A2 Hosting vs SiteGround: Pricing, Features, Speed, Pros & Cons

I've been a customer of both SiteGround and A2 Hosting for 5+ years.

I love SiteGround for it's easy to use dashboard, features, amazing support, and generous pricing.

I don't love SiteGround for it's file and iNode limitations.

I love A2 Hosting for it's focus on speed, very competitive pricing, and wide range of hosting service options – across shared, VPS, dedicated and more.

I don't love that A2 Hosting's dashboard could use some work, and the backend feels a bit disjointed. Their customer service is good, but lacks the speed and expertise I've found with SiteGround.

Nevertheless, both A2 Hosting and SiteGround are great hosts to compare to each other.

They both have great support, high uptime, and screaming good prices for the quality.

In fact, both of them are considered one of the fastest web hosts according to our research.

The best thing about these two hosting brands is that they are charting their own path, and not part of a web hosting globo-corp that doesn't really care about their customers.

So you're making a great choice sizing up SiteGround vs A2 Hosting, let's dig into what makes them different.

So cutting to the chase: both have a similar amount of experience in the industry, offer 99.99% uptime with a 30-to-45-day money back guarantee, and plenty of customizable options to accommodate all abilities and price ranges.

So they've both got the basics covered there. But where there's a huge differentiation between them: speed and customer service.

Overall, if you're looking for the fastest web host, go with A2 Hosting; if you're looking for the best overall host for features and customer service, go with SiteGround.

Update for 2024

This year, as in the past few years, SiteGround and A2 Hosting both remain top contenders for the best value WordPress hosts. They strike the perfect balance of affordability, features, and speed. For those managing around 5-20 websites, these two hosts are the sweet spot of value.

Compared to the premium WP Engine and Kinsta, both of these hosts offer a lot of the same features but allow for many sites hosted at a lower price. In-fact, SiteGround and A2 Hosting are both about only 10-30% of the cost of WP Engine and Kinsta.

If you want great value, managed hosting, with good customer support, we still strongly recommend both SiteGround and A2 Hosting in 2024.

A2 Hosting: Highlights, Pros and Cons

Since starting in 2003, A2 Hosting has emphasized their speed above all else, up to 20x faster than rivals. The Michigan-based company offers unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth.

A2 Hosting Pricing

A2 Hosting offers quite a few clear pricing options. The lowest price points in each option start at reasonable monthly entry prices:

• Shared Hosting: $12.99 is the full (renewal) price – but a coupon code brings it down to $2.99 for 12 months
• Managed VPS Hosting: starts at $76.99/mo for the full (renewal) price – but promotion brings it to $35.99/mo to start for 12 months
• Managed Dedicated Hosting: $249.99 is the full (renewal) price – promotion brings it to $159.99/mo for 12 months

Note that pricing is subject to change at any time. Last updated Jan 8, 2024.

Customer Support

Knowledgeable, friendly technicians are available 24 hours a day, every day. Whether you enter a server ticket, chat online, or call their helpline, they’ve received high marks for their service. To enhance your service, A2 Hosting allows you to choose the server closest to you.

There have been some complaints with slow responses, depending on the time of day. Personally I've had great experiences with their support.

There was one huge issue they had during the great A2 Hosting outage recently. But they've recovered since.

Speed

A2 Hosting touts a SwiftServer high-performance platform that allows them to offer Turbo packages. These servers load your pages up to 20 times faster, with fewer customers on each server and more resources allocated to individual accounts. All of their hosting accounts include solid state drives, which can perform thousands of input/output functions each minute.

Value

For the amount of service and support, A2 Hosting offers tremendous value. Included SSD, cPanel access for all shared hosting customers, and many other options are available to fit any need.

Features

A2 Hosting offers CPanel-powered functions, support for everyone from beginners to advanced developers and consultants. They provide automatic server-based backup, anti-virus protection, and a variety of software and development options for different industries.

They optimize for speed and security, and a lot of features come baked in. This makes their hosting beginner-friendly, which is super helpful.

One downside is that their features can be a bit overwhelming, because their UI isn't perfect. But it gets the job done.

Downtime/Uptime:

The have privately-owned servers, with data centers in Michigan, Amsterdam and Singapore. A2 Hosting guarantees 99.9% uptime. The also offer upload and download speed tests from each data center.

