A2 Hosting review 2010: After using GoDaddy web hosting services for the last four years, I just started using the A2 Hosting web hosting services yesterday. Here are my impressions so far.
A2 Hosting review - The initial experience
Buying the new domain name and paying for one year's hosting with A2 Hosting went normally. The nice A2 Hosting coupon (30% off with the phrase "JINGLE") was very nice, making the total price for the domain name and one year's hosting less than $70.
My new domain name was available within an hour, and I received an email copy of the invoice, and another email with a nice collection of instructions about how to work with my new domain.
The biggest surprise about the initial A2 Hosting experience was when an A2 Hosting support person pinged me on Twitter. I'm not sure if I like that, it seems like free advertising for them, not to mention at least a minor breach of privacy in our new relationship. (Maybe there was something about this "social" aspect in their Terms of Service documentation, I don't know.)
A2 Hosting review 2010 - SSH Linux command line access
I quickly logged into my new domain with SSH, and set up my own private Git repository. Git was installed on the server as advertised, and I also poked around to make sure PHP, Perl, Ruby, and Python were installed as well.
From the Unix/Linux command line, I like the way my A2 Hosting account is set up. Your website goes in one subdirectory, and then you can use the other subdirectories as desired, and create your own, which I did for my private Git repository.
A2 Hosting review - PHP and MySQL web applications, coming soon
So far I've just created a simple HTML web page to make sure I know how everything works. Later today I'll be installing Drupal and CakePHP on the A2 web server along with some MySQL databases to see how that goes. Because I have full Linux command line access, I don't expect any technical problems with the installation, so the only things I'm concerned with right now are:
- How fast are the A2 Hosting web servers? How many people/websites is my web server being shared with?
- How much RAM (memory) will I have available to my web applications? Drupal and CakePHP require a fair amount of memory, especially for busy websites, and I can't find anything in the A2 Hosting support documentation about web server memory.
A2 Hosting review (2010) - Summary
I'll add more to this A2 Hosting review as time goes on, but I just wanted to share my initial impressions before I got too far away from the initial experience. One last thought: I haven't needed any A2 Hosting support yet, but their online documentation looks okay so far, though I had to write up my own A2 Hosting Git SSH server setup/configuration tutorial.
Followup: I've written more about my A2 Hosting experience in my A2 Hosting review, Day 4 article.
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