Bryan Muthig founded A2 Hosting in 2001 as a simple hobby. Something that was a simple project grew into one of the most popular web hosts on the planet.
A2 Hosting vs SiteGround overall pricing comparison
Let’s compare how much you will be paying with each hosting platform.
Shared hosting
SiteGround offers some of the top yearly hosting costs in the hosting industry. With SiteGround you can host your website for $3.95 which comes up to $47 a year. For the server performance that you are receiving, this is a hard price to beat. This is not SiteGround’s only shared hosting option. SiteGround offers a GrowBig option for $5.95 a month to accommodate you in other hosting areas. If you want the top shared plan that SiteGround has to offer, then that means that you want the SiteGround GoGeek plan. This hosting plan is going to run you $11.95 a month or $143 a year, which is not bad at all to be honest. This epic plan comes with multiple domains, the entire feature list that SiteGround has to offer, more web space, and the highest monthly visits possible. If you are a new blogger or run a small blog, then the $3.95 StartUp plan is all that you will need.
Start SiteGround here at 60% off.
SiteGround VPS cloud pricing option
Let me start by saying that the SiteGround VPS plan is not for everyone. If you are a new blogger or if you are not generating any income, then the VPS hosting option far exceeds what you need. If you did need VPS hosting, then SiteGround offers Virtual Private Servers starting at $80 a month. The greater the VPS plan and the more that you pay, the more CPU Cores, Memory, and SSD space that you will receive. Altogether SiteGround offers 4 VPS plans. Above I mentioned their Entry plan for $80 a month. However, you can also take advantage of their Business plan for $120 a month, their Business Plus plan for $160 a month, and their Super Plan for $240 a month. The VPS hosting plan also gives you an option of optimizing your website to fit your needs. Some exceptional features that VPS has to offer includes 5 PHP Versions & HHVM, IP Tables Firewall, Private DNS Server Setup, Emails Spam Filtering, Free SSL Certificates, and Free Dedicated IP.
SiteGround Dedicated pricing
If you are running an enterprise, then you might want to use dedicated to have servers all to yourself. Over 90% of website owners will never need dedicated servers. For those who do desire dedicated servers with SiteGround, you are looking at hosting for $269/mo. SiteGround will set up and fully manage the dedicated servers for their customers. For more specs, you can also check out their Power Server plan for $349 a month and their Super Power Server plan for $729 a month. With Dedicated you will be able to choose United States, Europe, and Asia-Pacific data center locations. A few specs that you can expect are Intel Xeon E3-1230 SSD, 3.20Ghz CPU Clock Speed, 4 CPU Cores, etc.
Start the Dedicated plan here.
Shared hosting
A2 Hosting offers decent prices, but unlike SiteGround you have to pay your hosting plan multiple years in advance to get a real hosting discount. In total A2 Hosting offers 4 billing option for their customers to choose from. You are given, web hosting billed monthly, you are given a 12 month hosting option, a 24 month hosting option, and a 36 month wen hosting option. You are given the option of choosing Linux hosting or Windows hosting, which costs slightly more. The Lite plan was reduced from $7.99 a month and now costs $3.92 a month.
However, to get hosting this low you will have to pay 3 years ahead. In total, you will be paying $141 at the time of checkout. If you select their 24 month billing cycle, then you will be paying about $94 for two years of A2 Hosting, which is not too bad. Another shared hosting option that you can select with A2 Hosting is the Swift plan which starts at $4.90 a month for 36. A2 Hosting Swift allows for unlimited sites and resources and it will cost you about $176. The last shared plan that you can choose is their Turbo plan, which starts at $9.31/mo. With this plan you will receive an A2 Site Accelerator and Turbo, which means more resources per user and enhanced server performance.
A2 Hosting VPS pricing
A2 Hosting offers unmanaged and managed VPS servers. Their unmanaged servers cost $5 a month. If you are a new blogger or if you don’t know how to manage your own servers, then I do not recommend unmanaged servers, which may be more pain than it’s worth. Their managed and core VPS plans start at $32.99 a month. Depending on the plan that you choose you may or may not receive root access. If you needed VPS with free cPanel options, then A2 Hosting is a great option. VPS features include Full HostGuard Management, 75GB Storage, 2 TB Transfer, and more.
A2 Hosting dedicated pricing
A2 Hosting offers semi-dedicated servers, which is equivalent to SiteGround GoGeek. Their semi-dedicated server starts at $9.31 a month. Their Unmanaged Flex Server, costs $99.59 a month. If you would rather have managed dedicated servers, then this plan will cost you $141.09 a month. Their core flex server is going to cost you $141.09 as well.
Bottom line
SiteGround offers better pricing for what you are receiving. What I love about SiteGround is that you will not have to pay 36 months in advance to get the hosting price that you want.
Check out SiteGround (60% discount)
A2 Hosting vs SiteGround speed and page load response time comparison
In today’s SEO, website speed matters. A slow website can easily put you on Google’s bad side. Not only that, but a slow site can cause you to lose potential readers and customers. If you are trying to increase conversion rates, then make sure that you choose a platform that allows you to do just that. Google has made it abundantly clear that speed is a ranking factor. Cutting response time even slightly is beneficial.
