It’s now SiteGround vs A2Hosting! A2Hosting offers anytime money-back guarantee while SiteGround is famed for performance and class, but are these two popular hosting providers any good for you? Find out with this clear, concise, and helpful review post.
Choosing the best hosting plan is not an easy task. We have to be aware of every tip and toe of the hosting service provider. Selecting the wrong hosting can lead up to some drastic effects such as frequent site failures. You need a hosting which is developer-friendly as well as guarantee a fast loading website. Slow-loading websites are irritative and you’ll keep losing your audience. Now the question: Are SiteGround and A2 Hosting both stands above the upper criteria?
SiteGround and A2 Hosting are two of the leading hosting service providers right now. If you are stuck choosing between both the platforms and not sure which one is perfect for you, here is our SiteGround vs A2 Hosting comparison-cum-review to help you out.
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SiteGround vs A2Hosting: Defining The Rivals
SiteGround is one of the leading and well-known hosting service providers. It is also one out of three hosts officially recommended by WordPress. Not only WordPress, but it also can be integrated with Joomla and Drupal. Its user’s database has been significantly growing over the past few years.
On the other hand, A2 hosting is another strong and reliable hosting service provider. Let me tell you, it is the only hosting provider that offers an anytime money-back guarantee. If you don’t like their services at any point, simply contact them and take your amount back. There are certain terms and conditions which you’ll need to keep in mind obviously. They also have integrations with WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
Features Comparison Table
If you don’t have enough time to go through the whole content, just follow the below comparison table and pick one from both the platforms.
| Tests | SiteGround | A2 Hosting |
| For Beginners | Yes | Yes |
| Site transfer | Free | Free |
| Free SSL certificate and CDN | Yes | Yes |
| Uptime | 99.99% | 99.96% |
| Security | Best in class | Third-party security |
| Loading Speed | 1-2 seconds | 2-3 seconds |
| Renewal Pricing | Up to 3 times | Affordable |
| Malware scans | SiteGround’s “HackAlert” is free of cost. | Free ‘HackScan’ |
| Pricing | Little Expensive | Affordable |
| Customer Support | Excellent | Average |
| HTTP/2-enabled | Yes | Yes |
| Money-back guarantee | 30 Days | Anytime |
| Control Panel | cPanel | cPanel |
| Disk Space | Limited | Unlimited |
| Overall Rating(out of 10) | 8 | 7 |
So, as per the comparison table, SiteGround is a winner over A2 Hosting. But let’s see under what circumstances A2 Hosting is a better choice.
A2 Hosting vs SiteGround: Key Features Comparison in Brief
Uptime Guarantee
SiteGround uses SSD, CDN, and PHP 7.4, which makes it reliable in the long-term run. It commits 99.99% of uptime guarantee, but it’s average is actually closer to what it promises. Its average uptime is near about 99.9 as per experts and users.
A2 Hosting is also equipped with the same features as SiteGround. But in terms of speed, it is actually faster than SiteGround and gives an uptime guarantee of 99.9% and it actually does. But if we talk about average uptime, it stands somewhere around 99.8.
In terms of reliability, SiteGround is obviously more reliable than A2 hosting. If you have a business website then you can’t take the risk of downtime of your website.
Loading Speed
Every user feels irritated while visiting a slow loading website. And if your website loading speed is more than 4 seconds, 85% of your users will leave your website. So, you can definitely imagine the value of the response time of a website.
In terms of loading speed, SiteGround secures a position one with an average loading speed of 1.25 second. All credit goes to its in-built supercacher, which keeps unwanted data out of the server. It also supports HTTPS speeding to boost up webpage loading speed.
While on the other hand, A2 Hosting also comes with an A2 Optimised Site accelerator. That means you get turbo cache, APC/OPcache, and Memcached which fights with unwanted loads and helps in loading your website smoother and faster. After being tested by many experts, it’s average loading speed was detected as 1.75- 2.25 second.
Here, SiteGround is a clear winner over its rival with a minimum margin.
User Interface and Security Standards
SiteGround has in-built site tools that provide you full customization so you can smoothly perform all the tasks. A2 Hosting comes with cPanel and uses the latest version of PHP which also makes it effective and user-friendly. One thing that it has unique is its database of hundreds of help articles which are enough to answer most of your questions.
If we talk about security, both offer free SSL certificate and CDN but A2 hosting comes with an advanced security system including dual firewalls and brute force detection which makes it a bit more secure than SiteGround.
Customer Support Service
No matter how much-skilled person someone is, we all need the help of customer support at some point. And most of the time it’s about billing issues or technical problems. SiteGround has done well in this part by putting knowledgeable and trained people in helping customers. They are available 24/7 through a chat and ticket system. You can also get a reply within 10 minutes.
While A2 Hosting also offers live chat, ticket, and phone system to resolve your issues. They have 100+ articles on their website to help you out with any query. But many users have said that they have waited for minutes to get their problem to be solved and the solution is not even satisfactory. This may reflect that on live chat, A2 Hosting is not very well known.
So, SiteGround is a clear winner here.
