A2hosting Magento Hosting: Pros & Cons [2020 Review]

June 4, 2020

A2hosting is not a new hosting provider, but I guess not all of you know about this brand. There would be many questions about this brand such as: Are they reputable? Is it good to run a Magento 2 store on A2hosting? What about their support on Magento 2 issue?

We have been a running several Magento 2 stores for our clients on A2hosting and during that time, we keep monitoring website’s performance, hosting support, loadtime/uptime of Magento 2 website on A2hosting. In this review, we will summarize the Pros & Cons of using A2hosting for Magento 2 website

About A2hosting

You’ve probably never heard of A2hosting, they may be not as famous as some giant hosting providers but they’re indeed a reputed hosting brand. A2hosting was established in 2001 in Ann Arbor, Michigan and now they have data-centers located in 3 continents, including USA (Michigan), USA (Arizona), Europe (Amsterdam), Asia (Singapore)

Homepage: https://www.a2hosting.com
Services: Shared hosting, Cloud VPS hosting, Dedicated server

A2hosting has a simple and easy to use dashboard where you can easily access CPanel, check invoice, open ticket or upgrade your service:

A2hosting Hosting Pricing & Feature for Magento

A2hosting offer 3 plans for their shared hosting plan:

Lite: $3.92/month for the first invoice, then $7.99/mo. Allow only 1 website, and not support turbo feature.
Swiff: $4.90/month for the first invoice, then $9.99/mo. Unlimited website & unlimited bandwidth. No turbo feature.
Turbo: $9.31/month for the first invoice, then $18.99/mo. Unlimited website & unlimited bandwidth. Turbo feature with More Resources Per User, Fewer Users Per Server, Enhanced Performance Over Apache. This is the plan I recommend for running Magento 2

A2hosting supports LiteSpeed Cache (LiteMage) for boosting Magento 2 load speed

With all plans, you will have 1-click to install Magento 2. A2hosting also provides auto-configuration for Magento 2, they optimize Cron, PHP, Apache, Nginx and other elements of a hosting for the best Magento 2 performance.

A2hosting is running on the latest version of PHP and MYSQL, which is required to install and run Magento 2, there’s also free HackScan Protection and DDOS protection for every plan.

Another thing to be noticed is Caching system, caching is very important for Magento 2, with Turbo plan, your website is powered with 3 strong caching system: Turbo Cache, APC/OPcache, Memcached

Overall, what is the best plan for running Magento 2 on A2hosting? The answer is Turbo plan. Magento 2 requires a lot of resources and optimizations in order to have smooth performance. Lite and Swift plan are enough to handle a simple Magento 2 store, but with more plugins, products added to the site, they will overload when there’s traffic spike.

Hosting performance for Magento 2 website

We tested a real Magento 2 website with real traffic to measure the performance of A2hosting (Turbo Plan). The tests we’ve done are Load and Stress test, Latency test, Load speed test, Uptime test and here comes the results:

Server Load and Stress: We use stress testing service Loadimpact to observe how A2hosting handle traffic to Magento 2 store, result is described in the chart below:

With caching enabled, Loadspeed remains stable around 900ms for a default Magento 2 install website, even when the number of online visitors reached 100.

Latency: We tested latency from A2hostng US datacenter to different locations around the world and you can see the results below.

There’s not much difference between A2hosting’s min and max response time, RTT time remains stables and very fast among US cities. Also, there’s no loss packet found in the test, which means your customers will have stable connection to website all the time.

Load Speed

We tested A2hosting loadspeed on a default Magento 2 website (no theme/plugins installed) with Pingdoom and below are their performance:

Performance grade is 80 and load time is 793ms, a bit lower compared to SiteGround.

Uptime

We carefully monitor uptime of several websites hosted on A2hosing using Uptime robot. Every 5-min interval, Uptime robot will return uptime/downtime status of a website. A2hosting has no downtime during our test in Octorber, there’re 2 spike in response time because we were installing some new modules to Magento 2 store

Customer service & Support

A2hosting is a good choice for new Magento 2 user because support is available in different ways. Beside ticket, you can directly call and livechat with their support staff when it’s urgent.

Besides phonecall, ticket and livechat, A2hosting has built an extensive FAQ system. You can quickly find many helpful articles about your problems.

However, there’s a drawback with A2hosting support, I several times could not contact their support department via Live Chat. It’s said that all of their support staff were busy or not available.

Another prise for A2hosting is that they never use auto-generated answers for first message from customers. All messages are sent directly by support staff.