Here’s my WPX Hosting Review in which I’ll explain:

• How Fast is WPX Hosting?
• How well is the support provided (Real Example)?
• What are the best features WPX offers?
• Moreover, Should you go with WPX?

Coupon: Anirudh to get 50% off. Use the above link to register or else the coupon won’t work. (Case Sensitive)

WPX Hosting Review

In almost all Hosting Reviews sites out there, WPX Hosting hails the Top Spot and few of my friends & past clients had their sites hosted on WPX.

All of them say the common that their support is excellent!

Even I agree on that, and I’ll explain how well they helped in one issue we faced on a decent traffic money site that too very quickly in the latter part of the review.

After experiencing their support, I decided to test all the aspects of WPX Hosting.

And present you with my WPX Hosting Review with detailed stats to decide on your next hosting provider.

Especially the speed of the hosting (As we all know that Page Speed quickly became one of the important ranking factors in terms of Technical SEO).

WPX Hosting Speed Test

Instead of testing with a Fresh Copy of WordPress, I went with a Live site which usually gets around 20 – 30K Monthly traffic.

The site is having ample amount of JS, CSS, and High-Quality Images.

So, I wanted to test how it is performing on WPX Hosting at the moment and how it would perform when deployed on a Cloud VPS.

Speed Test

So, I copied the site to a Digital Ocean 2GB Droplet on Cloudways, A Fresh Droplet with no other website to slow down its performance.

After the tests I’m surprised to see the results:

Here’s the Pingdom Comparison – Left: WPX Hosting & Right: Digital Ocean 2 GB Droplet

WPX Hosting has 3 more sites apart from this running during the tests, and all those 3 sites are traffic sites.

Despite all these WPX Hosting prevailed to do well against a $22 Digital Ocean Droplet that was deployed on Cloudways Managed Hosting.

WPX Cloud Free CDN

With PageSpeed being one of the ranking factors, most SEO’s are trying to squeeze as much speed as possible using Technical SEO to speed up their websites.

CDN is one of the best ways to speed up a site exponentially. CDN puts the assets of your site in different regions/locations all over the globe.

and serves those assets when a nearby user requests the site without troubling the server. However, almost all the CDNs cost you additional on top of server expenses.

Here’s where WPX Hosting shines over the competition. They recently came up with their own CDN known as WPX Cloud.

The best part of WPX Cloud is it’s Free! Yes, you heard it right.

WPX Cloud has 20+ WorldWide Locations. 20+ PoPs is considerably less and more number of PoPs determine how good of a CDN it is.

Hey, it’s free right unlike the paid CDNs, and the integration of WPX Cloud is effortless. Almost all CDN Integration requires technical knowledge to understand custom subdomains, Pull Zone, Push Zone, etc.,

It’s not needed to configure WPX Cloud. Here’s how to get started with WPX Cloud CDN by WPX Hosting easily:

How to enable WPX Cloud CDN

• Login to your client area if you’re already registered. If not, register using the below link and use the coupon code for 50% off.

Coupon: Anirudh to get 50% off. Use the above link to register or else the coupon won’t work. (Case Sensitive)

• Click “Manage” right below the “WordPress Hosting” and select the Hosting Account which has your desired website that needs CDN Integration.
• The left pane should have an option named “WPX Cloud”. Just click on the option and toggle “Enable” right beside the website name, like this:

After you enable the WPX Cloud, The DNS Records of your domains gets 4 additional DNS Records as follows:

These records help cache the assets of your site at available CDN Locations. Make sure you find the similar setup on the Zone Editor section to check whether the CDN is configured properly or not.

Alternatively, WPX Support can help verify it for you.

CDN eases the load of most HTTP Request a website make when requested by a user and serves them fast. Here’s a case study on how enabling CDN has improved the traffic by 200% – 300%.

Infrastructure

WPX Hosting uses SSD based storage for their servers, which helps in faster throughputs helping the sites serve quicker than shared hosting that uses traditional slow storage raids.

All the sites that are deployed on WPX use HTTP/2, which is beneficial in terms of Page Speed.

With HTTP/2, browsers can load & process multiple assets like JS, CSS, HTML, and Images simultaneously when the website is requested.

Sites that use HTTP/2 doesn’t need their assets grouped to one file, and it actually slows the site a bit, and most of us are unaware of this fact.

Anyhow, It’s a discussion for another day, and I’ll get back with a detailed post on it soon.

They support PHP 7.3 Latest. Upgrading to PHP 7.x+ would speed up a site quite a lot, and there are several benefits to upgrading to PHP 7+.

