A2 Hosting and Siteground are two such web hosts that don’t need much introduction.
Both these hosts have been in their fields for over 15 years now.
A2 Hosting was launched by Bryan Muthig in the year 2001 and was named Iniquinet in the starting days.
Currently, its headquarters are located in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Siteground was launched by few university friends three years after in 2004 after A2 hosting’s initial launch.
Recent data shows that Siteground is currently hosting over 1,800,000 domains worldwide.
If you are stuck between theses two hosts and don’t know which one to choose for hosting your website, we are here to help.
We will be comparing both the web hosts (A2 Hosting vs SiteGround) on the basis of different parameters and try to conclude which host is better and why.
A2 Hosting vs SiteGround: Plans and Features Comparison
Choosing a particular host might boil down to personal preferences or past experiences but if you really care about the features you get for the money you pay, Comparing the plans and prices of different web hosts side by side is the best way to get a clear idea about the value for money they provide.
Reliability is a very important factor too, as going for cheap plans is of no use unless you get good quality services which most cheap hosts do not provide.
A2 Hosting and Siteground are pretty well known when it comes to being affordable and reliable at the same time.
They both have multiple plans under their shared hosting category which provides a variety of features for people with different needs.
So here we will be comparing all the plans provided by both these web hosts side by side to see which one of these provide better prices and features –
A2 Hosting Plans, Pricing, and Features
| Features | Lite | Swift | Turbo |
| Websites | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Disk space | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Bandwidth | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Monthly Price | $3.92 | $ 4.90 | $ 9.31 |
Siteground Plans, Pricing, and Features
| Features | Startup | GrowBig | GoGeek |
| Websites | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Disk space | 10 GB | 20 GB | 40 GB |
| Bandwidth | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Monthly Price | $3.95 | $ 5.95 | $ 11.95 |
The first plan by A2 hosting is named as Lite and it comes for a price tag of $3.92 / month.
This plan is most suitable for single websites and smaller projects.
With this plan, you get web hosting for 1 website and you can create up to 5 databases.
You also get unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth.
All the storage that you get with this plan is SSD storage so that you can be sure that you are getting the best transfer speeds.
The hosting control panel is by cPanel, so it is very easy to learn and use if you are new to website hosting.
If you are not satisfied with the plan or do not like it for any reason you can get your money refunded with the anytime money-back guarantee.
Talking about Siteground, the first plan provided by them is named as StartUp and costs $3.95/month.
This plan allows you to host up to one website and provides 10 GB of storage space with unlimited bandwidth.
This plan is most suitable for small websites or personal projects and allows up to approximately 10,000 visits monthly.
Some other features that you get with this plan are free SSL & HTTPS which is essential from the security point of view.
You also get free unlimited email accounts and MySQL databases. Cloudflare CDN and free daily backups are also included in this plan for free.
Coming to the second plan, A2 hosting has its second plan named as Swift which comes for a price of $4.90/month.
This plan has twice the server resource allocation as compared to the Lite plan.
You can host unlimited websites with this plan.
You also get unlimited storage and bandwidth with this plan.
Databases can be created in unlimited quantity, and all these features are coupled with free SSL for better security and SSD storage for faster data transfers.
You also get any time money-back guarantee with this plan so you can always get your money refunded if you don’t like what you get with this plan.
The second plan by Siteground is named GrowBig and it mainly focuses on providing hosting for medium to large scale websites that have up to 25,000 visits per month.
This plan costs $5.95/month and can be used to host multiple websites.
With this plan, you get 20GB of storage space and all other essential features such as free SSL and HTTPS, free website builder, free email accounts, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited MySQL databases, free CloudFlare CDN for better and faster file transfer and daily backups.
Other than this you also get few premium features such as free site transfers, SuperCachers for greater website loading speeds, and priority technical support. Website restore is also provided free with this plan.
The third plan by A2 hosting is named as Turbo and it costs $9.31 /month. This plan is listed as the fastest plan A2 hosting has to offer.
With this plan, you will get hosting for unlimited websites, unlimited database creation, unlimited storage for your website files, unlimited bandwidth so that your website never runs out of monthly resources and free SSL & SSD combined with a feature named TURBO which claims to provide 20X better and faster speeds for your websites.
You will also get A2 site accelerator with this plan which helps in improving the overall performance of the website by optimizing it.
You also get Any time money-back guarantee with this plan. The third plan by Siteground hosting is named as GoGeek and is specially designed for heavy websites with more than 100,000 visits per month.
This plan comes for a price of $11.95/month and has lots of features to offer.
With this plan, you can host multiple websites.
Though the exact number of websites that you can host with this plan is not specified anywhere on the site neither it claims to be able to host unlimited websites so take this information with a grain of salt.
