Choosing between different hosting providers is not an easy task and thus to help you with it, this post discusses two famous hosting providers, SiteGround vs A2 Hosting. Beginning with knowing a little about the providers, features and differences in pricing plans.

Starting Price	$6.99/mo.	$2.99/mo.
Server Locations	3	3
Free Domain	No	No
	Get 53% Off Now	Get 66% Off Now

SiteGround vs A2 Hosting – Overview

Established in 2004 in Sofia Bulgaria, SiteGround is a web hosting provider company. It was founded by Ivo Tzenov. The company is registered in four different countries, USA, UK, Bulgaria and Spain and has datacenter locations all around the world.

Hosted Applications offered by SiteGround include:

[features]

• WordPress Hosting
• WooCommerce Hosting
• Joomla Hosting
• Magento Hosting
• Drupal Hosting
• PrestaShop Hosting

[/features]

As of now, Siteground hosts more than 1.8 million domains worldwide. The company uses SSD to store data and has developed software solutions for account isolation, monitoring and reaction, and speed optimization. This software is sold under the 1H brand used by other Linux hosting companies.

Established in 2001 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, by its current CEO Bryan Muthug, A2 Hosting is an independently owned web hosting provider. Back in 2004, A2 Hosting was amongst the first few web hosting companies that supported PHP 5. The company has data centers in the US (their primary database center is located in Michigan and has another data center in Arizona), Europe (Amsterdam, Netherlands) and in Asia (Singapore), their data center locations makes them serviceable in various locations.

The company offers five different types of hosting options for the user to choose from:

[features]

• Shared Hosting
• Reseller Hosting
• VPS Hosting
• Dedicated Hosting
• Managed WordPress Hosting

[/features]

A2 Hosting is one of those few web hosting providers which is not owned by the EIG (Endurance International Group). The EIG group, which itself is also a web hosting provider, has control over some 60 web hosting brands which include HostGator, Bluehost, iPage and many more.

Siteground vs A2 Hosting : Features

Both Siteground and A2 Hosting are very reputed hosting companies in the industry. Both come up with amazing features that beat each other. So let’s go through each of them one by one.

Siteground vs A2 Hosting : Loading Speed

Slow loading websites are a thing of the past and the ones that are still loading slow will gradually become history because of dwindling visitors.

SiteGround provides you with industry leading speed technologies such as NGINX, HTTP/2, PHP7 and free CDN. A2 Hosting, on the other hand, provides you with turbo servers that will help you with a drop-in Apache replacement allowing you to speed up your site performance by 20 times.

Winner : A2 Hosting

Siteground vs A2 Hosting : Storage

Both A2 Hosting and Siteground store their data on full SSD servers which run faster than the traditional hard disks. SSD servers are faster than the traditional hard disks; this helps in improving the speed of your website loading and also helps in handling more traffic.

However, SiteGround also takes back up daily, so in case you forget or are just lazy, SiteGround is doing the work for you, so you don’t have to worry. A2 hosting providers also provide daily backup services, but for a charge, whereas SiteGround provides you the daily backup facility for free. So your data is safe and all backed up, daily and for free.

In addition to regular backups, SiteGround also offers you free Cloudflare. SiteGround has four data centres across the globe, in the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, and the Netherlands. Based on your location and the location of your target audience, you can choose which data centre you want your website to be associated with. SiteGround has partnered with Cloudflare and provides free CDN (Content Delivery Network) to their customers; this is where the different locations of the data centers come in handy and useful.

Winner : Siteground

Siteground vs A2 Hosting : User Friendliness

Irrespective of whether you opt for Managed WordPress Hosting or not, you get the option of getting a blank server or pre-installed WordPress server, while you get a hosting plan with A2 hosting. While installing WordPress isn’t entirely a huge task, it has its nooks and it definitely is an advantage when WordPress comes pre-installed and you don’t have to knock your head in installing the plugins.

While A2 Hosting has the panel pre-installed, SiteGround offers you a One-Click WordPress installation. Also, if you face any issues regarding installation, the SiteGround support team will take care of the whole installation.

