Hosting.com (A2 Hosting) Review

Hosting.com is the new name of A2 Hosting, which rebranded as Hosting.com in April 2025. It is a hosting company built around speed, with shared plans from $1.99 a month on a 4-year term and a clear upgrade path to managed servers and bare metal.

Its plans go from shared hosting to VPS and dedicated servers for large or growing websites. The company started in 2001 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and now serves customers in more than 180 countries.

• Overall4.2/5
• Features4.6/5
• Performance3.6/5
• Ease of use4.5/5
• Price3.7/5
• Support4.3/5

Hosting.com lists data centers in the USA, London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Mumbai and Sydney for its shared and cloud server plans. Its intro prices are fair for the quality you get, but renewal prices are much higher, so check them before you pick a long term.

Data sheet of the host

Hosting.com is fast, scalable hosting for developers, webmasters and bloggers with no technical knowledge. Whether you need shared hosting, a managed server or a bare metal machine, the range covers most requirements.

If your top priorities are speed, support and security, Hosting.com should be on your shortlist.

Hosting Types

• Shared
• Dedicated
• VPS
• WordPress
• Reseller

Operating Systems

• Unmanaged VPS: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Debian 12 or AlmaLinux 9
• Managed VPS: cPanel on AlmaLinux, with CloudLinux account isolation
• Windows VPS: Windows Server, managed through Plesk

DataCenters

• USA
• London
• Frankfurt
• Singapore
• Mumbai
• Sydney

About Hosting.com

As mentioned before, the company was founded back in 2001 as A2 Hosting. At first, it mainly served developers and webmasters, but the platform has grown into one that non-technical users can handle easily.

Hosting.com now brings A2 Hosting and World Host Group together under one brand. It says it hosts more than 3 million websites for about 700,000 customers.

On the technical side, Hosting.com's shared plans support multiple PHP versions up to PHP 8.5, as well as multiple Node.js versions.

AMD EPYC processors power the shared plans, with published per-plan limits: 2 vCPU and 2 GB of RAM on Starter, 4 vCPU and 4 GB on Pro, and 4 vCPU and 8 GB on Max. Storage is NVMe with a fixed allowance per plan: 15 GB on Starter, 50 GB on Pro and 100 GB on Max for shared hosting. The package comparison also lists a concurrent visitor capacity of 30 on Starter, 60 on Pro and 120 on Max.

Every shared plan also includes the LiteSpeed web server with LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress, OPcache and Memcached. Pro and Max add Redis object caching.

A2 Hosting also had a green angle: in 2007, it started buying carbon offsets through Carbonfund.org to balance its server emissions. Hosting.com's about and plan comparison pages don't say whether that program still runs, so ask before treating it as a reason to sign up.

The hosting suits most needs, with specific setups for WordPress and eCommerce. Hosting.com advertises a 99.9% uptime commitment, and its plan comparison lists 99.95% for shared and cloud server plans and 99.99% for bare metal.

Technical Features

Score 4.6/5

Historical screenshot: A2 Hosting's developer software page before the rebrand. The versions shown are old; the current stack is listed below.

Web applications, e-commerce and marketing

The shared plans support PHP (multiple versions up to 8.5) and Node.js, and you can switch the PHP version per site. They work with MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL, including pgvector, and you get SSH access, Git, Composer, WP-CLI and cron jobs. So, if you are a developer, Hosting.com is an easy recommendation.

Further, if you have an eCommerce store, you can use Woocommerce, Magento, Prestashop, or Opencart. The cPanel plans install these and 400+ other apps through Softaculous, and the Hosting Panel has its own one-click installs.

For marketing, Hosting.com sells a separate Marketing Suite with SEO and marketing tools for small businesses. Every shared plan also includes an AI website builder for WordPress.

Domains, Databases and Benefits for Developers

The number of websites depends on the plan: 5, 10 or 50 on the Hosting Panel plans, and 1, 10 or 100 on the cPanel plans. Shared plans include a free domain for the first year, and you can also transfer your current domain to Hosting.com.

The cPanel plans include unlimited MariaDB databases. On the Hosting Panel plans, a single database can be up to 1 GB on Starter and 5 GB on Pro, and you manage databases with phpMyAdmin.

Storage is NVMe on RAID, and the shared plans are available in all six data center locations. Dedicated servers are hosted in Dallas by default, with other locations on request, and they run the operating system you choose, while CloudLinux is part of the managed cPanel server stack.