SiteGround speed performance
With that said, both sides have positives about them when it comes to speed. One of the reasons that SiteGround is recommended by your favorite CMS is that SiteGround excels in giving your website speed features such as SSD drives, NGINX setup, SuperCacher, free Cloudflare CDN, and more. These features are why we’ve noticed an average page load speed of 300ms, which is exceptional and rare.
A2 Hosting speed performance
A2 Hosting does well in speed as well. You are given multiple data centers,10 Gb/s Redundant Network, THE A2 Optimized WordPress plugin, and more. If you use their Turbo plan you will be given pre-configured site caching for a faster blog. Compared to SiteGround, A2 Hosting is about 30ms – 100ms slower. To be honest, this is not much but in the world of SEO every second counts.
SiteGround and A2 Hosting web hosting uptime performance comparison
Hosting uptime is the amount of time that your servers is up without an issue. A good web hosting company will always monitor their servers and handle any downtime that you may have. One of the reasons why these two companies are extremely popular is because they excel in uptime. Both companies are equipped with an in-house 24/7 monitoring system to maintain strong server performance. Both companies offer a 99.99% uptime which is great news for your business.
SiteGround and A2 Hosting web hosting features comparison
SiteGround features
Unique Anti-bot AI – Make sure that remain protected against brute-force attacks by botnets. Unique Anti-bot AI blocks pesky brute force attempts and helps you not to take any losses.
NGINX – One of the best hosting features for the fastest web server possible.
Automatic Backup System – Backing up your website is one of the most important things when being a website owner. It is extremely important! With SiteGround your account is backed automatically which saves you the hassle. You will have backups for folders, databases, emails and more daily.
Linux Containers – You will be able to enjoy a platform that was built on Linux Containers. LXC gives you more stability and it handles traffic spikes well.
SSD – A good web hosting provider is a web hosting provider that comes with SSD drives. If you desire 1000X faster hardware, then make sure to have SSD.
HTTP/2 enabled servers – This is an awesome feature that will help in boosting your site speeds in the browser. An SSL must be used to take advantage of this fantastic feature. SiteGround a Free Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificates.
PHP7 and HHVM – This is another speed feature that SG offers their hosting customers for free.
Power and hardware redundancy – You will receive high level electricity redundancy through their data centers which will help to prevent any downtime.
Free Drag & Drop Builder – If you prefer a drag and drop builder over the installation approach, then SiteGround offers a free drag and drop builder that will help you to easily create your website.
30-Day Refund – SiteGround offers a 30-day refund policy for all of their web hosting plans.
A2 Hosting features
A2 Optimized Software – You will receive optimized servers. Great for getting the most out of your web hosting servers.
A2 Optimized Site Accelerator – This feature is only available on their Turbo plan. With this feature you will receive OPcache/APC which cuts the PHP response time in half. The Site Accelerator also offers Memcached, which makes your MySQL databases faster.
CloudFlare – Just like SiteGround, you will receive a free CloudFlare CDN to enhance your blogs speed.
Anycast DNS – This is a great feature to boost your website performance especially at critical times.
Migration – A2 Hosting offers free website migration to transfer your website from another hosting server to their hosting servers.
Patchman Enhanced Security Tool – This is an awesome security tool if the inevitable happens and you have an infected file. Patchman will automatically quarantine all infected files immediately. Patchman also offers out of date detection to keep you aware of out of date software.
Optional WP-CLI – Exclusive WordPress features that helps you to easily manage your WP installations.
Anytime money back guarantee – Cancel your service within 30-days of signing up to receive a full refund from A2 Hosting.
RAID-10 Storage – Unlimited storage space for your content.
Quadruple Redundant Network – 10G Level 3, 10G CenturyLink/Saavis, 10G Cogent, and 2.5G Comcast.
Ease of use comparison
It is essential that we compare the ease of use especially if this is your first time creating a website.
SG
With SiteGround I guarantee that you will be able to create a website or blog in 5 minutes or less. There is no hosting company that is easier to create a website with, then SiteGround. The main reason is because of their WordPress preinstall wizard. This is an awesome feature that instantly installs WordPress for you. All you have to do is choose one of their plans, fill out your info, and their wizard handles the rest.
A2
A2 Hosting does not offer this preinstall wizard. You are going to have to install WordPress yourself. It is not hard, but this preinstall feature is very convenient for beginners. Instead of a 5 minute setup time. You will have a 15-25 minute setup time. If you want the easier hosting company than SiteGround is definitely the way to go.
Control panel web hosting comparison between SiteGround and A2 Hosting
Although you are not going to be in your control panel most of the time, that doesn’t mean that an easy to use control panel with a beautiful interface isn’t convenient to have. By far the easiest control panel to use with the most hosting features is cPanel. If you are given an option of a custom control panel vs cPanel make sure that you always choose cPanel. This will save you a lot of time and headaches. Both platforms use cPanel. Here are some features that will be included in your cPanel control panel. File Manager, Disk Usage, Zone Editor, PHP Manager, Cron Jobs, Email Accounts, SSH Access, IP Blocker, SSL/TLS Status, Password&Security, and more.