A2 Hosting vs SiteGround: Plans & Pricing
SiteGround Plans
It offers three plans from basic to advanced. You can choose up as per your requirement.
Startup Plan
It is the basic plan which costs $6.99 monthly. It includes unlimited sub and parked domains, free email account, 10 GB of web storage, hosting for one site, friendly site tools, free CDN with each account, and anti-hack system with spam protection and daily backup, free SSH and SFTP access, and super cacher of level 1 only. You will also get options for customized server setup and HTTP/2 enabled servers. It’s a startup plan. If your business is just launching you can choose this and later upgrade as per your requirements.
GrowBig Plan
This plan comes up with a price tag of $9.99 monthly and the most recommended plan for users who are having a hard time deciding. Some features of this plan remain the same as the Startup plan like unlimited sub and parked domains, free email account, friendly site tools, free CDN with each account, and anti-hack system with spam protection and daily backup, free SSH and SFTP access. What you get more is 20 GB of storage, 25000 monthly visits, unlimited hosted websites, super cacher at all 3 levels, advanced on-demand backup, and staging.
GoGreek Plan
Here comes the last and premium plan offered by SiteGround hosting which costs $14.99 monthly. If you require more traffic and more data i.e. you have an e-commerce inventory or large data infrastructure, this plan is for you. It includes all the features of the Startup plan and GrowBig plan. What it offers more is 40 GB of storage with 10000 monthly visits. It also includes advanced priority support, white-label hosting & client management, and pre-installed Git.
Note: All plans mentioned above are for WordPress web hosting.
SiteGround Cloud Hosting Plans
In cloud hosting plans SiteGround offers Entry, Business, Business Plus, Super Power plans prices at $80/month, $120/month, $160/month, and $240/month respectively.
A2 Hosting Plans
A2 hosting offers four plans for WordPress hosting which are as follows:
Startup Plan
If you have to start a single site, it is recommended as it is a basic plan. It costs $2.99 per month. With this pack, you get 1 website, 100GB SDD storage, easy site migration, free SSL certificate, virus scanner, free CRN, website staging, and choice of server location.
Drive Plan
The second plan comes with a price tag of $4.99 per month and is an upgrade to the startup plan in which you get unlimited websites, unlimited SSD storage, website migration, free SSL and CDN, unlimited database, and website staging.
Turbo Boost Plan
It is the most popular plan of A2 hosting. You’ve to pay $9.99 per month. This plan comes with a lot of premium features like turbo servers, up to 20X faster page loading, 40% faster in CPU performance, unlimited NVMe Storage, free backup. The rest features as drive plans.
Turbo Max Plan
And now comes the last and bigger plan which is priced at $14.99 per month. They claim it to be their fastest service yet in which you get all the features of a turbo plan with 5X more resources, anytime moneyback guarantee, free CDN, malware scanner, lower bounce rate, Litespeed enhanced web server, turbo cache, and APC/opcache. This is a premium plan recommended to those who have requirements of high speed and to host many websites.
Note: Upper plans are for shared hosting as well as WordPress hosting.
A2 VPS Hosting Plans
Core VPS and Managed VPS
There are a total of three types of plans in core/managed VPS hosting- Power+, Prestige+, Pinnacle+ prices are $25, $35, and $50 respectively.
Unmanaged VPS
In this Hosting, the plans are $5 for the Entry plan, $10 for the Mid plan, and $15 for the Elite plan.
Dedicated hosting
Dedicated hosting plans start at $99.59 and go up to $290.49. One can choose from managed, core, and unmanaged dedicated hosting according to their convenience.
A2 Hosting vs SiteGround: Pros & Cons
A2 hosting Pros
- 99% uptime guarantee
- Free ‘Hackscan’ protection
- Free and easy site migration
- Website builder and developer-friendly tools
- Anytime money-back guarantee
- Unlimited SDD storage
- Free SSL and PHP 7
A2 Hosting cons
- High Renewal rates
- Turbo servers are too highly-priced
SiteGround Pros
- Multiple server locations in the US, Europe, and Asia.
- 99% of Uptime Guarantee with great page loading speed.
- Comes with a 30-days money-back guarantee
- Google cloud infrastructure.
- Adequate customer support with less response time than other hosting providers
- Offers free web hosting migration
- Free SSL certificate, PHP 7.4, and SSD hosting.
SiteGround Cons
- Data storage is limited in all plan
- Pricing is quite high as compared to other hosting platforms
- Limited numbers of monthly visits
Conclusion: Which One To Go With?
Last but not least, it’s time to give the final verdict: SiteGround vs A2 Hosting. Both of them have some limits like in terms of storage, SiteGround offers limited storage while A2 hosting provides unlimited storage. In terms of uptime and loading speed, SiteGround beats its rival. And when talking about security, A2 Hosting beats over SiteGround.
Since both offer 30 days and anytime money-back guarantee respectively, you can also try both of them and then choose. I believe things would be more clear then.
However, we recommend that you go with SiteGround as it has more pros than A2 Hosting. And I’m pretty sure that SiteGround will keep improving.