Winner : It’s a Tie

Siteground vs A2 Hosting : SSL Certificate

Both A2 hosting and Siteground will provide you with free SSL certificates. The free SSL certificate should be enough points for the security aspect for web hosting provider, however, there is more.

SiteGround believes that security of customer data is very important. The company uses malware detection technology to protect your website from hackers and works relentlessly to make sure your website is safe.

A2 hosting, on the other hand, provides a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt.

Winner : Siteground

Siteground vs A2 Hosting: 30 day Money Back Guarantee

A2 hosting provides you with a 30 day money back guarantee.

While both SiteGround and A2 provide a free week trial, A2 goes a step further and provides you with a 30 day money back guarantee and also a pro rata based money back guarantee in case you are not satisfied with the services later than 30 days as well. However, SiteGround only provides a 30 day money back guarantee.

Winner : A2 Hosting

Siteground vs A2 Hosting: Customer Support

SiteGround provides 24*7 round the clock customer support. The response is always fast, helpful and effective. There are three kinds of support provided and you can choose one on the basis of your comfort, ticket support, SiteGround chat support, and phone call support. You need relentless and reliable support and this company provides exactly that. 

While A2 provides decent customer support as well, SiteGround surely beats A2 in terms of customer service.

Winner : Siteground

Siteground vs A2 Hosting : Pricing Plans

Both hosting providers offer you three different types based on your needs to choose from. While the features offered are more or less the same, the numbers differ. The differences can be looked into as below:

Hostings	Shared	WordPress	Reseller	VPS	Dedicated
SiteGround	$6.99 /mo.	$6.99 /mo.	$14.99 /mo.	–	$240.00 /mo.
A2 Hosting	$2.99 /mo.	$2.99 /mo.	$13.19 /mo.	$25 /mo.	$99.59 /mo.

Siteground vs A2 Hosting Shared Plan

Startup Plan :

As the name suggests, this plan is the company’s basic plan offering and is thus the cheapest.

This is ideal for people who are just starting with their websites, new bloggers and even new startups with website traffic under 10,000.

Features	A2 Hosting	SiteGround
Plan Name	Startup	Startup
Websites	1	1
Space	Unlimited	10 GB
Bandwidth	Unlimited	Unlimited
Price	$2.99 /mo.	$6.99 /mo.

If you are new customer, you can get the trial plan at $3.95 per month, however if you subscribe for the first time for longer time durations, say 12, 24 or 36 months, you get an overall discount, thus reducing the per month cost of your web hosting.

Middle Plan :

It is for websites that have been around for some time and are seeing an increase in traffic and also for website owners who want to host multiple websites. The offerings under this plan are as follows:

Features	A2 Hosting	SiteGround
Plan Name	Swift	GrowBig
Websites	Unlimited	Unlimited
Space	Unlimited	20 GB
Bandwidth	Unlimited	Unlimited
Price	$4.99 /mo.	$9.99 /mo.

Premium Plan :

This is a premium plan which offers multiple features in addition to the above plans. This plan is ideal for websites which have high visitor traffic, are e-commerce websites or are websites which have heavy data load and page load times is a critical factor. The additional offerings under this plan are as follows:

Features	A2 Hosting	SiteGround
Plan Name	Turbo Boost	GoGeek
Websites	Unlimited	Unlimited
Space	Unlimited	30 GB
Bandwidth	Unlimited	Unlimited
Price	$9.99 /mo.	$14.99 /mo.

Websites which expect heavy traffic need to have a host of plans which can handle the traffic. You don’t want your website crashing because of heavy traffic, this will just nullify your whole hard work of gaining more visitors. So depending on your need and traffic, you should decide the web hosting plan and not on the basis of the cost.

Winner : A2 Hosting

Conclusion – Siteground vs A2 Hosting

While both companies have brilliant reviews and offer amazing features at great prices, there are some features offered by one and not by the other, all of which have been mentioned above. Selecting one of the two is a personal decision, based on your personal needs. I still recommend Siteground hosting to all as I’ve experienced both of them.