Free domain comparison
Neither company offers a free domain name but you are able to create a domain as you are setting up your site which is convenient for bloggers of all levels.
PHP comparison
We all know that there are many hosting providers to choose from such as Bluehost, HostGator, and more. However, you will soon notice that not all hosting companies offer the latest PHP versions. A2 Hosting and SiteGround are two of the best PHP hosting companies that you will find. They both support all the latest versions of PHP such as PHP 5.5, PHP 5.6, PHP 7.0, PHP 7.1 and PHP 7.2.
Data center comparison between A2 and SiteGround hosting
The more data centers that a web hosting company offers the better it will be for your business. It’s hard to compete with SiteGround in this category. SiteGround has data centers in 3 continents, which is rare. In total, they have data centers if 5 different locations with more data centers coming soon. SiteGround data center locations include Chicago, US, London, UK, Amsterdam, NL, Singapore, SG, and Milan, IT. Whether you live in the United States, India, Europe, Africa, etc. you will always have servers near you.
A2 Hosting does well in this category as well offering 4 server locations to choose from. A2 Hosting data centers are located in USA-Michigan, USA-Arizona, Europe-Amsterdam, and Asia-Singapore.
Which hosting provider is better for WordPress between SiteGround and A2 Hosting?
Finding a hosting provider that is optimized for WordPress is crucial. WordPress is the top (CMS) in the world. There are many Content Management Systems and website platforms such as Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Concrete5, MODX, DNN, and more. With that said, over 30% of the entire web is using the WP platform. No other platform comes close to this. What this means for you is that, there is a strong chance that you are using WordPress and if you are using WordPress, then you need a hosting provider that will increase your WP performance.
Although A2 Hosting is great for WP, on the WordPress.org website you will notice that SiteGround is the recommended hosting platform for all WordPress websites. That’s not it! If you look on Joomla’s website, you will notice that they are being powered by SiteGround. The top two content management systems recommend WordPress, which speaks volume of their performance.
SSL comparison
Whether you use Chrome, Firefox, or Internet Explorer, SSL’s are getting more and more important. Soon Google will show not secure right before HTTP domains. More and more people are switching to HTTPS. Both hosting companies accommodate the new trend by offering Free SSL hosting that you can install directly from your cPanel.
Web hosting support comparison
I’ve dealt with some awful support teams, such as Namecheap and other hosting providers. Even with the best companies you will one day have to use their hosting support.
A2 Hosting
A2 Hosting offers 24/7 phone support, ticket support, and live chat support for their customers. If you need more help from their guides you can easily get help for billing, MySQL, DNS, Plesk, or you can search a question. What I love about A2 Hosting is that you will also receive Skype support if you need face to face help.
SiteGround Hosting
With SiteGround you are given 24/7 phone, ticket, and live chat support. Live chats are answered in under 2 minutes which is exceptional. SiteGround gives their customers guide and video support options. In their knowledge base you can learn how to use different applications, how to use FTP, how to fix any website problems that you may run into, and more.
You will be able to meet up and personally discuss things with other website owners. SiteGround has built a friendship with their customers and a community over the years. They have been to my area several times in the past year. Check here to see if they are coming to your area soon.
Popularity and reviews
This matters because it shows what most people are choosing and it shows which company is more trustworthy. Both companies have been around for almost the same amount of time, but A2 Hosting is not a large company.
When I check the keyword searches for “A2 Hosting” the average Google monthly search is 6,600. The average monthly search for “SiteGround” is 60,500. This alone tells you that SiteGround is more popular along with the fact there is more information on the internet about SiteGround than A2 Hosting.
Because of the reviews alone I would choose SiteGround. More popular bloggers are hosting with SiteGround. Out of 623 verified reviews, out of 5 stars SG achieved a 4.6 rating, which is exceptional.
Here is a review from myofficesetup.com
Ever since day 1 with SiteGround, I’ve transferred all my clients over and they’ve noticed it as much as I have. Excellent in every category: Support, Service, Up-time, Value, Servers and Hosting… everything you name – they rock!
Bottom line
We just compared two extraordinary hosting providers. You would be fine using either company but, hands down SiteGround is the better hosting company. The SiteGround features are much better than A2 Hosting. With SiteGround you are given more speed functionality. SiteGround is currently the more popular web host and it is recommended by WordPress, Joomla, and other top content management systems. Also, SiteGround is easier to use, SiteGround offers a preinstall wizard which helps you to setup your website in under 5 minutes from start to finish. Optimized hosting for $3.95/mo is a steal. Put your site on the web by starting SiteGround today!
5-minute website step-by-step tutorial.
Click here to start SiteGround (60% off)
- Choose a plan
- Create a domain
- Enter account details
- Use the preinstall wizard
- Setup your WordPress password and username
- Log into your new website.
- Congratulations!
Quote – Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of day are dangerous men, for they act their dream with eyes wide open and make it possible.
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