You get SSH access on every shared plan, which is pretty much required if you are a developer. File limits are published too: 200,000 inodes on Starter, 400,000 on Pro and 1 million on Max.

"Green" infrastructure

The next part of this review is the green angle. A2 Hosting used to describe itself as 100% carbon neutral, said it reused old servers instead of trashing them, and let staff telecommute to cut commuting emissions.

Hosting.com's current pages don't repeat those claims. Its about page only says it wants to be reliable and sustainable, so ask Hosting.com directly if a green host matters to you.

Performance and Security

Score 3.6/5

Hosting.com (A2) Speed Test Results (November 2026)

In November 2026, I load-tested 4 live websites hosted on Hosting.com (A2): 2 on shared hosting and 2 on VPS/cloud. Each site's hosting was verified from its server IP, and the table notes the technology each site runs on and the datacenter its server sits in, since both affect the result.

Most hosting reviews quote the cached speed, which is really the cache or CDN talking, not the host. I show both: the cached TTFB your visitors normally get, and the uncached TTFB with the page cache bypassed. The ranking uses server time (uncached TTFB minus the network round trip from the test location), because a cache can hide a slow server. Each hosting type's figure is the median of its sites.

Test settings, November 2026: 5 virtual users for 2 minutes, at most 1 request per second, every second request with a unique query string to bypass the page cache. Live websites under light load, not a controlled benchmark of Hosting.com (A2)'s plans.

On server time the VPS/cloud sites answered faster, a median of 263 ms against 964 ms on shared. None of the 4 sites showed a strong page cache: cached and uncached came back close together, so visitors lean on the server as much as the test does. All 4 sites answered every request without an error.

What each site runs:

• Web design agency — WordPress, Phoenix, United States
• Travel blog — WordPress, Singapore
• Personal site — WordPress, Detroit, United States
• Printing company — WordPress, Detroit, United States

Each hosting type has only 2 tested sites so far, so its median is less reliable. My Performance score for Hosting.com (A2) uses the shared result, the plan type I recommend from Hosting.com (A2). The other type is shown for comparison and ranked separately on my benchmarks page.

Uptime figures will be added once the monitored site has 30 days of data.

Hosting.com (A2) Under Load: 1 to 50 Visitors (November 2026)

The speed tests above use light traffic. For this test, k6 raised the number of visitors from 1 to 50 over 2 minutes, and every request skipped the page cache, so the server had to build every page. It puts real load on a live website, so I only run it on sites I manage or have permission to test, normally at a quiet hour for their visitors.

Server time as the load rose to 40–50 visitors at once:

• Web design agency (WordPress, Phoenix, United States) — 690 ms → 7,300 ms, grade E
• Travel blog (WordPress, Singapore) — 1,840 ms → stopped at 23 users, grade E
• Personal site (comparison) (WordPress, Detroit, United States) — 207 ms → 2,880 ms, grade D
• Printing company (comparison) (WordPress, Detroit, United States) — 338 ms → 4,850 ms, grade E

Sites marked comparison run a different plan type and are not counted in the shared grade.

Grades use fixed limits on server time at 40 to 50 visitors:

• A — under 0.5 s
• B — under 1 s
• C — under 2 s
• D — under 4 s
• E — 4 s or more, more than 1% failed requests, or a test k6 had to stop

Real visitors mostly get cached pages, so this is the hard case: a traffic spike on pages the cache can't answer. Each site's technology, plan and plugins also affect the result.

This load grade counts in my Hosting.com (A2) score. It's one of the three grades behind the host's benchmark rating and the Performance score of this review, next to server time and the slowest 5% of requests.

Hosting.com Uptime Guarantee

Hosting.com advertises a 99.9% uptime commitment.

LiteSpeed speed and optimized software

Speed and software optimization are among the most important parts of this review. Hosting.com builds its plans around speed, and the old Turbo features are now standard: every shared plan runs the LiteSpeed web server on AMD EPYC CPUs with NVMe storage.

Each shared plan has published IOPS and I/O limits, from 1,024 IOPS and 50 MB/s on Starter to 8,192 IOPS and 250 MB/s on Max. HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 are included on every plan.

Historical screenshot: the A2 Optimized dashboard used on A2 Hosting's Turbo plans before the rebrand.

Site acceleration and caching

Caching comes preconfigured with your web hosting. Here is how the layers work.

The first is LiteSpeed Cache, which stores pages and serves them without running PHP on every request. The second is OPcache, which cuts PHP response time.

