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Are you ready to start a business online but struggling to choose between Cloudways Vs A2 Hosting for your website?
If yes, you have reached the right place to finalize your hosting plan. This blog post will compare Cloudways and A2 hosting with the basic parameters required for a website.
Comparing features like speed, security, pricing, WordPress optimization, CDN, uptime performance, and support would help you know the best web hosting.
Before we look at detailed features, here is a quick comparison between these two hosting services to identify the better server provider.
Cloudways Vs A2 Hosting – A Quick Comparison
Features | Cloudways | A2 Hosting |
Managed Site Migration | Available | Available |
Built-In CDN | Available | Available |
Free SSL (Auto Renewal) | Available | Unavailable |
SSD Based Servers | Available | Available |
Managed Security & Backup | Available | Unavailable |
Built-In Advanced Cache | Available | Unavailable |
1-Click App Install | Available | Available |
Free Trial | Available | Unavailable |
Chat & Ticket Support | Available | Ticket Support available |
PHP Apps Supported | Available | Available |
Why Choose Cloudways Hosting?
Many features stand out to prefer Cloudways over A2 hosting. Some of them are listed below,
Free & Self Migration – This cloud server provider has free migration to move your old website to their cloud server for free. And it offers self-migration through the plugin. You need to install the specific plugin and do the migration process independently.
Automated Backup – It is easy to configure and restore the backup files in Cloudways. Even though you need to pay a small fee for off-site backup, paying for data security is worth it.
High security – Detailed firewall protection, Regular security patching, and Auto healing are the unique features of Cloudways for high-class security. Moreover, It provides a Multifactor authentication mechanism for data protection. SafeUpdates is an exceptional security feature that keeps your applications up-to-date.
Faster Performance – SSD-based storage, Optimized advanced cache, multiple databases, PHP 7 ready server, Redis support, and HTTP/2 enabled server with 100% uptime. Most importantly, it uses a dedicated environment for servers, which overcomes shared hosting performances. It has a free WordPress cache plugin – Breeze as well. When you make site changes, it is easy to clear Cloudways Cache.
Easy To Control The Applications – It allows you to control your applications like a professional. No complicated command run here! Moreover, you can schedule your Cron jobs, control cache rules, and change the Webroot application.
Free trial & SSL – It provides free trial usage without credit card information and free SSL installation for high security.
Flexible Pricing – This cloud hosting has pay-as-you-go monthly plans that allow you to pay only for the resources that you use. There is no high renewal price headache here.
Other Impressive Qualities – It is easy to make subdomains in Cloudways. Likewise, SFTP login access is available for secure file transfer. Out of all of these options, you can upgrade or change the PHP version with a single click.
Why Prefer A2 Hosting Instead Of Cloudways?
Telephonic Support – Both Cloudways and A2 hosting provide different modes of support for their customers. It may be a live chat support email/ticketing system at 24×7, whereas A2 hosting gives telephonic support to its customers 24×7. This feature is limited to premium customers who are hosting Cloudways.
Unlimited bandwidth – This green web hosting is best known for its shared hosting performance, unlimited bandwidth, and faster performance, thanks to its turbo plan.
Use HTTP/3 for faster performance – It offers HTTP/3 for faster response without handshake dialogue in its protocol. However, it was restricted to 50 HTTP requests in its hosting plan.
Unlimited Email Addresses – This affordable hosting gives customers unlimited email addresses with POP3, IMAP, and SMTP support and offers spam protection. These features are not available in Cloudways.
Cloudways Vs A2 Hosting – A Detailed Comparison
After the quick battle between A2 Hosting and Cloudways, you might conclude that Cloudways is an excellent managed hosting for WordPress. Now, let’s compare the other essential features so that you will get the ideal one of your choice.
1. Speed
For online businesses, website speed matters a lot for site owners and dedicated bloggers. The site loading should be superfast to please your visitors and search engines.
Bandwidth and Storage space plays major roles in achieving better webpage loading time. Many hosting providers give limited bandwidth and space, and here we look out for Cloudways Vs A2 hosting speed features and score.
Cloudways
Cloudways uses multiple features like SSD, PHP 7, and CDN to give the best speed performance rather than just providing high bandwidth and storage for a low cost. The hosting server plays a fair role in content delivery, faster page loading, and a large amount of traffic handling with its 50+ data centers.
It offers three different server locations for faster performance and different bandwidth limits for every server to handle much traffic without reducing the speed. All the services use the latest PHP version for good performance.
The cache is a major factor affecting the speed and performance. Cloudways uses caches, including Memcached, Varnish, Nginx, and Redis, to deliver better user responses for stack handling.
Check our blog speed score hosted on the Cloudways server. We are satisfied with the high score, which is essential for high search engine rankings.
A2 Hosting
A2 Hosting used SSD-based website storage and shared hosting among the USA, Europe, and Asia servers. For traffic handling, it provides a LiteSpeed webserver during traffic spikes.
For Caching, it uses turbo cache, APC/ OPcache, and Memcached in its turbo plans, so the performance was limited. HTTP/3 uses a Quick UDP internet connection; unlike TCP IP in HTTP/2, it becomes faster. DNS records are duplicated on all servers over the globe for better performance.
Have a look at the niche blog hosted on A2Hosting. The speed score is somewhat better; however, we want to improve and perform well.
Speed Test Score | Cloudways | A2 Hosting |
GTMetrix | 100% | 93% |
Loading Time | 0.461ms | 1.5s |
Winner – Cloudways
Verdict
Because of its dedicated environment, all servers used in Cloudways handle traffic during spikes rather than lite speed web server usage in A2 hosting. With the help of auto-healing managed cloud servers and other speed qualities, Cloudways wins the speed performance battle with A2 Hosting.
2. WordPress Optimized Features
Among the different CMSs available on the internet, WordPress is powerful for web applications, blogs, forums, websites, and community sites. This CMS needs PHP, MySql, and Apache servers for its operation. When we choose your hosting, we should check the above things to use WordPress applications in your websites.
What to look for in a WordPress hosting plan? – It’s a million-dollar question! You should find one that offers WordPress-optimized servers that support HTTPS, the latest PHP, and MySQL versions. Moreover, it’s better to pick the one with staging environments, configurable backups, 1-click backup restore, and WordPress-focused technical support. Let’s see who offers great features for WordPress users!
Cloudways
Cloudways uses PHP 7 and above for its Apache server in five locations with a dedicated environment. Many WordPress applications like Third-party API integration like Payment processors, SMTP add-ons for email delivery, Restful API for developing applications for WordPress, free website migration addons, and free SSL certificate renewal over the years are the special features of Cloudways hosting with WordPress.
Cloudways uses a Staging URL for one-click app installation with WordPress. With its Apache server located in different locations, it gives no crashing of WordPress websites. Besides, it uses CDN for content delivery. So, the videos and images used on WordPress websites are distributed over the globe by its data centers. Readers can easily access those data nearby. Data streaming is reduced here; it is a major problem in WordPress blogs that use video content.
A2 Hosting
A2 hosting offers free email addresses and domain access in its hosting. Easy use of cPanel and FTP is used to access data used in WordPress sites. Its turbo plan uses many automated backups for WordPress.
This unfalling web host uses a Woocommerce one-click setup for web applications. It also offers one-click payment processing gateways for eCommerce applications in WordPress. An Optional WordPress CLI interface is available for application development. There is no Addon domain installation in its shared hosting.
Winner – Cloudways
3. CDN
The CDNs are used to deliver content from your website to visitors according to their geographical location. It is a quick and efficient way of delivering your content through a distributed network of servers deployed worldwide.
The content delivery may be in any form, such as text, Infographic images, podcasts, or video; the main thing is to deliver them quickly. Regarding video and infographic images during traffic spikes, they may be buffering or crashing. To avoid this problem, many hosting providers offer CDN with the help of data centers.
Let’s see which hosting offers a better CDN feature!
Cloudways
Cloudways offers easy integration of CloudwaysCDN to reach a wider audience across the world and ensure that your site content gets delivered quickly for improved user experience. You don’t need to undergo any technical activities to enable this CDN service for your website. CloudwaysCDN implementation is a simple procedure; we have done it for our blogs.
All servers use a dedicated environment for bandwidth, and storage provides 50+ data centers across the globe, with your content distributed over the geo to access nearby locations with better performance. However, you must understand that the CDN is a premium feature, and yes, you need to pay $1 per 25GB.
A2 Hosting
It uses Cloudflare CDN to distribute content over the globe so that end-users can access streamless data. Also, it uses the USA, Europe, and Asia as its server locations to deliver faster content to the end-user. Cloudflare CDN is compatible with all the plans.
Winner – Both
Verdict
Both Cloudways and A2 hosting use CDN for ease of content access by their users of the websites.
4. Security
For maximum data security, you should be very careful when choosing the right hosting service for your business website because your site information is precious and needs to be protected well. If you lose it, then you will be frustrated for sure!
The main thing about security is that hackers and cybercriminals are ready to steal your data and perform malicious attacks that would cause your website to crash. Hence, site security is the main concern. Pick a hosting provider with firewalls, DDoS protection, network monitoring, Malware scanning, and automated backups.
Now, let’s see which hosting has great security features, Cloudways Vs A2 Hosting.
Cloudways
A dedicated firewall is used to avoid malicious attacks from traffic spikes. One-click SSL installation prevents unauthorized HTTP requests from the browser—IP whitelist feature used in WordPress community websites and membership websites to provide unrestricted access to certain customers.
The cloud servers are protected by regular patching and CloudwaysBot from denial of service and malicious login attempts. Multi-factor authentication prevents your server from being hacked by cybercriminals. It also provides automated backup, which has been stored on various servers.
A2 hosting
A2 hosting uses two-factor authentications to access the data within the network. Dual firewall protection, virus scanning, and DDoS protection are available here to avoid unnecessary login attempts and malicious attacks during huge website traffic.
SSL certification protection is available on a premium basis. Regular kernel care and updates to remove the fair of the server have crashed. However, the flexible backup option is not available in A2 shared hosting.
Winner – Cloudways
5. Pricing
People always expect all the features and benefits at a low cost, but it is impossible to provide them right now. You must spend on premium products or services to yield the maximum results.
So, which hosting is affordable? Let’s see the war between Cloudways and A2 Hosting pricing.
Cloudways
Cloudways offers managed hosting plans that are flexible and transparent. It means that you will only pay for the resources you use. You can choose between three servers and four different pricing plans, but no money-back guarantee feature exists.
The company charges the users a minimum of $11 per month for their hosting service among the three different hosting servers. Don’t miss out on its latest autonomous plan for busy websites. A 3-day free trial is also available to test the features!
A2 Hosting
This green host server provides four different hosting plans for customers: Start-up, Drive, Turbo Boost, and Turbo Max. Resources available in every plan are restricted to certain features of A2 hosting. It has cheap hosting plans for tight budgeters. However, it will be profitable only if you pick the service for 3 years.
Let’s take the Turbo Boost plan, which charges $5.99 monthly. If you go with 3 years, you must pay a huge amount in bulk. Also, you have to be ready to bear the renewal charges.
Winner – Cloudways
Verdict
Even though the pricing plans of Cloudways are a little bit higher, I would say that it is worth paying for the premium features with the highest uptime and great security. Also, you don’t need to worry about the annual renewal charges as you pay monthly in Cloudways.
6. Uptime
“All-Time Site Availablity” is the dream of every site owner. When your site goes down and is not accessible by your visitors and business customers, you will face reputation issues and revenue loss. To avoid this bitterness, you should select a hosting service that gives a 100% uptime guarantee so that you can stay peaceful.
As we use both Cloudways and A2 Hosting hosting services, the uptime comparison is for your view!
Cloudways
Cloudways hosting maintains a good performance record with almost 100% uptime through its auto-healing managed cloud servers that can prevent the website from crashing. Since it comprises enhanced security features, your servers will be safe and secure.
Moreover, the data centers with CDN can offer uninterrupted webpage availability over the globe at any time. Also, the caching mechanism ensures that the data is available 24/7 without any downtime.
A2 Hosting
A2 hosting also offers three different server locations for its data centers. Many plans affect the uptime performance during traffic encounters at shared hosting. In turbo plans, A2 hosting uses Cloudflare CDN to avoid webpage crashes and malicious attacks, but the security is not up to the level, so you may not get 100% uptime.
Performance | Cloudways | A2 Hosting |
Uptime | 100% | 99% |
Winner – Cloudways
Verdict
As you can see from the screenshots, we didn’t experience any downtime issues with Cloudways. It is the best WordPress-managed hosting for small businesses that win the uptime performance with a 100% score.
7. Customer Support
I strongly advise you to select the hosting provider that will help you solve your problems anytime. You should evaluate their proficiency, response time, and resolution time. The mode of contact is important, and yes, it should be done through phone or live chat 24/7.
You may also search the user reviews about the technical support and ask some questions to know their level of response. It would be better to check their social media presence and knowledgebase articles to fix things.
So, who is offering dedicated customer support, Cloudways Vs A2 Hosting? Let’s see!
Cloudways
This managed cloud hosting company has dedicated 24/7/365 live chat support to solve your troubles. You can even approach them on weekends for any technical glitches. They assist you with care!
It also offers online ticketing support for tech issues. SLA live chats are used to resolve the issue and improve online support. Telephonic support for premium customers, Application-level support, and Slack-level security support can be provided by tech support engineers who are available 24/7.
A2 Hosting
It offers three kinds of support: Email, Telephone, and Live chat. For free site migration to A2 hosting, there is a separate option for guru crew support 24×7.
Winner – Both
8. Ease of Use
How intuitive is the user interface of web hosting? Whether it is Cpanel access, FTP account, and Database access, everything should be provided within the user dashboard of your hosting account for easy access. The settings should be uncomplicated and easily identifiable. So, who provides a better dashboard to handle everything in one place?
Cloudways
Cloudways hosting account uses a dashboard instead of Cpanel for application management within the hosting account. The navigation menu in the dashboard can guide us toward the features listed.
We have an access details link for database management in the dashboard itself. Backup and restore options are also available in the dashboard. DNS management can be done easily with dashboard options.
Have a look at Cloudways’ user interface! You can manage all the stuff under one roof.
A2 hosting
A2 hosting uses traditional Cpanel for hosting application installation and configuration. There is a separate phpMyAdmin for database management. For one-click app installation, it will be easier to identify with icons in it. However, the interface is boring and needs a refreshing look to work with enthusiasm.
Winner – Cloudways
Other Cloudways Comparisons
You may want to look at these Cloudways comparisons!
- Cloudways Vs Kinsta
- Cloudways Vs SiteGround
- Cloudways Vs Flywheel
- Cloudways Vs WPEngine
- Cloudways Vs Digital Ocean
- Cloudways Vs Godaddy
- Cloudways Vs Gridpane
- Cloudways Vs Hostinger
- Cloudways Vs RunCloud
- Cloudways Vs WPX Hosting
Wrapping Up the Battle – Cloudways Vs A2 Hosting
It isn’t easy to choose between the two reliable hosting providers, and yes, both Cloudways & A2 Hosting are trying to offer a satisfactory service to their clients. However, you are in a situation where you need to pick an ideal server service for your business website. Here is my conclusion!
In comparing Cloudways Vs A2 Hosting, Cloudways wins most of the tests, and I have given valid reasons for its victory. If you want to buy high-performance, secure hosting that can load your site super fast, go with Cloudways without hesitation.
A2 Hosting is suitable for a business beginner or newbie blogger, as you might have a tight budget in your initial phase. When you start growing, you will keenly be interested in getting dedicated managed hosting like Cloudways.
I highly recommend Cloudways, which is doing better than its competitors, to move your business to a new height and stand out. I hope you have decided to proceed with Cloudways and grab the highest offer.
Hey Nirmala,
Because of its dedicated environment, all servers used in Cloudways handle traffic during spikes rather than lite speed web server usage in A2 hosting. With the help of auto-healing managed cloud servers and other speed qualities, Cloudways wins the speed performance battle with A2 Hosting.