Features

Here are a few features of WPX Hosting that are worth mentioning:

User Interface

User Interface is of the entire hosting platform is a custom panel, not regular cPanel what most server providers use. And, I personally don’t like cPanel.

I like custom made hosting management panel like this, but WPX sure needs revision to their existing design. It’s okay but needs an overhaul, design-wise.

File Manager

Most cPanel based hosting platform has File Manager as a feature that lets you access files in /root of your server. However, many custom made platforms don’t.

They suggest users set up FTP accounts and access the server using FTP or SFTP via FileZilla or by an alternate client.

WPX is an exception to that. They have file manager features present in the panel and it works perfectly and helped me save plenty of time in the past by preventing me to fire up FileZilla for simple file management tasks.

Regular Backups

WPX Hosting comes with a Backup Manager. All of your sites gets backed up regularly on a daily basis.

Plus, backup retention is quite good. They store each and every backup of your site for up to 28 Days. Restoring to an earlier backup is very easy.

All you need to do is to go to the backups section, Pick a site and select the data of the backup you want to restore.

Also, there is an option to take a personal backup. You can initiate this at any time in the backups section. All the automatic backups are off-site.

Which means they don’t eat up your storage. The backups are stored securely in their raid 10 based cloud servers, But the personal backups occupy your server’s storage.

Staging Area

Staging environment has become a mandatory feature for a premium hosting. WPX too offers Staging area for hassle-free edits we perform on our sites without disturbing the production sites.

One can easily make a staging site of their existing sites and make the needful edits and push the edits to the production site without any down-time.

24×7 Support – Best-In-Class

Providing awesome support to customers is the best way to gain their trustworthiness and maintain customer retention. WPX Hosting does this pretty well.

I haven’t seen a bad review regarding WPX Hosting Support.

Here’s my personal experience with WPX Support:

One of my client’s sites was having a CSS Issue on a High Traffic site hosted on WPX, This was brought to his notice by few of site’s visitors.

Which means we’re already late in noticing the issue.

Before a month or 45 days ago to the day we noticed, We’d added AMP to the site to take advantage of Page Speed, and better CTR AMP gives to a site.

This was working pretty well for us. We observed a decent 25% – 40% boost in traffic. Back to the issue: So, The CSS was not loading on the site and each and every page visit seemed broken.

Only HTML Text was seen on the page after loading. Needless to say, I went on to the dashboard and purged the cache assuming Caching Plugin is causing the issue.

But, That didn’t fix the issue, and we’re trying to recall what sort of edits we did in the past days that caused this problem. And, the client was asking me, is it because of the AMP?

I was 100% sure it wasn’t because of AMP as it’s an entirely different thing to mess up the site. So, We’re in a dilemma and went ahead to contact the support so that they can provide a log file for us to identify and fix the issue.

Instead of providing us with the log file, They were quick enough to exactly explain to us what’s the issue is, and why clearing cache didn’t work.

And the issue is that we had exhausted our server’s storage limit. Still, I was wondering why it caused CSS to break and the rep explained this clearly, which is actually true. It’s a minor detail we forgot at that moment.

When the cache is purged, It first creates a new set of Cache Files and then clears the old cahce files.

Which requires free space, which we lack in the server and that is why it’s wasn’t working, and after clearing a few megs we’re back in business.

Site started serving as it should and this all happened within 5 mins. I would say they’re very good & fast in terms of support which most providers lack.

And, They justify the term “Managed” in “Managed WordPress Hosting”, unlike few competitors.

How secure WPX Hosting can be?

We see lots of reports every day regarding plugins having vulnerabilities and while few of them gets fixed quickly by the developers. Most of them don’t.

And, having such plugins can open doors to hackers to maliciously exploit our site and get control over it easily. And, We’ve been seeing sites getting hacked regularly these days.

Unlimited 1-Click Free SSL

After the launch of Let’s Encrypt, Almost every provider added support to 1-Click SSL feature. Same goes for WPX Hosting.

With a single click, you can add SSL Certificate to your websites right from the dashboard adding one of the primary layers of security to your websites.

Free Malware Removal

This is by far the best support feature very few are providing when it comes to Managed WordPress Hosting. As mentioned earlier, WordPress websites are very vulnerable.

WordPress tops the stats of sites getting hacked, and malware removal is a mess unless you keep regular backups of your site.

WPX does that for you – You can get back to a hack free version of your site. But this doesn’t work all the time, What if your backups are infected and you just restored an infected one just to get hacked again?

There’s no solid one-click solution to disinfect a site 100%. We’ve to rely on several methods to completely secure the site in such cases.

And, It’s a tough thing to do unless you’re technical enough. If you’re not, you’re forced to hire an expert. Maybe Me ? (Not an expert, BTW. But I have helped many in securing their sites. Contact Me if you need help, I’ll help you for free)

Coupon: Anirudh to get 50% off. Use the above link to register or else the coupon won’t work. (Case Sensitive)

If you’re already a WPX Hosting customer, then they’ll help you for free in the malware removal. If not join using the above link and use my coupon code for 50% discount.

Free Unlimited Website Migrations

One more surprisingly beneficial feature with WPX is Website Migrations. They do that for free and for an unlimited time.

All they want is to be their customer, and their support team will cover the migration for you. Few providers have started doing this.

Few support this already, but there are limitations. Either they offer for one-time and charge for more, or they charge each and every migration.

Email

Many Managed WordPress Hosting doesn’t provide email boxes. Even premium ones like Kinsta and more affordable ones like Cloudways don’t.

WPX has this, and it’s hassle-free to set up. You can allocate data to each email box and manage all of them right from the dashboard.

No need to worry about Mail Exchange DNS Records and stuff. They automatically get added in the Zone Editor DNS Section when you create the email for yourselves. Just like when enabling WPX Cloud Free CDN.

Helping Homeless Dogs & Cats

This part is not actually relevant to the WPX Hosting Review. However, I decided to write about this anyway.

So, the founder of WPX Hosting – Terry Kyle started a project for Homeless Dogs & Cats. And It’s wonderful. I take care of 20 Cats at my home

Being a pet lover, I thought it’s worth mentioning here, and I recommend everyone of you to check this project: EveryDogMatters

WPX feeds 500+ homeless/shelter dogs & cats every day. I wish they grow more and keep doing such awesome service to the homeless animals.

Conclusion

Here are a few things I wish had in WPX Hosting the first place and bonus discount for the readers:

Features I would like to see in WPX Hosting

• UI – Definitely the User Interface should be revised, It can be better looking with more info regarding the server, etc.,
• Server Storage – Currently, They’re offering very low SSD Storage compared to the competitors starting at 10 gigs for the Business Plan, I wish it to be at least 20 GB
• More CDN PoPs – As mentioned earlier, More PoPs = More Speed. Currently, it’s 20+.

Setting those aside, I would strongly suggest going for WPX if you’re serious about your Business, PageSpeed, and need Awesome Support at the same time

Bonus

Here’s a WPX Hosting Promo Code for you to get 50% OFF on all the plans of WPX. Use this Coupon Code along with the link and get 50% Discount on your total bill

Coupon: Anirudh to get 50% off. Use the above link to register or else the coupon won’t work. (Case Sensitive)

Also, I’ll explain why?

And why most of my sites are hosted on Cloudways in this review.

So, Let’s dive in…

VPS or Dedicated Servers are the best options for hosting websites when you seek maximum speed & reliability. However, Most Hosting Providers don’t offer managed hosting.

And that’s where Cloudways come in. Cloudways has been around since 2009 and offers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on its platform.

They provide fully Managed Hosting solutions to the customers, so we don’t need to worry about our website downtimes or slow loading speeds.

When signing up use the Promo Code: ANIRUDH10 to get $10 Instant Credit to your account

Cloudways Review – 9 Reasons why I migrated to Cloudways

I’ve been doing Online Marketing from past 7+ Years or so, From the days of blogging on Google’s Blogger Platform to self-hosted WordPress sites.

and experienced many issues with the sites I own in the during this journey. Believe me slow loading speeds, site downtime, and not having regular backups are necessary things to address when you plan on having a website/blog.

Cloudways Platform is specially developed to address such issues without breaking the bank.

The plans are affordable, and the features we get along with their platform are a must have.

I work full-time as a Digital Marketing Manager for an IoT Based Startup, and all of our company sites, as well as my personal blogs, are hosted in Cloudways.

Before me, our company sites used to be hosted on Godaddy, Which is popularly known for being the worse hosting in terms of speed. I know right…

After making the shift to Cloudways, the Cloud VPS Experience gave our sites a tremendous boost, and I’ll try to add a few screenshots in this review, check them below:

Cloudways Managed WordPress Hosting

Okay… Let’s talk first about the USP of Cloudways, Managed WordPress Hosting. What exactly is this?