They did have a huge data center outage recently, but things have been smooth sailing since.

SiteGround Hosting: Highlights, Pros and Cons

Started by former lawyers and IT professionals in Bulgaria in 2003, SiteGround offers tons of web hosting options, unlimited bandwidth, and award-winning service, speed, and support.

We personally love SiteGround. Overall they are affordable, super friendly, and feature-rich with everything we need.

SiteGround Pricing

SiteGround’s plans are on the pricier side when it comes to budget hosting, but many reviewers appreciate all of the extras that come with a little higher price. They have several levels for each of their four hosting options.

• Shared Hosting: Regularly priced at $9.95, coupon codes drop that down to $3.95
• Cloud Hosting: Starts at $60 monthly
• Reseller Hosting: A credit plan, which equals one year of hosting, is as low as $42 each credit when you purchase 11 or more credits.
• Dedicated Hosting: Their U.S. dedicated server plans start at $229 per month

Customer Support

They are available at every second for instant chat, instant phone responses, and tickets that they say average about 10 minutes for the first response.

SiteGround is shocking in how fast they are to respond. It's truly unbelievable.

You get support tickets filled out faster than you can say “server” and an attention to detail that goes above and beyond.

They help out with issues they don't need to, and they go as far as fixing WordPress issues for you. Wow.

Speed

SiteGround offers solid state drives on all hosting plans, and offers enhanced performance with NGINX, HTTP/2, PHP7 and free CDN.

They have a SiteGround SuperCacher plugin with multiple levels of caching and speed. You can choose what level of implementation you want to get this baby purring as fast as possible.

Value

While the prices may be slightly higher than other hosts, SiteGround’s plethora of options for developers and users of all abilities provides a high level of value.

Overall, the value from SiteGround is unbelievable. It goes head-to-head with Bluehost and takes it down easily!

Features

The offer hosting for a variety of different apps and services, provide Joomla, WordPress, and Magento themes, as well as tutorials for each. They include free daily backups.

Downtime/Uptime: SiteGround offers a real-time status that lets you test your Web site’s real-time status. They offer a 99.9965 percent yearly uptime rate and a 99.999 percent monthly uptime rate. Data centers are in Chicago, London, Amsterdam, and Singapore.Their software minimizes downtime by providing automatic real-time detection and an automated instant reaction. They resolve more than 90 percent of server performance issues instantly with no human interaction needed.

SiteGround vs A2 Hosting: Speed Comparison

We compared SiteGround and A2 Hosting on two sites with near identical content, from similar themes, both by StudioPress, and with similar amounts of content and text. These were the results:

We've got SiteGround on the left with a total grade of 94%, and A2 Hosting on the right with a total score of 97%.

Note that this is with caching plugins provided by each host turned on. For SiteGround we used their SG SuperCacher with nearly ever level of caching turned on, and with A2 Hosting we went with their Turbo plan, up to 20x faster.

On a practical level, these are great results and it really shows that both of these are stellar. The speeds are so close that I wouldn't necessarily just choose one over the other purely based on the miniscule difference in speed.

SiteGround vs A2 Hosting: What’s Best for You?

Both A2 Hosting and SiteGround offer unique features that can accommodate businesses of all sizes. They are both geared more toward developers or individuals experienced with Web site development but offer thorough customer support and assistance through tutorials and troubleshooting for users of all strengths and abilities.

While price shouldn’t be the determining factor, A2 Hosting is geared toward small businesses, e-commerce companies, and individuals. The wide-variety of features offered for the lower price make this a solid, reliable option. They offer 30 different customized hosting packages, including options for CMS, CRM, scheduling, auction, education, e-commerce and Web development. Get A2 Hosting discount here.

SiteGround is a quality option for developers who want more flexibility and customization options, marketers who count on consistent uptime and little downtime, and resellers who are looking for reliable products to offer at a reasonable price. They have advanced technical availabilities and fast customer support to maintain your sites. Claim 60% off SiteGround here.

A2 Hosting Review Recap

Below is the summary of our full A2 Hosting review.

SiteGround Review Recap

Below is the summary of our full SiteGround review.

Update Log

• Jan 8, 2024: updated some details, light pricing fixes, next need better screenshots that are up to date.
• 2020: some lightweight edits throughout
• 2019: initital publication

Last Updated on January 8, 2024 by Joe