A2 Hosting Review: Is It the Worst Hosting Service of 2023?

An online business depends heavily on the efficiency of its website, especially in the eCommerce retailing space. That is why it is imperative to choose a hosting service that can provide exceptional website speed, so you never have to face downtime. Apart from the website's speed, a hosting service is also used for storing the company's emails, files, and other important data on its server.

However, not all hosting service providers are created equal. Some service providers are just not up to the mark and making companies lose millions of dollars just because of their inefficient service. One such hosting service provider is A2 Hosting.

Our official PhoneBot website was hosted on A2 Hosting's dedicated server, but our recent experience has been terrible and resulted in a significant loss. This raises a question, is A2 Hosting the worst hosting service of 2023?

Let's dive deeper and understand what happened with PhoneBot's website during the Black Friday season in 2022 and why we think A2 Hosting has become a poor hosting service.

The Servers are Terrible!

Around November 17th, 2022, the PhoneBot site, which A2 Hosting hosted, started facing speed and loading issues. A lot of our customers could not load our product pages, let alone buy anything from our site. And if you are an online business or an online buyer, you know how pretty darn frustrating it is when the site takes ages to load.

So just like any other eCommerce company would do, we contacted A2 hosting's customer support team and asked them to look into the issue immediately because we were losing money with every passing minute!

At first, they stated the website's slowness was because the database queries were consuming a high amount of resources. Later, one of their support agents told us that our current server could not cater to 50/60 simultaneous users, and since the traffic is high, the site is loading and responding slowly. This led us to buy a dedicated hosting plan which cost an additional amount but little did we know that it was not really the problem

The problem was actually with the Singapore server provided by A2 Hosting on which PhoneBot's site was hosted. They confessed it later, but by that time, we had bought another hosting plan and initiated migration to that server.

Talking about migration, this was another nerve-racking experience for us with A2 Hosting.

A2 Hosting Takes Ages for Migration!

When we changed our hosting plan, and initiated migration, one of their agents told us that the migration would not take more than 4-5 hours. But this was farther from the truth.

The transfer process by A2 Hosting was extremely slow as if they were putting files on the server one by one.

The total data to copy from the old server to the new one was around 101GB, and it took them approximately six days to complete the transfer. Can you believe it? 6 days to transfer only 101GB!

While they were at it, it seemed like some of their agents were not even aligned on the migration process. For example, one of A2 Hosting's agents claimed that 101GB had been transferred, whereas, in reality, only 16GB had been transferred at that time. See for yourself in the below image.

You might think the migration to another server would have fixed the problem. But to our disappointment and surprise, it did not!

The site loading time was still pretty slow, and the problem was again with the server provided by A2 Hosting. In short, after acting upon their suggestion and changing the server, the elephant was still in the room and we went back to square one.

SubPar Customer Support Team

First off, the customer support team of A2 hosting made us believe that the problem was actually from our end, due to which the PhoneBot's website was facing speed issues. But later on, they came to realize and confessed that the problem was with their server.

But this miscommunication did not only cost us valuable time but money as well since we purchased another server based on A2 Hosting's support agent's suggestion.

Secondly, one of their agents was not aligned with the process of our migration to another server and conveyed the wrong information.

All these things depict that their customer support team is subpar and can not handle a situation efficiently.

Have We Changed Our Hosting Service Provider?

After losing a lot of money during the peak sale season, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and going back and forth with A2 Hosting for 20 days, no fruitful result came out as our site was still facing speed issues after all the efforts. So we finally decided to change our hosting service provider.

A2 Hosting's service has costed us a lot and left us disappointed. Their service was okay when we first switched to them, but this experience was enough to teach us a lesson about not trusting A2 Hosting again.

Should You Trust A2 Hosting Service With Your Website?

Perhaps you could give A2 Hosting a shot if you do not have a busy website. But looking at our experience, it is evident that their servers find it challenging to manage even 50/60 simultaneous users. And it's not just about slow servers. They also took ages (6 days) to complete the migration process.

And on top of everything, their customer support service was also not up to the mark. So looking at all these factors, we would not trust A2 Hosting with our website again.

That is not to say that we are stopping you from doing so. We have penned down this blog just so that you learn from our experience and make a wise decision. Otherwise, you may lose your time and money. Therefore, choose wisely!