You get 30GB of storage with this plan to store your website files which is not that much considering the price of this plan.
This plan offers all the essential and premium features as seen on the previous plans such as free website builder, 24/7 technical support, free website transfer, unlimited databases, and bandwidth etc.
you also get some additional plan-specific features with this plan such as free backups on demand, WordPress, and Joomla staging, once-click git repo creation.
You also get special servers that are PCI compliant and have fewer accounts on them resulting in better website performance and speeds.
Comparing the prices and features of all the plans of both the web hosts we can clearly see that A2 hosting provides better features for lower prices whereas Siteground does provide good features but the prices are somewhat higher than what A2 hosting charges.
Moreover, the better features of Siteground are reserved for the costlier plans.
Overall both the web hosts have good pricing and features but in the end, it comes down to personal preferences.
If you are going to buy one of the basic plans then A2 hosting is the way to go as it has cheaper plans but with better features while if you need high performance and are ready to pay a bit more, then Siteground should be your choice as the features that you get in Siteground high tier plans are much better than what A2 hosting provides.
A2 Hosting vs SiteGround: Performance Test
A good web host not only provides good plans but also does not compromise on the performance.
Many of the hosts will provide cheaper plans but will make up for their losses by giving lower quality hosting services.
If you buy a host, doesn’t matter cheap or not, the main thing you should look for is the performance that you will be getting with that host.
Performance of a host, in general, is referred to as a combination of various factors such as website loading speeds, server uptime, extra features, allocated resources, ability to handle traffic, data caching, content delivery and retrieval and many more.
The better the performance of the host the better it will be for your website.
So the bottom-line is to compare the performance of the host beforehand to make sure that you choose the best available host in your budget.
Here, we will be doing a performance test on two websites.
One hosted on Siteground and the other one on A2 Hosting.
The performance test will test the basic aspects of both the hosts such as page loading speeds, number of requests made and time taken for them, and the total page size.
This will help to clearly portray which host is better amongst the two in terms of performance.
A2 Hosting Performance
A2 hosting scored a C grade with 75 points in the performance test.
The test was conducted through a test server located in North America.
The page size of the website is around 1.3 MB, but it still required 69 requests to load the page fully with a load time of 4.91 seconds, considering the page size is a bit more.
A high number of Http requests is what caused the delay in load time but this is on the website’s part rather than being a fault of the server.
So we can say that as a web host server, A2 hosting did a good job in this test.
Siteground Performance
Siteground received a D grade with 63 points which is not that great when it comes to performance.
Though the page size was around 4.4 MB and a total of 251 requests were made from the server which is too much for a page of this size.
So we can say that the website itself is not optimized well.
Moreover, a load time of 4.72 seconds is also good enough for a page with this size.
Comparing the performance test results of both the web hosts we can say that A2 hosting has a slightly better performance when compared to Siteground.
A2 Hosting vs SiteGround: Time to First Byte Test (TTFB Test)
Time to first byte can be defined as the time taken by the server to receive the request from the user, process it, and send the first byte of the required data back to the user.
This is somewhat similar to page loading speed but is much more important as the page loading speeds are variable and mostly depend upon the size of the page and the number of external files linked to that page.
The more the external links and size of the page, the less will be the page loading speed. Page loading speed mostly depends upon the website itself rather than the host whereas Time to first byte completely depends upon the host.
This test helps to determine the time taken by the host to deliver the initial byte of the data.
This determines the speed of the host itself and its ability to establish a connection as fast as possible.
If the TTFB time is high, it means that the server is slow and will surely perform worse when the hosted website is content heavy.
So it is always recommended to run a TTFB test on the host before buying any plan.
For the sake of comparison, we will be running a TTFB test on two websites and comparing their TTFB times.
A2 Hosting Time to First Byte (TTFB)
TTFB test conducted on a website hosted on A2 hosting produced these results.
Here we can see that the minimum time taken to transfer the first byte of data is by the Atlanta server which took 0.737 seconds.
The connection time was 0.023 seconds with a total time of 2.310 seconds.
Whereas the maximum time taken was by the test server located in Tokyo, Japan with a total connection time of 4.159 seconds and first byte time as 1.588 seconds.
The performance grade allotted was “F” which is fairly poor.
Though TTFB tests are greatly affected by the test server locations considering the fact that multiple test locations yielded somewhat similar results so we can say that A2 hosting needs to improve its server response speeds.
Siteground Time to First Byte (TTFB)
In the case of Siteground, the TTFB test results are much better if not great.
The minimum time taken for transferring the first byte of data was by the Dallas, USA server which took 0.110 seconds overall with a mere 0.019 seconds to establish the connection and .081 to transfer the data.
Similarly, the maximum time taken was by the Sydney, Australia server which took a total of 2.043 seconds to carry out the complete process.
