A2 was very reliable a year ago, but now, their systems are very outdated. There are several critical security bugs in their system. Its like Marty coming back from the future.
My experience with A2 was mostly regarding to hacked and infected sites, and the solution was always to move out due to the incompetence of the support.
As I see it from here the support has no clue of what they are doing, and they don't really care about the data losses they caused.
In a few words: don't even think about it.

A2 is great if you're looking for cheap, shared hosting by a company that (at least appears to) care about the environment. Signing up a new website with a new domain name is a piece of cake, anything else and it gets hairy (some of their service setups are a little dinky).

I'm a web designer/developer with a steady string of clients needing hosting. I've started referring them to a2hosting almost exclusively because it's easy and mostly pain-free.

HOWEVER, their support--as with most cheap-o web outfits--is sub-par (and trust me, sometimes support really matters). Their online chat feature seems handy, until you realize just how long it takes to get something simple answered; you get the impression that it's just one person trying to handle multiple queries at once...extremely slow and frustrating.

3.5/5 stars.

I was looking for a budget vps with quality support. It was the first time i was trying to host websites on vps and support was one of the main factors. After reviewing lot on the web i choose A2Hosting. My selection has proved right till date.

I purchase an vps of 256mb ram and running around 10+ sites on it till date. The server has been able to handle huge traffic of 10,000+ hits per day. The server has never gone down. The control panel is simple to use and provides all statistics. They have a good knowledgebase and wiki online. They are among the few hosts i have seen to have an discussion forum too.Live chat people are always there to assist.

Since i was totally new to managing vps, initially i raised lot of support questions. Their support team is very helpful and helped a lot. They proved that there is no much technical expertise required to manage an vps.

I rarely faced any problems with a2hosting and they have handled the problems which i created(not from their side). They are good option for anyone looking for quality hosting withing the budget. I would surely recommend everyone to give A2Hosting an try !

I am extremely disappointed with their hosting and appalled at their lack of support. I started hosting with A2 Hosting in December 2007. My first registered support request was March 3rd, 2008.

My problem was my website went down several times a week, although the down time was only a matter of minutes each time, I quickly became concerned about the constant problems I was having with A2 hosting.

The support was terrible, they constantly deny the problems and even on one occasion claimed it was a problem with my website. Over a year I couldn't even tell you how many times my website went down, because it was only down for a few minutes I couldn't submit a support ticket fast enough to prove to them there was a problem. They claimed they had 24/7 monitoring and they didn't see any problem.

They finally admitted the server was having problems (how could they not), only after a year of complaining and finally adding an outside monitoring service. They claimed to have fixed the problem however, the six days following their claims I was down again six times. After emailing them again, sending the proof that the server was still having problems, their response was:

"If your still having troubles with intermittent downtime, you might want to consider a VPS, or Dedicated hosting plan."

I couldn't believe it. I explained to them that I was not going to upgrade my plan because of the problems they seem to have keeping their servers working. They agreed to migrate my site to another server.

So on April 4th, 2009 - I received an email stating that my site had been migrated to a new server. Unfortunately the site was not accessible. I explained to them that The problem appeared to be that the site couldn't connect to the postgres database server since the migration.

Their response was "Your site is resolving for me at http://www.textcall.com". I had to explain to them once again that it was a database permission problem on their server.

Their response: "I have escalated this issue to our network administrators. They agree it appears to be a permissions issue."

I only had to wait 24 hours for that response.

Here is the most ignorant response I have received from A2 Hosting yet, keep in mind my site and database was working on the other server (when the server wasn't down) and nothing had changed other then the migration:

"The issues appear to be related to permissions on your custom schema. The 'common' schema owner has been changed to your 'textcall' user, but there may still be permissions issues.

Unfortunately, custom schemas are not something that we support, we cannot further troubleshoot permissions on this."

Again, this was after they migrated from one server to another, A2 Hosting decided that they wouldn't support the problem they caused.

This is when I made the first phone call to their support line, and where I got hung up on because I wasn't happy with their excuses. I eventually got the main tech supervisor, the person that oversees the servers and is supposed to make sure everything works correctly. He explained to me that he couldn't figure out how change the permissions on the server they migrated my site to and my only option was to migrate it back to the original server it was on.

Let me say that again. The person that supervises the hosting support, the person that sets up and maintains A2's Hosting servers could not figure out how to change the permissions on the server. This is after my site had been down going on three days.

That was on Tuesday April 7th, 2009. This is now Saturday April 11th, 2009, the site has been down twice since then and is now down again due to some kind of "unexpected problem". I received an email saying everything has been fixed yet my website is still down and support has failed to respond.

I'm not trying to make up your mind on whether or not to use A2 hosting as your hosting provider, I'm merely sharing my experience over the last year with this company. If it's important to you however, that your website is up and accessible then take my experience in to consideration.

Jasontor
Textcall.com