High Performance Web Hosting

Why Choose A2 Hosting For Shared Web Hosting?

The Fastest Shared Hosting In The Industry

At A2 Hosting, our motto is "Our Speed. Your Success." Those aren't just merely words but actually something we strive for each and everyday. We really want you to succeed!

Your visitor satisfaction rate, bounce rate and most importantly your conversion rate are all directly impacted by your page load speed. Each extra millisecond of page load time can negatively impact each of these crucial metrics. There are a number of ways that you can ensure that your site loads quickly. That includes making sure that your software is up to date, using caching solutions and remove any unused plugins. However, one of the most critical factors for determining your page load speed is your host. A2 Hosting uses the best hardware, software and optimizations to ensure you get the fastest page loads speeds possible.

Do you have any web hosting questions? You're in luck! Our amazing 24/7/365 support team fittingly named the Guru Crew is here to help. Just contact them via live chat, email or give us a call! 

Get started now! You make amazing projects and need a Shared Hosting provider who can keep up. Trust us. We've been doing this since 2003. You're going to absolutely love our service! We're so confident of that fact, we offer an Anytime Money Back Guarantee allowing you to try us completely risk free. What are you waiting for? Give your site and business the boosts they deserve!

Why Will Your Site Be Faster At A2 Hosting?

We strive to be different than those other Shared Hosting providers. We're not some generic service. As you know, our goal each and every day is to be the fastest web hosting provider and offer tools that other hosts are simply unable to offer you. Below are just some of the speed enhanced features available on our SwiftServers, our exclusive speed-enhanced hosting platform. Every A2 Hosting customer, including you, is hosted on our SwiftServer platform! While we won't give away the entire recipe for our special speed sauce, here are a few ingredients that ensure blazing fast performance. 

• Turbo Server Option - If you really want to give your site an advantage of your competitors, you'll definitely want to consider hosting your sites on our Turbo Servers. Why? They feature up to 20X faster page loads compared to competing web hosting services. Now that's really fast! Just a few of the features that make our Turbo Servers perform so well are that they use a speed enhanced, drop-in Apache alternative, have less users on each Turbo server and every Turbo user has more resources allocated to their account. Our Turbo Servers also includes our exclusive A2 Optimized tool that makes caching a breeze. You can read more about this tool below.
  • A2 Optimized Tool - Not only do we allow caching for Memcached, OPcache and Turbo Cache on our Shared accounts so you get the fastest page load speeds, our exclusive A2 Optimized tool lets you setup these solutions with just 1-click so you get the easiest experience as well! Those other hosts either don't allow these caching solutions on their shared servers or they're simply unable to. Not A2 Hosting! We actually give you this tool to help you set up the caching for your sites! How do these caching solutions make your site load faster? By storing key components of your website in memory for faster retrieval each time your site is accessed by one of your website visitors. This prevents every piece of your website from having to load for each of your visitors. Your site is instead more readily available because key pieces of your website (broken down below) can load faster:
    • Memcached - Boosts the speed of your databases by keeping the most important pieces of your MySQL databases in memory for faster access when visiting your site.
    • Turbo Cache - Makes it possible to load all the HTML content of your site without even having to run PHP!
    • OPcache - Offers up to 50% faster PHP response times! 
• Solid State Drives (SSDs) - Did you know that A2 Hosting was one of the first hosts to offer solid state drives? SSDs are included for free in our SwiftServer platform and feature up to 300% faster page loads compared to traditional hosting! Unlike those traditional hard disk drives that use spinning disks to access a data (think of a record player/turntable), Solid State Drives use flash technology to access its data. Flash technology is more compact, lighter and most importantly provides faster performance for your website.
• Choice Of Data Center Locations - While A2 Hosting is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States, we know that your visitors may not be. You want to host your website as close to your visitors as possible to reduce latency. That's why we offer data center options located around the globe! You can choose the one closest to your visitors. That means you get all the A2 Hosting speed features with the added benefit of reduced latency.
• Free Content Delivery Network - While you can choose your data center location at A2 Hosting so your site is hosted as close as possible to the majority of your website visitors, you still want cater to the rest of your visitors if they don't live so close! That way ALL of your visitors can experience how fast your site loads. That's why we've also included a free content delivery network (CDN) with your account. Our CDN automatically routes your traffic through its smart global network to automatically optimize the delivery of your site. How does it work? The CDN offers a large number of worldwide data centers. It is able to access the fastest, most efficient route from these data centers back to your web server than would otherwise be available to your visitors.
• Anycast DNS - When typing in a domain name, traditional DNS works by translating that domain name into the IP address where that website can be found. The computer is connected with the web host and the web site can be viewed once this IP address is located. The DNS record is located on a DNS server found in one location. For example, if you're located in the United Kingdom, but your visitor is located in the United States, it can take some time for that DNS server and your visitor's computer to communicate with each other. This can slow down how fast a web page loads. A2 Hosting uses Anycast DNS because that resolves this issue. Instead of just one DNS location, Anycast DNS copies your DNS record on our network of global servers. This means that your DNS record is much closer to your visitors and Anycast can direct visitors to a DNS server located more closely to them. In short, Anycast DNS is another A2 Hosting solution that can help your site load even faster for your visitors.

