hosting.com (formerly A2 Hosting) Review: Pros & Cons in 2025

hosting.com at a Glance

hosting.com Pros, Cons, and Things That Could Be Better

I like to compare hosting providers to ice cream flavors. There are those who like to keep things simple with just plain vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry. But then there are others who prefer their ice cream with all the flavors in the world. Triple chocolate fudge cookie, bourbon vanilla bean truffle, and honey salted caramel almond all have their raving fans.

Ice cream makers keep inventing new ways to serve up flavorful combinations – and I think the same can be said about hosting providers. They add features, they innovate, they improve. 

But that really isn’t the case with hosting.com (formerly A2 Hosting). It’s still mostly A2 Hosting — it’s just been rebranded to reflect its sale in January 2025. In fact, I found some old A2 Hosting branding still in place during my tests and marketing features unique to A2 Hosting are still largely kept intact.

Hosting.com offers shared hosting, managed and unmanaged hosting for WordPress, cPanel hosting, managed and unmanaged VPS, dedicated servers, and reseller hosting. It’s a good choice for small businesses and individuals, but I can’t recommend it if you’re brand new to hosting. Its proprietary control panel might make it easier to use, but that’s really going to depend on your experience with other dashboards.

My testing shows hosting.com is neither a honey salted caramel almond nor is it a scoop of plain vanilla. It has its positives, but it proved to be rather average overall. In the world of ice cream, hosting.com is, well, simply vanilla with some sprinkles on top. Read on to see if you’d agree.

Decent Features That Might Look Familiar

If you thought hosting.com would be the new and improved version of A2 hosting, I have bad news: it’s not. And in at least one case, hosting.com managed to mismanage what was good about A2 Hosting. Without these A2 Hosting features, hosting.com’s offering is plain vanilla – both figuratively and when it comes to ice cream flavors.

Optimized Plugin

When I first started building WordPress sites, I had no idea how to make them load faster or what settings I could tweak to improve performance without “breaking” something. That’s where hosting.com’s Optimized plugin comes in. It’s an A2 Hosting holdover and one of those features still wearing A2 Hosting branding. The Optimized plugin automatically fine tunes WordPress settings and then makes suggestions on how you can continue to improve performance. 

It’s really nice not having to worry about caching, image compression, or forgetting to change the username from the default “admin.” It’s also very helpful that the Optimized plugin keeps the rest of your plugins updated and running smoothly.

What’s not so nice is that I could never get many of the plugin’s features to work. I kept getting an error message that amounted to “You’re not using an A2 Hosting server, so we can’t give you any results.” It wouldn’t give any info on loading speeds, site performance, or stability. Maybe hosting.com has forgotten to turn it on? I remember using it with A2 Hosting and it was a nice feature to have.

Custom Control Panel

Hosting.com claims that its custom control panel is there “to optimize and streamline site management.” It’s supposed to be an option, but according to support and my experience, it’s actually pre-installed. I might be too familiar with cPanel to make an accurate comparison, but I didn’t find it that much easier to use. Mind you, it’s not difficult to use… though it’s definitely not the most beginner-friendly panel I’ve encountered.

It looks a lot like WordPress’s dashboard, all dressed in black. You have the options menu on the left and your menu selection appears in the main panel. To actually work on your WordPress site, you still have to access your dashboard through your WordPress login. In that respect, hosting.com’s custom control panel isn’t any different from cPanel.

You need two warnings concerning the custom control panel. The first is that it opens in its own browser window. My pop-up blocker was doing its job, so for a moment I thought something was broken. The second is that if you don’t like it, you may not be able to keep your site in the transition to cPanel. According to support, it’s possible you’ll lose your WordPress site if you replace the custom control panel with cPanel.

Performance Plus Surge Protection

Due to issues using the hosting.com website, I had to contact support to understand what this feature is, how it works, and why it’s important enough to note. Performance Plus is hosting.com’s way of saying that it uses servers with load balancing technology to handle high traffic spikes. 

Hosting.com is using completely cloud-based servers now, and this newer infrastructure helps maintain steady site performance regardless of how many visitors are clamoring at the door. I can see this feature being really useful for sites that run into occasional traffic spikes, such as online stores or blogs running giveaways.

Support was kind enough to clear up the confusion the hosting.com website created and explained that the feature is available on all its plans, not just for WordPress. So even if you decide to go the shared hosting route, you can take advantage of Performance Plus. 

