Hosting.com (formerly A2 Hosting) Review: Plans, Prices & Specs

A2 Hosting is now Hosting.com

A2 Hosting no longer exists as a separate brand. On April 28, 2025 the company published an announcement titled “A new chapter begins: A2 Hosting evolves into hosting.com”, and a2hosting.com now redirects to hosting.com. The parent group is World Host Group, which acquired A2 Hosting and adopted the hosting.com name for the combined business; its about page calls hosting.com “the best of World Host Group and A2 Hosting under one global brand”. Shop for A2 Hosting today and what you buy is a hosting.com plan.

The change was not cosmetic. Existing A2 customers kept their accounts and their support team, but the plan lineup was rebuilt. A2’s Startup, Drive, Turbo Boost and Turbo Max tiers were mapped onto Starter, Plus, Pro and Max, and the company publishes that mapping itself. A2’s “unlimited” storage promise was replaced with published, capped allowances, and the three-year commitment needed for headline pricing was dropped. A2’s legacy data centers (Michigan, Arizona, Amsterdam and Singapore) still appear in knowledge base articles for older accounts, but new orders go onto the hosting.com platform. The current shared lineup is Starter, Pro and Max, so the “Plus” tier appears to have been folded away.

Who it is for

• Small businesses and freelancers who want cPanel, email and a free first-year domain without managing a server.
• Agencies running WordPress who want Cloudflare Enterprise, staging and WP Rocket bundled in.
• Resellers, who get Enhance-based accounts at 30 to 120 accounts per plan.
• Teams outgrowing shared hosting who want a managed cPanel server on the same platform.

It is a weaker fit for developers hunting cheap raw compute: self-managed VPS plans list at $19/mo for 4 GB of RAM, well above what pure cloud providers charge.

Pricing and renewals

This is the part that needs care. Every shared and WordPress price advertised is an introductory rate tied to a prepaid term, and the renewal is the monthly list price. Starter is $1.99/mo on a four-year term and renews at $9.99/mo; on a one-year term it is $2.99/mo with the same renewal. Pro is $3.79/mo on four years and renews at $19.99/mo. Max is $7.79/mo on four years and renews at $27.99/mo. That is a five-fold jump on Starter, so budget for the second term rather than the first.

Managed WordPress follows the same pattern on three-year terms: Small at $3.49/mo renewing at $9.99, Medium at $3.99/mo renewing at $17.99, Advanced at $9.49/mo renewing at $25.99 and Turbo at $13.49/mo renewing at $34.99. Self-managed Linux VPS plans discount on three-year terms too, from $6.49/mo for 4 GB (regular $19/mo) up to $36.99/mo for 32 GB (regular $99/mo). Dedicated servers are the honest exception: DS1 is $199/mo monthly or $189/mo on an annual term, with no promotional rate and no renewal surprise.

Features

Every shared plan includes LiteSpeed with LiteSpeed Cache, NVMe on AMD EPYC hardware, a web application firewall, Monarx malware scanning, daily backups with 30-day restore, free AutoSSL, a free first-year domain, mailboxes and cPanel. Published resource limits are a real improvement over the old “unlimited” marketing: Starter gets 2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 1,024 IOPS and 15 GB, Pro 4 vCPU, 4 GB RAM and 50 GB, Max 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM and 100 GB. The developer stack covers PHP to 8.5, Node.js, Python, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, SSH, Git, WP-CLI and cron. Unmanaged VPS plans offer root access with Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12 or AlmaLinux 9 and optional cPanel.

Data centers

The company advertises ten global locations. Its VPS documentation lists London, New York, a US West site, Canada, Singapore, Sydney, Mexico, Europe, Dubai and Mumbai; managed WordPress offers the United Kingdom, two US regions, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Singapore, India, Australia and the UAE. Dedicated servers ship from Dallas by default, with other sites on request. Hardware sits mostly in Equinix facilities, with AMD EPYC CPUs, Samsung NVMe, hardware RAID, redundant uplinks and Anycast DNS.

Performance and reliability

The published commitment is a 99.9% uptime SLA with a service credit of 5% of the monthly fee per hour of confirmed downtime, capped at the month’s fee. The comparison table quotes 99.95% for shared plans and managed servers and the WordPress pages quote 99.99%, so the promise depends on the product. LiteSpeed, NVMe and a CDN in front of most requests are a sound recipe for fast loads, although long-run uptime data for the rebuilt platform is still thin.

Support and money-back

Support runs 24/7/365 with live chat, a US phone number, email and tickets, staffed in-house across offices in Bali, Sofia, Manila and Bangalore, with an AI assistant called Orbi answering first. The company publishes a two-minute average first response and CSAT above 85%. The money-back guarantee is 30 days and covers shared hosting, managed WordPress, email and reseller plans only. A2’s old “anytime” guarantee is gone: VPS, dedicated servers, domains and third-party licences are excluded.

Verdict

Hosting.com is a more transparent product than late-era A2 Hosting: published resource limits, LiteSpeed and NVMe on every tier, shorter terms and a phone line that is still answered. The costs are steep renewals, uncompetitive VPS pricing and a narrower refund policy than the brand used to advertise. If you want managed cPanel hosting with real humans behind it and you plan for the renewal, it is a solid pick. If you are chasing the lowest cost per gigabyte of RAM, look elsewhere.