A2Hosting is considered one of the best shared hosting services. But in recent years, you might have seen the site speed getting slower. This makes you wonder, “Is A2 Hosting oversold?”.
Overselling is when there are more number of websites/accounts than a server can handle. When shared hosting is oversold, your website performs slower than it should.
Let’s see if A2 Hosting is overselling their services or not.
Is A2 hosting oversold?
Yes, all A2 Hosting servers for shared hosting are oversold.
There are multiple shared hosting accounts (control panels) sold on the same server. You can see the big difference in the loading time. A server that is as good as A2 should never take this much time to load.
The slow loading time results in lower search rankings.
But why do they do it? Well, this is their marketing tactic to lure into their “Turbo” plans which offer faster performance and are a lot more expensive as compared to others.
Risks and Drawbacks associated with Overselling
To begin with, the biggest issue with A2Hosting is the lower disk IO of only 4 MB/S. This alone makes the website a lot slower if you have a larger number of visitors.
You can check if your account keeps hitting the resource limit. In cPanel, the “Resource usage” option shows how you can check it.
When the resource limits are hit continuously, your website will slow down tremendously. So, the best option is to upgrade to a better hosting when the resource limit keeps hitting.
While upgrading, you need to make sure that you are upgrading to a more prominent hosting that is not overselling their services or using the resource limit settings from the 2000’s.
Unfortunately, the resource information is not publicly visible. So, hosts can easily fool their customers by overselling their services. A user got 2 answers from the A2 Hosting team when he was inquiring about the limits.
Another problem you might face is the tighter limits on server resources so they could oversell their services. By this, your website hits the limit even if it just has a few hundred visitors a day.
This makes the customer frustrated and they will upgrade to a VPS.
So, the important point to consider for answering the question “Is A2 Hosting oversold” is their tighter limits upon resource utilization of a server.
Is A2 Hosting fast?
All this makes you wonder, “Is A2 Hosting fast?” or you will have to fight with the resource limit reached error all the time? Let’s find out.
Server Speed technologies
Technology plays a very important role in hosting services. A2 Hosting uses the best hosting modern stack for their servers. To take a quick look at the specs, they use 12-core CPUs with at least 64 GB of RAM for shared hosting.
To add some more taste to it, they add their highly modernized software to add HTTP2 support and a lot more.
But all this becomes useless when there are thousands of websites lying on your server. Sometimes, even a small server with fewer accounts performs better.
A2 Hosting offers 2 types of plans. Some have the word “Turbo” in it. Without a doubt, their turbo plans perform as guaranteed.
You will see blazing-fast speed with turbo plans. They are capable of handling more traffic as promised. You might see that most performance features are only enabled for their turbo plans.
But, the question is what about the other plans? Why do customers have to suffer if they don’t have the budget to go with the turbo plans?
If you wish to go with Turbo plans, you have the green light here. However, be noted that at this price point, you can always stretch your budget a bit more and buy a VPS.
NVMe storage
NVMe storage offers better read/write speed. However, it’s of lesser use when the total IO is limited. Here, you will get only 4 MB/S which is not good for shared hosting given that all the other resources also exhaust quickly.
There is a small twist even to its NVMe EPYC processors. They are only for Turbo plans.
A low-resource website is fast even if it’s hosted on Raspberry Pi. But, the same site won’t perform even in 12 core servers if it’s overcrowded.
Conclusion
A2Hosting isn’t good enough for normal shared hosting plans. However, their Turbo plans are pretty good. So, you should try to find other hosting services for budget-shared hosting.
Is VPS the answer? Well, our last piece of advice would be to not get VPS from shared hosting providers. They are a bit overpriced as compared to others.
Also, there could be overselling issues even in the VPS. So, the speed is slower compared to others.
A good VPS would be to go with AlphaVPS just in case you’re planning to upgrade. It’s UK-based and offers cheap yet highly-performing servers at the price of shared hosting.
FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
What is the difference between server overselling and overloading?
Server overselling is when a web host (mostly intentionally) sells more amount of RAM, and bandwidth than they are capable of (based on estimates of average consumption by a user).
On the other hand, overloading is when the server uses more resources than it’s capable of, ultimately failing to handle user requests.
Is A2 hosting legit?
Yes, A2 Hosting is a completely legit web host. You can surely opt for the service without worrying about scamming.