Turbo Servers

The use of “turbo” language by hosting.com is another A2 Hosting holdover. With A2 Hosting, it simply referred to servers with LiteSpeed and other performance-enhancing technology. Here, I suppose it refers to hosting.com’s cloud-based servers with LiteSpeed. In any case, “turbo” power should dramatically increase your site’s loading speed and performance scores.

I’ll get into the details of my performance tests in a bit, but let me say that I’ve received better results from other hosts who didn’t tout “turbo” anything. Still, hosting.com did perform decently, so we’ll give these “turbos” a boost. (Bad puns come at no extra cost to the reader.)

hosting.com Features at a Glance

My Hosting Experience With hosting.com

Like its features, hosting.com’s signup process is neither awful nor outstanding. There are certainly things to watch out for, like unclear claims and misleading plan features on its website. But once you complete the signup process, it’s mostly smooth sailing from there on out.

Creating a New Account With hosting.com

Before I get into the details of becoming a new hosting.com customer, I need to admit that I had some difficulty picking a plan to test. Save for VPS hosting, all plans have the same names. Starter, Plus, Pro, and Max follow you from one hosting type to another.

Other issues with hosting.com’s website make it less than user-friendly, too. There are feature descriptions that are incomplete and/or inaccurate. For instance, despite hosting.com advertising east and west coast US data centers, WordPress plans only use the Dallas location. And then there’s the content that’s technically true but misleading. This is why I can’t wholeheartedly recommend the host to beginners looking for transparent plans.

The Performance Plus blurb describes it as an option when it’s a standard feature. It also mentions a “Sell plan” that doesn’t exist. And while you can manage more than one site from your control panel via Multisite, each one requires its own separate hosting plan – that’s because WordPress plans limit you to one site per plan.

Once I waded through all the confusion the website caused, purchasing my hosting plan was actually fairly simple. If you don’t have a domain name, there’s a handy domain checking tool in the checkout process that searches for your desired domain and suggests other options if it isn’t available. You have to buy a year or more of hosting to get your free domain, by the way.

You can choose from one of four payment terms: monthly, annually, biennially, and triennially. For WordPress plans, you’ll only have four data center choices. Dallas is the only option available in the US, while London, Frankfurt, and Singapore are your other choices. Payment options are typical: PayPal, credit or debit card, or bank transfer.

Connecting a Domain and Installing WordPress

WordPress comes preinstalled on all WordPress plans, whether managed or, like mine, unmanaged. That’s one thing that hosting.com got right, as installing WordPress can be a real pain. Not having to do it saved me time, effort, and peace of mind.

Another thing hosting.com gets right is making essential information readily available. Your DNS information is one of the first things you see when you open your dashboard for the first time. All I had to do was go to my domain registrar, copy and paste the info required, and wait for the domain to be connected. This took a lot longer than I’ve experienced with other hosting providers by the way, but I have no way of telling if it was hosting.com or my registrar at fault.

Once my domain went live, I had my site up and running in a matter of minutes. In fact, it took more time to complete the testing required for our review process than it did to point my nameservers and access WordPress from my control panel.

Other Ease of Use Features

One-Click Staging Environments

I have an uncanny knack for “breaking” websites. If you can stop a plugin from working properly or accidentally mess up one of your theme’s functions, chances are I’ve done it at some point. That’s why I really like hosting.com’s staging and cloning capabilities. On my Plus plan, I had five staging websites available. I didn’t require this feature during testing, but it was nice to know that it was an option.

Security Features

Hosting.com offers strong security measures for shared plans, such as DDoS protection and brute force defense. These features aren’t always free – some hosts will make you pay for this level of security as a monthly add-on. The pre-installed SSL was another thing that made site setup easier and quicker as I didn’t have to configure anything on my own.

Pre-Installed Plugins

My site came with 11 plugins already installed, including the (non-functioning) Optimized plugin. Some of the notable ones were the free version of Jetpack, AIOSEO, WP Forms, and Monster Insights. I’m not sure if I’d actually need to use all these plugins, but if you want a no-hassle way to have the most popular and essential plugins for your WordPress site right away or aren’t sure where to start, this can be useful.

Speaking of plugins… one way that the website is misleading is the mention of “automatic backups.” You only receive automatic data backups with the managed WordPress plans. In addition to this, you can’t manually back up your site from the custom control panel. Support suggested a third-party plugin I could use for site backups instead.

I Had High Expectations That hosting.com Did Not Meet

A2 Hosting was a solidly performing budget hosting provider. In our tests, it had loading speeds ranging from 0.5 seconds to 1.1 seconds and its reliability score was always 100%. In my ice cream analogy, A2 Hosting was a pint of Hȁagen-Dazs or an I Caruso gelato.