What Else Makes A2 Hosting Better?

Yes, server speed is a crucial reason why we're the best choice for your web hosting needs. We could go on and on about what makes us faster and why have a fast loading website is so important. We probably already have gone overboard as it is. However, there are other key features that really set us apart from competing hosts and are reasons why our customers love our service. Yes, they appreciate our fast speeds, but if you get to read our A2 Hosting Reviews, you'll also notice that our Guru Crew Support team is especially popular with our customers. Here are additional reasons why we're the best host around and why we'll be the last web hosting provider you'll ever need:

Ultimate Reliability

Right alongside awesome support and blazing fast server speeds, we understand that you're also looking for a web host that you can depend on. At A2 Hosting, we understand that there's nothing more frustrating than server downtime. When your website is down, it means that your visitors can't read your content and most importantly they can't purchase from your site. It's a total loss of opportunity as well as a waste of your time and hard work. We understand! That's why we hand pick our engineers and use the best hardware, networks, data centers, software and techniques to ensure our servers run at optimal performance. At the end of the day we want you to sleep easy knowing you made the right decision choosing A2 Hosting for all of your web hosting needs and that your business is in trusty hands. That's why each of our accounts include our 99.9% Uptime Commitment.

Easy Shared Web Hosting Account Management

Are you planning on hosting your first site with A2 Hosting? How exciting! Do you know what's even more exciting? How easy it will be to manage your hosting account, whether this is your first site or your 100th! That's because each of our Linux Shared Hosting accounts includes the user-friendly cPanel control panel. Your account comes pre-installed with this award winning control panel. Use cPanel is loaded features to make your life easier including:

• File management
• Database administration - Easily manage your MySQL databases with phpMyAdmin
• Domain administration - Create and edit subdomains as well as manage your account's addon domains
• Email - Add email accounts, setup fowarders, manage your email lists and more
• Statistics - Includes Awstats, Webalizer and more

Server Support For The Best Software

One of the tools that wasn't listed above in the cPanel features was Softaculous. Use Softaculous to install the web's most popular software to your account with 1-click. That means you don't have to fumble around with downloading and uploading install files or hire a developer to help you get the software you want. All you have to do is log into cPanel and click the Softaculous icon. From there you'll see categories of solutions ranging from blogs, content management systems, forums, wikis and so much more. You can also use the Softaculous search feature to find the software you want to us. This includes some of the web's most used solutions including WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.

You'll even receive an email from Softaculous informing you when new versions of the software you've installed are available. You can log right into your cPanel account and update your software with a click of your mouse within the Softaculous interface. This will ensure that you have the most up to date features helping keep your site both secure and performing well.

Developer Friendly Web Hosting

Are you an experienced developer? You'll be happy to hear that we actually made a name for ourselves for being the "developer-friendly" host. In fact, we were one of the very first hosts to offer both PHP 5. Of course, technology (and PHP versions) have changed a lot since we started back in 2003, our commitment to loading your account with all the web development tools you could want has not! You get everything from support for the best versions of PHP, MySQL, Apache, Python and more to resources like free SSH access, version control software like Git and so much more.