Either the developer or the Marketer has to take care of their WordPress site. Things like SSL Installations, Setting up the redirects, Backups, and other technical tasks can be tricky and take lots of time to perform.

If you aren’t well aware of what to do to complete such tasks you need to learn how to do them or hire an expert to finish the tasks on your behalf.

Which can end up in wasting lots of valuable time, as well as money and few tasks/changes performed, can screw up your website at any moment if you hadn’t followed the instructions.

These things can be avoided because the Cloudways support will always be there for you to take care of these things. Whatever you ask regarding WordPress they’ll do it for you.

As mentioned above, it can be a complicated task like sitewide HTTPS Redirection or just a simple plugin installation. They’ll guide you through or can perform on your behalf depending on the task’s complexity.

You can reach out to the customer support via Live Chat instantly right from the platform.

Speaking of platform let’s talk about the Infrastructure Cloudways provides for the servers we deploy on their dashboard.

Cloudways Hosting vs Traditional Hosting

Usually, if you go with any Cloud VPS or a Dedicated Server provider like DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services, etc.,

You need to setup you’re own hosting environment either manually or by installing a Cpanel or VestaCP or EasyEngine or any other alternative to manage your websites efficiently.

Few of them like VestaCP and EasyEngine are free, but Cpanel may cost you too.

And managing your sites on your own can be a daunting task, and you might end up hiring server experts to do the task of regular maintenance.

with their Managed WordPress Hosting you can flawless deploy new applications, destroy unnecessary deployments, Install SSL, Staging & Cloning and much more…

We’ll go through the features offered in-depth in this article, But for now, here’s how the dashboard looks like on Cloudways.

Only Managed WordPress Hosting?

Till now I kept talking WordPress alone right? You might be wondering that Cloudways offers WordPress alone, and the managed services are for WordPress only?

No, Cloudways provides managed services to all these CMS:

Promo Code: ANIRUDH10 to get $10 Instant Credit to your account. Supports Credit Cards, Debit Cards & PayPal

However, managed services aren’t the top reason why I migrated to Cloudways. There are other features that’ll go through in this Cloudways Review that are very important to progress quickly in this domain.

Speed

Cloud VPS/Dedicated Server

Cloudways Web Hosting services are based upon the servers we get from DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services.

They only provide infrastructure to maintain those servers that are deployed on their dashboard.

It’s good news because all these providers are well known to supply the faster SSD Based Virtual Private Servers as well as Dedicated Servers in the market.

So, we get the ability to choose whatever provider and the resources we need to get started.

Caching

Cloudways uses a custom stack to host web applications and supports almost all possible caching plugins we all are well aware of like WP Rocket, AutoOptimize and W3TC.

They used to recommend W3TC earlier because all the servers deployed support Varnish as well as Redis Cache for caching.

Also, W3TC has options to handle Varnish, Reverse proxy, etc., W3TC might be outdated, and currently developers are not supporting the plugin.

However, believe me, it’s a much capable plugin even today, and many popular blogs are still using W3TC. Using W3TC as reference Cloudways team has developed an in-house caching plugin and named Breeze.

It does justification to the breeze the plugin is simple to setup, and most of the options are 1 click enable/disable. Supports Cloudways CDN, Varnish cache and can be controlled using the plugin.

Varnish Cache

Varnish is a popular caching mechanism used in most Linux based servers and is pre-installed on all the Cloudways servers we deploy.

Breeze has the option to enable/disable as you can see from the screenshot above showing the settings of Breeze Plugin on WordPress.

You can monitor Varnish Hit Ratio in the monitoring section on the dashboard and the cache be easily purged from the breeze settings on wp-admin.

Redis Cache

Redis is another popular layer of caching mechanism used in Linux servers to efficiently cache web pages to serve them instantly without troubling the server.

Redis is disabled by default, and we can install and enable it under each server settings. Cloudways suggests not to use both Redis & Varnish and recommends Varnish over Redis.

Even I don’t recommend Redis when Varnish is enabled because Redis keeps the entire page copies separately that would add up space pretty quickly on your server forcing you to upgrade when storage isn’t enough.

Cloudways CDN

This is one of the best features that was brought to Cloudways lately, and I personally excited to include in this Cloudways Review. You might know about StackPath, which is formerly known as MaxCDN.

If you consider adding StackPath to your website, it’ll cost you $10 per month, Whereas Cloudways CDN is just $1 per month.

It had partnered with StackPath and integrated the CDN on to their servers. You can add CDN with just 1-click, and also there’s a dedicated section on every application.

Which makes the integration of CDN in WordPress very easy. Purging of the cache can be done on the settings or via the breeze plugin on the WordPress Dashboard.

When signing up use the Promo Code: ANIRUDH10 to get $10 Instant Credit to your account

CDN makes a lot of difference, Improving PageSpeed results in tremendous growth in terms of traffic. Google openly says about PageSpeed being a ranking factor.

Here’s a small experiment we ran on a site with Cloudways CDN and without it and observed around 200 – 300% Traffic Growth after CDN Implementation.

Cloudflare

Most of the sites still use Cloudflare for securing their websites as well as speeding them through CloudFlare’s Cache. Cloudflare has tons of options.

Which makes it a mandatory feature for many out there. Cloudflare as a CDN can be enabled on the sites you deploy on Cloudways.

It can work alongside Breeze, and You can install Cloudflare official plugin and add the API for automatic cache purge. What about the SSL?

CloudFlare offers Flexible, Full & Strict SSL. You can use flexible SSL as you used to but if you’re going with Full or Strict. Enable SSL on Cloudways first. Adding SSL on Cloudways is easy, and I’ll explain more down below.

Vertical Scaling

This is one of the modern features every VPS provider should adopt. Cloudways has Vertical Scaling of their servers.

What this means is that, If you think that it’s time to upgrade your server for whatever reason like out of storage, Max CPU Usage, Need more ram, Seek better speed, etc.,

You can do that now with just a few steps. They’ve included this option to make the scaling possible and that too quickly without disturbing your server and the applications in it.

Select how much ram you need and how many cores you want, including the additional storage and click scale on your server.

That’s it. You’re done scaling your server.

Also, This works vice-versa. You can downgrade easily if you ever need to go back to a slower hosting plan.

Security

SSL & Firewall

Cloudways offer free Let’s Encrypt SSL including Wild Card Support. You can easily install SSL for any website within minutes from the application section.

All you need to do is input your domain name and email and click Install SSL. You’re done!

Once you’ve SSL installed, you can use Cloudflare Full or Strict SSL options if you’re using it on your website.

Cloudways offers cloud-based firewall to protect your websites from malware’s and attacks, but it’s not as sophisticated as Cloudflare.

If you’re worried much about security, then configure with Cloudflare and add the WAF Module on to the Cloudways server settings.

Server Permissions

Most hacks that happen are due to user mistakes, We as users get neglected to protect confidential data, and that leads to devastating things.

Cloudways servers don’t come with /root permissions, So even if one website gets hacked the hacker won’t be able to take over the entire server due to lack of permissions.

Latest Software/Security Patches

Compared to most Hosting Providers, we see the latest softwares early in Cloudways like PHP 7.3 or SQL 5.7. Cloudways control panel can manage the package installations easily.

Latest software also improves speed by serving the sites faster, and you can check more about PHP Benchmarks here

They patch vulnerabilities pretty quickly, and those updates get installed in the background.

Reliability

Backups

Backing up your site is essential. You might never know what goes wrong. Moreover, having a local backup is a terrible idea because if the whole server gets hacked, then you lose the backup as well.

So, Most use plugins like updraft to automate the backup to Google Drive or FTP or any other file system. I would say it’s worse or anything.

But not quite efficient compared to Cloudways. They have off-site backups, and those backups are stored in secure servers off-site and can be restored in seconds, unlike traditional methods.

You can retain backups for a month, and the frequency can be set in intervals like 1 hour, 6 hours, 12 hours, 1 day or so…

Staging/Cloning

Another excellent feature is that they support a staging environment for updating your sites. Now you no need to worry about messing your sites.

Just deploy a staging copy, work on it, and when the changes are made and looking good, push them to the production site. Cloning is similar to staging and has been since Cloudways started their hosting business.

Clone app don’t have staging features, but cloning helps in changing to new servers and having multiple clones of sites just to be sure to showcase to clients etc.,

Auto-Healing Restarts

Usually, MySQL is the culprit for any server crash/outage, and a quick restart fixes that which needs manual attention if you’re using a traditional hosting.

In Cloudways it happens automatically, Whatever happens in the server that causing issues with the server not working. Cloudways bot alerts you and restarts the server/services automatically not to have downtime.

Customer Support

Customer support is vital even if it’s a hosting provider with sophisticated features like Cloudways. However, I must admit that the Customer Service nowadays is not so good.

Earlier it used to be pretty fast and now it’s too slow and people starting to rant about the same. If support is the most valuable feature you would want on a Hosting Platform then I would suggest you check out WPX Hosting instead.

Live Chat

They’ve 24×7 Live Chat, But responses are too slow, and few agents lack the knowledge and need much time to complete the support service.

Ticketing System

Same with the ticketing system, Tickets opened are not being addressed faster despite marking them with High Priority. They’re taking time, but issues are getting resolved.

Cloudways Bot

Cloudways have added their own bot which monitors our servers and alerts us when we have WordPress updates, Issues, , etc.,

Also, the bot can be integrated with Slack, Email or any communication service using their API.

Community Forums

They’ve recently added Community Forums on their website. Mostly, you’ll see less active forums with lots of rants about bad support.

and very few useful threads with actual tutorials.

Still, Cloudways is a decent Managed Hosting compared most hosting companies despite the slow support.

Among all the features that I talked about in this Cloudways Review all that is left is to include my 9 reasons why I retain in Cloudways.

9 Reasons for using Cloudways

1. Daily Backups with 1 Month Backup Retention.
2. Cloudways CDN which is 10X Affordable compared to competitors.
3. Staging environment for faster site fixes and edits.
4. Vertical Scaling to faster server resources at my fingertips.
5. Security and better Control Panel/Dashboard.
6. Pay as you go, pricing model.
7. Better Caching with Breeze optimized servers.
8. Latest Software & Security Features.
9. Wide server provider options.

Features I would like to see

1. Cloudways has RackSpace Email Addon for Dedicated Email Addresses, but I would like to see more providers added to the list.
2. Ability to add an individual IP address to sites hosted in a single server. Few providers are doing this lately.

Summary

By now, you might have understood that Cloudways is a precise balance of affordable servers with sophisticated features.

Along with the free trial, they offer 30 Day Money Back Guarantee. No Questions Asked. So, why delay? Sign up now for a free trial.

When signing up use the Promo Code: ANIRUDH10 to get $10 Instant Credit to your account.

Let me if there’s anything else you would like me to include in this Cloudways Review in the comments section down below.

In this A2 Hosting Review, I’m going to cover the following:

• How Fast A2 Hosting is? Especially How Fast their Managed WordPress Hosting is?
• How good is their support?
• Discuss about LiteSpeed, Which is used by A2 Hosting.
• Premium Features, along with their plans and more.

Promo Code: anirudh51 to GET 51% OFF on all plans of A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting Review

A2 Hosting is one of the Fastest Top Growing Hosting providers in the market and is often compared with the fastest players like SiteGround and WPX Hosting.

They’re based out of Michigan, USA and Michigan is one of their server locations. Apart from Michigan, they serve globally, and here are the server locations of A2 Hosting.

• USA-Michigan
• USA-Arizona
• Europe-Amsterdam
• Asia-Singapore

A2 Hosting Speed Test

I’ve been testing A2 Hosting’s Mid Tier Managed VPS Hosting & Mid Tier Managed WordPress Hosting for more than 1 month.

In this A2 Hosting Review, I’ll be comparing the Managed WordPress Hosting Plan with Cloudways Digital Ocean 1 GB Plan as the SSD Storage of both the plans are similar.

Speed Test

Page Speed was surprisingly good during my tests, and it was consistent. Still, the TTFB seemed slow, Here’s the speed test results:

Below is the Pingdom test comparison results. A2 Hosting performed well in the test despite the larger Page size for the WordPress site deployed.

Still, it performed well in the Load time, that is because of an optimized version of WordPress Install which gets deployed on all plans of A2 Hosting.

I’ll go in detail about the optimized WordPress offered by them in the next section. Before that let’s discuss TTFB.

TTFB is considerably low on A2 Hosting Server, which was not expected by me. If you check the above Speed test table, there’s nearly 2X slow difference in TTFB according to Webpagetest.org

So, I went on checking TTFB on few more locations using KeyCDN test and found that A2 is slow on most location around the globe.

Here are the results of the test:

So as you can see that TTFB is slow in most regions and to overcome this, there are ways like using Cloudflare as free CDN and other methods

However, that’s a discussion for another day, and I plan on making a guide to decrease TTFB soon, and I’ll link here, after publishing the same.

Server Resources & CDN

A2 Hosting is branding their servers by the name “SwiftServer” & “TurboServer”, and the server resources seem not dedicated.

Unlike Cloudways, most Managed Hosting Platforms don’t offer dedicated resources per account, and they seem to support most important features, and here’s a quick look:

As mentioned these aren’t dedicated resources. These are shared server resources, and such deployments are prone to Neighbour Noise

In short, if there are plenty of apps runnings on the same shared server, be it WordPress, Custom PHP or any then that affects the overall performance of the server and your site may experience slow performance.

Like most providers, A2 Hosting too doesn’t disclose the information related to the number of accounts that each server is being shared with.

Here’s the complete set of server resources info according to their product info page:

LiteSpeed Server & LiteSpeed Cache

Let’s talk, “LiteSpeed”…

A2 Hosting servers are based on CloudLinux OS using LiteSpeed webservers. LiteSpeed became so popular lately for several reasons.

There are Enterprise and OpenSource free versions of LiteSpeed for all types of users. LiteSpeed claims that it is so much faster compared to Nginx & Apache.

Yes, it is much faster, but there’s a catch to it, and I don’t want to get into more details on that in this A2 Hosting Review as it deserves a dedicated article with clear explanation.

I’ll plan for that soon and will update here. Back to the topic, What Makes LiteSpeed so unique is it’s Cache Plugin.

A2 is using Plesk as Hosting Control Panel and using a tweaked version of W3TC along with their in-house A2 optimized caching plugin

I wish they’d used LSCache instead of this which is also free and better. In case if you’re wondering what LSCache is:

LiteSpeed developed their own plugin for caching known as LSCache. Unlike most caching plugins that cost a lot for subscriptions and support, LSCache is completely free and packs tons of awesome features which makes it so special.

Here’s a chart explaining how fast a LiteSpeed server can be when coupled with its LSCache

A2 Optimized seems to be doing a fine job at handling caching for WordPress. Breeze is also an in-house caching plugin by CloudWays which does a fabulous job on the servers deployed on Cloudways

Turbo Server – A2 Optimized Server with Turbo Cache

I think Turbo servers are marketing terms used by A2 Hosting. Turbo Server is the name given by them to the SSD Servers used for the hosting plans.

Turbo servers come with Turbo Cache, server-level caching mechanism. Also, the rewrite rules for this to function properly are added automatically when you deploy WordPress on their server.

If not you can make this happen with a single click from the Plesk control panel. Apart from this, A2 Optimized and A2 Tweaked W3TC can also be installed from the control with a single button.

That’s a decent feature making the experience much better for users who are looking for Managed Service. I think they justify the term “Turbo Web Hosting” considering the levels of caching and the SSD based Servers they use.

Also, Memcached is auto-enabled on all the applications to handle object caching. Redis would be a bit better, but it’s no big deal.

Features

There are several features outlined in the product description page, and most of them are obvious. So I’ll explain a few important ones here:

Free Jetpack Personal License

Jetpack is nowadays being avoided by most because of the load it puts on the website, making it slow. However, It does come with some cool features that we can’t ignore.

For starters, Jetpacks tracks “Stats”, Unlike Google Analytics which can be complicated for a newbie. Jetpack makes the stats lot more clear.

Another feature I like is the uptime monitoring. It’s free with Jetpack and lets you know if your website goes down. Enough with the free stuff, let’s talk about the “Personal License”.

If you sign up for A2 Hosting WordPress Plans you’ll get “Jetpack Personal License” for free, which has premium features like “Backups”.

You can set up backups to your site, and the backups happen according to the time interval you’ve set up, and all the backups are Off-Site.

I’ll talk more about “Backups” on A2 Hosting in the later part, and if you want to check the complete features of Jetpack Personal, you can do that here.

Free Site Migrations

As I’ve discussed in this WPX Hosting Review, Site Migrations is an impressive feature. Most new users are worried about the migration part.

Moreover, it makes them not to choose a new hosting over their existing despite the issue they’re facing. This feature alone is a real conversion booster for the provider and I think it’s good to have.

Unlike Cloudways, who only offer for 1 free site migration, A2 Hosting’s migration depends on the plan you choose. If you opt for the 3-Site plan, then you’ll get to have 3 Free Site Migrations.

So the number of migrations depends on what type of plan you choose. Here’s how they priced their WordPress Hosting Plans.

Plans & Pricing

Below is the pricing chart for the plans of A2 Hosting. You can use the below A2 Hosting Promo Code along with the offer Link to get 51% OFF on All Plans.

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Eco-Friendly Hosting

I personally care a lot about the environment and animals. Which is why I’m more excited to talk about this section in particular in this entire A2 Hosting Review.

A2 Hosting aims to be eco-friendly, and they advertise a lot about “Green Hosting” which means they employ several practices that benefits the environment.

They plant 3 Trees for every hosting plan you take, and that’s really good. They prefer recycled servers over new preserving resources.

