Do you want to host your site with Siteground or A2 Hosting but don’t know which company to use? Here, we’ve compared the pricing, features, and support of A2 and SG.
Siteground is one of the three hosting companies WordPress.org recommends to its users. It hosts more than 2.5 million domains. It might be a great and famous company, but several better alternatives exist.
A2 is not recommended by WordPress or any other top blogging platforms but is an excellent alternative to SG. We have no idea how many people use A2, but according to the usage tracker tool BuiltWith, it is one of the top 10 hosts in many countries.
Here’s a detailed comparison of A2 and SG:
A2H has shared details about its plans in depth. None of the companies have done so. Siteground has shared basic but essential information about its hosting subscriptions. You might learn more about the company after using its services for a while.
Storage memory
Disk space is crucial when choosing a hosting company, as the website will save the files users upload on the storage disk. Although SG plans offer disk space in GBs, the free disk space will reduce as the site ages. Unfortunately, none of the shared plans of the company have unlimited storage memory. The company offers disk space between 10GB to 40GB to the users, and its alternative A2H provides a humongous 100GB to unlimited disk space to the users. When the available storage space on Sg is utilized fully, you have three options – find and get rid of unwanted files, switch to another SG server/subscription with higher storage memory, or switch to another hosting service provider.
Visitors capping
Many shared hosting companies have an unlimited bandwidth policy. Siteground, on the other hand, has set a limit on the number of visits a website can have. For the Startup plan, there’s a limit of a thousand visits; for GrowBig and GoGeek subscription, there’s a limit of 100k and 500k visits. Websites hosted on A2 shared servers can have unlimited visitors. In addition to disk space, the number of website visits is another significant difference between A2 and SG.
eCommerce support
As eCommerce sites can be complex, a user must host them on a server that can handle their complexity. Both companies offer shared servers enabled with caching. They also let users install WooCommerce with a few clicks of a button. Thus, SG and A2 are ideal for launching WooCommerce websites.
The security of an eCommerce site is important as users may buy products from your site. While making a payment, they will have to enter some personal details. Someone might steal the user’s data if the site is not SSL enabled. On sites using SSL, the outgoing traffic is always encrypted. Thus, it won’t be easy for the eavesdropper to steal the details submitted via website forms.
SSL is important not only for eCommerce sites. Every website should be using SSL. If a website doesn’t use it, browsers may show an error to visitors when they open your site in the browser’s tab. Siteground and A2H users can enable SSL for their sites with a few clicks of a button.
Performance
In A2H, a website’s performance is significantly different between hosting plans. According to the company, A2 Turo servers are 20 times faster than the Drive and Startup servers. Each Siteground shared server plan is enabled with Nginx caching, but the performance of the shared Startup servers is expected to be different than the GoGeek, and GroBig servers as the servers have faster PHP.
Turbo users can install the LiteSpeed Cache plugin to boost their site’s performance or enable these performance modules for their site – Gzip compression, CSS/JS merging, and configure A2 to add expiry headers to the static files. Siteground has launched an SG Optimizer plugin that does these three and many other tasks to make a website faster. This plugin was not built exclusively for its hosting service users. Anyone using WordPress can install it.
Plugin and theme management
A2H has built a custom dashboard for WordPress users through which the users can deactivate/activate plugins or themes or configure the site’s security settings. Siteground doesn’t offer such a feature yet.
Site migrations
If users cannot transfer websites to A2H by themselves, they can contact the Guru Crew Team of the company to get their site moved. A2 has a dedicated website migration team. Siteground users in the same situation will have to use the site migrator plugin. This plugin was built by the company’s engineers and is available in the WordPress repository.
Security
SG and A2H protect their customer’s websites with the WAF. A2 Hosting users get access to these security tools:
- HackScan, Patchman.
- KernelCare, Virus Scanner, Dual Firewall.
Siteground uses a custom-built firewall that gets updated with new rules often. Their servers are powered by an AI anti-bot system which, according to the company, blocks millions of attacks every day. In addition to these two modules, SG has introduced a service called HackAlert that scans the website for malware/virus infections. HackAlert isn’t a free service. Its monthly subscription fee is $1.
A2 offers a security hardener module to the users of its Turbo subscription. This module scans the existing security settings and applies settings that will make your site more secure. The company gives the Turbo plan users access to the Security Rollback function. This function will roll back the security settings on demand.
Domains
Although Siteground and A2 are website hosting companies, they let their users register and manage .com, .net, .org, .biz, etc domains. How much do these domains cost? A .com on SG is priced at 17.99 and 16.99 dollars. .org TLD is available on SG for 19.9 dollars and 16.99 USD on A2. There are plenty of cheap domain registration services on the internet, and there’s no benefit of registering a domain with the same company. Thus, you can ignore the domains section of A2 and SG.
These are the major differences between Siteground and A2 Hosting companies.