To speed up the database, you get Memcached on every plan and Redis object caching on Pro and Max. Object caching keeps the results of repeated database queries in memory, which helps busy WordPress and WooCommerce sites most.

"Constant Security" and 24/7 monitoring

Security is a crucial part of choosing a hosting provider. Hosting.com includes a solid set of protections on every shared plan.

A web application firewall (ModSecurity) and DDoS filtering protect your website from common attacks. Monarx detects and removes malware, brute-force login protection blocks password guessing, and each site runs in its own container.

As for individual site security, every plan includes free SSL certificates with automatic renewal. You can also turn on two-factor authentication for your account.

Ease of use

Score 4.5/5

In this review, I've said that this hosting has a strong developer focus. So, this section covers the ease of use for non-technical users.

The Hosting Panel has all the options in one place. You can manage your websites, email, domains and backups there, and renew your products with ease.

If you prefer cPanel, the cPanel plans give you the familiar dashboard. Both panels install WordPress and other apps in one click.

The built-in AI website builder for WordPress lets you start a site by describing what you want. Orbi, Hosting.com's AI assistant, answers setup questions and hands you to a human when needed.

Monarx automatically detects malware on your website. That way, you don't need to worry about security too much.

Overall, everything is easy to use. Dedicated servers are different: Hosting.com sells them unmanaged with root access by default, so ask sales whether cPanel or Plesk is available if you want a control panel. On shared hosting and managed plans, cPanel or the Hosting Panel lets you handle these tasks without much technical knowledge, but an unmanaged dedicated server needs someone comfortable with the command line.

Historical screenshot: A2 Hosting's cPanel theme before the rebrand. Hosting.com's default plans now use its own Hosting Panel, with cPanel on the cPanel plans.

Price

Score 3.7/5

Next, let's look at Hosting.com's pricing.

Reliability and support

Score 4.3/5

Along with fast, scalable hosting, reliability matters a lot. Hosting.com publishes customer reviews on its own site and shows a 4.8 rating from about 7,250 reviews.

Treat those ratings as customer-reported experiences rather than measurements. They still give a useful picture of how the support team handles problems.

Software, servers and support team

Hosting.com has moved its shared hosting to cloud-based servers with AMD EPYC processors, NVMe storage and Anycast DNS. It says hardware is refreshed to the latest generation without downtime.

You get the server resources of the plan you choose, and higher plans add more CPU, RAM and IOPS. Its team watches the servers 24/7.

Support is in-house and available 24/7/365 by live chat, phone and tickets, and the contact page also offers email. The team works from offices including Bali, Sofia, Manila and Bangalore, and Orbi, the AI assistant, handles quick questions first.

The promise of "Constant Security": Monarx, WAF and more

Security is important, and Hosting.com builds it into every plan. Monarx checks new and edited files as they appear and removes malware, giving you protection against hackers and infected uploads.

A web application firewall filters out attacks and bad bots. Daily backups are kept on separate storage, and you can roll back to any day from the past month.

If something is wrong with a server, Hosting.com's 24/7 monitoring alerts the technical team so they can fix it. Further, every plan has free SSL, and shared plans include Cloudflare DNS sync, while the CDN itself is included on cloud servers and bare metal.

Site Transfer Policy

Hosting.com has a free managed migration service, with no limit on the number of sites. Its team moves your sites, email and domains from your current host, and you can check the copy on a temporary URL before any DNS change.

On cPanel, the move is a straight backup and restore. From other hosts, the team migrates manually and tells you exactly what it needs.

Conclusion: Is Hosting.com Right for You?

For an inexperienced user, things might be confusing at first. There are many different hosting packages, and depending on what you get, there are a ton of different functions at your disposal.

This could be confusing. But, once you have found your hosting package and the tools at your disposal, it becomes easier to find your way.

Hosting.com says more than 790 people work behind the scenes, with in-house support teams on several continents. In my opinion, its offer is a good balance between speed, reliability, competitive intro pricing and quality support, as long as you plan for the renewal prices.

No matter where you are on the scale of hosting needs, Hosting.com has a solution for you, from a single shared site to a bare metal server. I recommend it mainly to site owners whose visitors are in North America, Europe, India, Southeast Asia or Australia, close to its six data center locations.

If you are a developer or system administrator who is comfortable with server management, you will find that Hosting.com offers excellent solutions, especially when you consider the number of features that come with a typical plan.