I expected hosting.com to perform at least as well. Unfortunately, hosting.com didn’t manage to do that. Some things to keep in mind before I get into the results – I hosted my WordPress Plus plan on hosting.com’s Dallas, TX data center. And I didn’t integrate Cloudflare CDN, even though I could’ve easily done so through the control panel.

I set up a working WordPress site, complete with a Divi theme, text, and images – this is to make sure we’re realistically testing a real-word site. If you’d like to learn more about how we conduct our website tests, check out this article.

GTmetrix Performance Tests

Since my server was in Dallas, TX, I decided the best option for a monitoring center would be GTmetrix’s Chicago, IL location. My site scored an A overall but the performance and structure scores were lower than what A2 Hosting had registered for the same site (100% for performance, 97% for structure). Because I’ve used the same website for testing, a slow server response would likely explain the drop in score.

After reviewing the site’s performance during the first week, it looked like the weekend and Monday had the slowest response times. Recent research on online traffic shows that Monday is one of the busiest days for shoppers. If my site had actually been a functioning e-commerce store, think of the sales I might have lost due to my site slowing down during peak hours.

GTmetrix Global Speeds

When it comes to performance around the world, hosting.com’s results were… adequate. Loading speeds were great in the US and parts of Europe. Two locations where A2 Hosting struggled were Singapore and Australia – so it’s not surprising that hosting.com can’t manage great speeds here either. It recorded speeds of one full second more for Singapore and 1.5 seconds more for Australia.

UptimeRobot

My site’s test results from UptimeRobot were the one bright spot in my tests. I had no downtime during the entire 3+ weeks of monitoring. This is one area where hosting.com didn’t disappoint.

Support Is Responsive but Not Always Helpful

Experience has taught me that support is the one area that’s prone to suffer whenever there’s a big change at a hosting provider. I went in expecting vanilla with sprinkles at best, and that’s pretty much what I got.

Hosting.com provides pre-sale support via telephone, live chat, and a knowledge base. Once you become a customer, you can also use a support ticket system. As a “global” host, I wasn’t too thrilled to learn that support is currently only in English.

I had a mixed experience with live chat and phone support. The live chat agent was more confused than I was, while the phone agent was more proficient, if a bit slower (as a side note, the phone recording scripts still call hosting.com “A2 Hosting” – this mistake occurred twice during my testing).

I first contacted live chat to see if I could get some clarification on the Performance Plus feature. The agent was online quickly but didn’t seem to understand my question.

I finally posted a screenshot from the hosting.com website and specifically pointed to what it said about the feature, along with the mention of a “Sell” plan. That’s when the agent informed me that this information was an error and would be rectified. As of the time of writing, it’s still there.

I then tried a telephone call to get advice on backup plugins. The entire call lasted 8 minutes, although I was on hold for 3 of them while the agent reviewed my site setup and looked up the best plugin for me to use. Their suggestion happened to be one of the top-rated free backup plugins. I was pretty pleased with that. They did promise to send an email with further recommendations, but that never materialized.

All in all, I’d have to give hosting.com’s support team a decent – but not phenomenal – score. There are other budget hosts out there rocking the whole support thing. hosting.com has a long way to go before it can even come close.

Great Upfront Discounts, but Beware the Renewal Fees

My site ran on the unmanaged WordPress Plus plan. This plan has more than enough RAM, storage, and bandwidth for the average small business with a decent amount of traffic.

But if I were to recommend a package to you, dear reader, I’d go with one of the cheaper shared hosting plans for several reasons. The first is that the plans basically provide the same resources. The entry-level unmanaged WordPress plans offer slightly more RAM than their shared hosting counterparts, but all else pretty much remains equal.

The second reason is that shared hosting plans allow more than one website. The last is that cPanel with Softaculous would still provide a straightforward one-click WordPress installation, as well as site backups without the need for an extra plugin. Keep in mind that all shared and WordPress plans come with a 30-day money back guarantee, so if you aren’t a fan of a specific plan, you can back out and get a full refund.

If you’re looking for an e-commerce solution, I’d recommend hosting.com’s managed WordPress plans or a VPS hosting plan. The automatic backups offered with managed WordPress plans would be worth the extra fees alone. If you’re new to VPS, hosting.com offers managed plans that are bundled with cPanel.

There’s a big upside to hosting.com’s pricing and that’s the incredible initial discounts. The shared hosting plans cost the equivalent of pennies per day (especially if you commit long term), and the unmanaged WordPress plans aren’t far behind. The end of that initial term, however, brings a major surprise. Hosting.com’s price upon renewal can be nearly three times the cost of your first term.