Siteground got a “B” grade for the TTFB test which is much better than what A2hosting received.
When compared to A2 hosting’s results we can clearly see that Siteground has better server response and connection times.
Comparing results from both the tests we can clearly conclude that Siteground is much better in terms of server speed and response timings.
A2 Hosting vs SiteGround: Uptime Comparison
Almost all the web hosts claim to provide 99.99% uptime.
But what does uptime actually mean? In simple words, uptime refers to the time for which the servers of a particular web host were online and functioning properly.
Uptime is one of the most important aspects of a good web host as good uptimes means that your websites will never be unavailable to your users unless you specifically take it down.
If you run an online business and it needs your website to be online 24/7, then uptime is a very important factor for you.
You can’t afford to have your website offline even for a few minutes.
Though it is understandable that servers are machines only and they will surely require maintenance and repair.
This will cause the servers to be taken down on purpose for some time causing downtimes for your websites.
But this is a necessary process and acceptable too.
Moreover minor and rare downtimes are fine too but the real problem arises when the servers face frequent downtimes, that too for long durations.
Hosting your website on such web hosts will only drive your existing users away.
Frequent downtimes are a sign of poor quality servers, or bad maintenance, or even both in some cases.
To check how good a web hosts is in terms of uptime, we need to take a look at its previous downtime records.
To compare among Siteground and A2 hosting we will take a look at downtimes from both the host in past few weeks and conclude which host performed better.
Keep in mind that both hosts claim 99.99% uptime guarantee so we need to check whether they really keep their promise or not.
A2 Hosting Uptime
The uptime reports for the past one month of A2 hosting show that over a period of almost 45 days A2 hosting faced only two minor downtimes.
One was on 18 January 2019 lasting for about 1 minute and the second one was on 9 January 2019 lasting for 1 minute.
This shows that A2 hosting really kept its promise as the overall uptime rating was greater than 99.99% with only two minor downtimes which are considered to be normal.
Siteground Uptime
Unlike A2 Hosting, Siteground faced around 9 instances of downtime in the past 45 days.
These ranged from lasting for a minimum of 1 minute to a maximum of 36 minutes.
On certain occasions, Siteground even went below the upheld 99.99% uptime mark.
This shows that Siteground does have some issues when it comes to uptime.
Comparing between Siteground and A2 hosting we can clearly see that A2 hosting performed much better than Siteground as it had only 2 minor downtimes as opposed to Siteground which faced downtimes almost regularly.
A2 Hosting vs SiteGround: Customer Support
Customer support is one of the most neglected but important aspects of a web hosting company.
Usually, users don’t pay much attention to the customer support services provided by the web host and usually get lured in by the cheap plans and the promised great performance but it is only later that they get to face the issues without receiving any kind of help from the customer support team.
Good customer support is as important as the price itself that you pay for the plan.
You would not want to end up trying to contact the customer support staff multiple times without getting your issue solved.
Usually, most web hosts promise 24/7 customer support but this doesn’t tell anything about the response time of the customer support staff.
It could take a few minutes to even a couple of days before your issues are resolved.
Therefore just having a 24/7 available customer support team is not enough.
It should be made sure that the response time is minimum and issues are being resolved by the support staff as soon as possible.
A2 Hosting too promises 24/7 technical support just like all other hosts.
Moreover, it also provides multiple ways to contact them.
You can directly call the customer support staff and get your queries resolved or you can also use the live chat feature or send an email directly with your queries.
The support crew is available 24/7/365 and tries to resolve the issues as soon as possible ranging from few minutes to a couple of hours at max.
Talking about the payment methods, A2 hosting provides standard support for credit and debit cards along with Paypal support. You also get any time money-back guarantee which not many web hosts provide.
If you don’t like the service provided by A2 hosting at any point in time, you can ask for a refund.
Similar to A2 hosting, Siteground also has multiple ways to contact the support crew which is available 24/7.
You can directly call them or initiate a live chat session.
You can also email them your issues or raise a ticket.
The response time varies accordingly and time taken to address your issues and fix them might take from a few minutes to a couple of hours.
The payment mode on Siteground is similar to A2 hosting as they too accept Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal.
Overall there is not much difference between the customer service provided by A2 Hosting and Siteground. So in terms of customer support, we can say that both stand in the same position.
Conclusion: Is A2 Hosting or Siteground Good?
Considering all the factors and different tests performed so far we can say that Both web hosts are good on their own premises.
A2 Hosting is better in terms of basic plans as they are much cheaper and provide good performance whereas Siteground provides better performance for somewhat costlier plans which generally belong to the upper tier of the shared hosting category.
So the end choice depends upon the user and their needs whether they need just a basic plan or an advanced plan with much better features and better performance.
Related Article:
