A2 Hosting review 2010 - Day 4

A2 Hosting Review 2010, Day 4: After four years of using GoDaddy web hosting services, four days ago (December, 2010) I started an experiment to use the A2 Hosting web hosting services. A2's specs -- including the ability to access my web server and also use an A2 Hosting server as a private Git server -- looked impressive, so I set up a new domain and website with them.

Continuing after my earlier A2 Hosting review, this A2 Hosting review continues to be pretty easy: Everything has worked as advertised. I've been able to SSH into the server, set up my private Git repository, and yesterday I started setting up a CakePHP MySQL project on the web server, and again, everything has worked as expected.

A2 Hosting and GoDaddy web hosting - Memory and speed concerns

My biggest concern about the A2 Hosting web server continues to be available memory and speed, but that's going to take a little more time to learn about. That being said, it can't be any worse than GoDaddy, where some of my Drupal sites go to sleep for extended periods. Yesterday I couldn't access one of my GoDaddy Drupal websites for more than fifteen minutes, and while I was trying to figure out how to log into the insane GoDaddy user interface and restart my Apache web server -- I never could figure this out -- my GoDaddy Drupal website suddenly began working again. So even if the A2 Hosting service is that bad, at least I can SSH into the web server and restart Apache myself.

(Frankly, if GoDaddy was a public company, I'd sell my stock in them if I owned them. I watched Dell go through this same thing when they reached their peak, and they're still trying to recover. We always guessed that a committee had taken over the Dell website, and nobody could add one feature without everyone else getting their own pet pork-barrel feature added to the website as well.)

A2 Hosting Review 2010 - Summary

So far so good with this A2 Hosting review. The A2 Hosting Git server (my private Git server) is working as advertised, as is the PHP application hosting. As mentioned, my only concerns at this point are web server speed and available memory. If I have one A2 Hostiing complain it's just that: Tell me how much memory my server has, and make some statements about web server performance guarantees.