So if you go with A2 Hosting, You’re in-turn helping the environment.

Email

This has been one of the features that I miss to see in many premium hosting providers. A2 Hosting kept this feature, and you can create, manage, delete business emails directly from the Plesk Control Panel.

However, the email client is RoundCube which is crap. I wish they’d gone with a custom email web client, which has better UI than RoundCube’s.

Despite the crappy user interface, People still use this feature to create and use emails from the hosting itself. If you’re running an online business or something, then it’s wise to choose GSuite or Office 365 over this.

Although this is for those guys who need a business email for occasional interactions. You can always pair the emails created on a better client as it supports POP3 & IMAP.

Reliability

Security

Coming to security, They’ve very tight integration going on here. starting from the type of web server they use, customized caching plugin, server-level cache, and control panel based security monitoring, etc.

I can say the security is good. The control panel website section has the ability to show mid-high level security recommendations.

Most of them can be applied directly by you without even logging in the WordPress dashboard. That’s something most of the users would like.

They did an excellent job of identifying the common security vulnerabilities WordPress apps has and listing them so that users can fix them with one-click is something unique.

There’s a “Security” section in the control panel –> WordPress section. From that, you check the Security Status of your website.

With just one click you can fix them as shown in the below screenshot

Also, one of security feature they encourage us to employ is to change “WordPress Login URL”. This feature comes by default.

All the WordPress doesn’t work when you navigate to /wp-admin, There’s a different login URL for each site, and it’s really good to have considering the thousands of brute force attack each and every WordPress site face on a daily basis.

You can also login to the WordPress dashboard without even typing your credentials. In the Control Panel, you can directly login to the dashboard from the website’s section. Pretty neat feature.

Support

Their support seems good, and the responses are fast. I haven’t experienced any lousy support until now. Also, I appreciate them taking care of auto-enabling the features that are necessary and comes bundled.

They enabled my Jetpack personal license without my involvement after I launched my WordPress site. And considering all the security measures and one-click fixes they’re enabling for us shows how reliable their support is.

Most of the users who reach out to customer support is because of these common fixes they want to make on their sites, and that’s been taken care of automatically from the control panel.

They’ve Live Chat support as well as a Ticketing system to quickly respond to our queries. And if you’re looking for a Good Managed Hosting then use the offer link & the coupon code for 51% OFF on all plans

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Up Time

During my usage, I never experienced downtime. A2 Hosting claims 99.9% Up Time to their servers on their products features section

According to UpTime.com, They have got a 100% Up Time, which is very good in my opinion. I was expecting it to be a bit low than the advertised 99.9%

Surprisingly it wasn’t the case. For people who are serious about their business, A2 Hosting seems very reliable in terms of Up Time.

Regular Backups

As explained in the earlier part about the Jetpack Personal License, Jetpack has an option for taking off-site backups which get enabled starting with a personal license

I like this type of backups in particular compared to other off-site backups most providers offer that is because we can view the complete backups in a separate dashboard

In addition to that, we can download them individually whichever date backup we want.

When you enable backups option in Jetpack, It installs VaultPress which is acquired by Jetpack lately, and from then the backups process is pretty much automated.

You can see the status of the backup’s on Jetpack from WordPress dashboard or you can view them on VaultPress. As usual, a total of 30 Days backup’s are kept for you to restore or access.

Why is this different is because you can check each backup using the “View Backup” option and then drill through the WordPress directory and can also download files directly from VaultPress.

This can be handy, and most users use VaultPress because they offer multiple site backups at a low cost and A2 has this, unlike Off-Site backups that can’t be accessible.

Managed Updates & Security Patches

Regular updates to the server platform and security patches are taken care of. It all happens in real-time with zero downtime.

If you were using a VPS, then you should be prepared for a few minutes of downtime because a restart of the server is required for the security patches to apply when you run an update command.

Whereas in A2 Hosting you won’t experience any downtime and the uptime is excellent as explained in the above section.

Also, The control panel has the ability to perform automatic WordPress Plugin updates directly without needing to login to the WordPress Dashboard.

Conclusion

Considering all the great features that come with the platform, A2 Hosting is a reliable hosting provider if you’re looking for Managed.

Not having LSCache can’t be pictured as a downside because their inhouse plugin seems to be working fine and their support team is trained to work with it which makes the experience better when the user’s reach out to the support.

I wish the pricing to be a bit cheaper considering the competitors like WPX Hosting who offer Free CDN along with great support.

A2 Hosting Promo Code

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