Shared Hosting Plan Options

You may have noticed that in addition to the Linux Hosting offered on this page, that we also offer Windows Shared Hosting. Which operating system should you choose? Please note that it doesn't matter if you have a Mac, Linux or Windows based computer. You can choose either of our Windows or Linux Hosting regardless of your computer's operating system. What you should probably pay more attention to is the type of software you want to host instead. Do you require server support for solutions like Apache, PHP or MySQL? Your best choice would likely be choosing our Linux Shared Hosting. If on the other hand you need server support for software like ASP, MSSQL and .NET, you'll want to choose our Windows Shared Hosting.

You may not be sure which plan to get started with. The good news is that our plans are completely scalable. That means that as your website grows, so can your hosting plan. Our team can help seamlessly move your sites and account into a higher resource Shared Hosting plan if you outgrow your existing plan. And if you happen to outgrow your Shared Hosting package, we'll even help move you into one of our VPS Hosting or Dedicated Server solutions. The good news is that you can stick with A2 Hosting for the entire live cycle of your website. We're excited to grow with you!

What is Shared Web Hosting?

But First, What Is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is the service that helps you get your website online so you have an online presence. The web hosting service is actually what is needed to store the content found on your website. It's the place where all of your images, databases, videos and other pieces of your website are stored. While you will also need a domain name for your website, please note that domain name registration and web hosting are actually two different services. The good news is that you can actually register your name with A2 Hosting as well as host your website for ultimate convenience!

Think of the relationship between web hosting and a domain name similar to building a new home. A domain name is actually how your visitors will find you. Just as your new home needs an address so people can find you, so does your website. And just as you need a plot of land to build your house on, you need a web hosting service to put your website on.

So What Is Shared Hosting?

Shared hosting, also sometimes referred to as virtual hosting, is a web hosting environment where each individual hosting account is stored on a single web server. Think of a web server as a very powerful computer loaded with resources. Each of the accounts on the server share the same system resources whether it is disk space, data transfer or server processing power.

Shared Hosting offers you an affordable way to get your web site up and running because all the related server hosting costs are shared and spread out among the other users/accounts who are being hosting on that server.

Is A Shared Web Hosting Account Right For Me?

Shared hosting is a perfect platform if you have modest website needs. In particular, this means if you are just starting a website, have a small business website or just run a website as a hobby with minimal resource needs. Shared web hosting is also a popular option if you run a simple blog or forum. In short, shared Hosting is ideal if you have small websites or are just getting started because it is a good learning environment to get your “ feet wet” with a minimal investment.

Shared Hosting is also a popular option for users who don't get know what sort of resources they'll need. You'll be happy to read that A2 Hosting customers never pay account upgrade fees. That means you can upgrade to a larger shared hosting account or even move into a VPS or a dedicated server if you discover more server resources are needed than what is found with your shared hosting account. Of course our 24/7/365 Guru Crew Support Team is standing by in case you have any questions pertaining to which web hosting plan you should choose.

Advantages of Shared Web Hosting

At A2 Hosting, the advantages of our shared web hosting packages are obviously speed. However, the other pros of these plans include affordability and convenience. Our shared web hosting environment means we can offer reasonably priced hosting plans because our customers are not only sharing server resources, but they are also spreading the cost of hardware, server maintenance, security updates and other factors among all customers on the server. As an A2 Hosting shared server hosting customer, you also do not have to worry about server uptime and technical support because that's our job. Our shared web hosting packages come with an abundant amount of resources like disk space, data transfer and email accounts that are perfect for your personal and small business websites.  These are just a few of the reasons why we offer the best web hosting for small businesses and general users.

Possible Disadvantage of Shared Hosting

Please note that each account on a shared server does not feature root access. Users looking for administrative level access to their server should certainly consider our VPS Hosting or Dedicated Server plans. Additionally, customers who have eCommerce sites or existing websites that receive a large number of visitors each month may want to consider VPS Hosting as well. Otherwise, you'll discover that A2 Hosting's shared hosting is an excellent solution for your website.