A2
On This Page: [hide]
A2 Is Now Hosting.com. Here’s What Changed.
Skip this section only if you already know the rebrand history. Everyone else needs the context, because it changes the math in ways the marketing copy doesn’t spell out.
World Host Group, a UK-based hosting holding company that owns Krystal, TSOHost, and roughly two dozen other brands, acquired A2 Hosting in January 2025. Three months later, on April 28, A2’s domain switched to a 301-redirect pointing at hosting.com. WHG had been holding the premium hosting.com domain as a parked asset. Rather than running two consumer brands in parallel, the parent company chose consolidation.
What changed for buyers:
- Plan names: Startup became Starter, Drive became Plus, Turbo Boost became Pro, Turbo Max became Max.
- Term length: the headline 36-month introductory pricing was replaced with a 12-month term, matching SiteGround.
- Spec democratization: LiteSpeed, NVMe, and AMD EPYC now ship on every shared plan. Pre-rebrand these were Turbo-only.
- Resource transparency: RAM, vCPU, and IOPS are now listed publicly on each tier. The legacy A2 product pages hid these.
What stayed the same: the “Guru Crew” support brand, 24/7 phone and chat coverage, the 30-day money-back window, and the data center footprint.
Why it matters for this comparison: the famous “20x faster Turbo” pitch that distinguished A2 from SiteGround for years is no longer a product differentiator. It’s the baseline. Every shared plan gets the LiteSpeed plus EPYC stack. That fundamentally changes how value compares against SiteGround at the entry tier, where SiteGround StartUp now looks underweight on raw infrastructure.
Pricing Tier by Tier (And Where Each One Wins)
Mapping plans across these two isn’t perfectly clean. Hosting.com fields four shared tiers; SiteGround fields three. We grouped by closest functional equivalent and called out where the comparison breaks down.
Entry tier: single site, light traffic
- Hosting.com Starter: USD 3.99/mo on a 12-month term. 15 GB NVMe, 1 site, 2 GB RAM, 2 vCPU, daily backups, LiteSpeed Cache, free CDN. Renews at USD 14.99/mo.
- SiteGround StartUp: USD 2.99/mo on a 12-month term. 10 GB SSD, 1 site, ~10,000 monthly visits cap, daily backups, no staging, no Ultrafast PHP. Renews at USD 17.99/mo.
The entry-rate gap looks like USD 1/mo in SiteGround’s favor. Everything else flips the other direction. Hosting.com Starter ships 50% more storage, publishes guaranteed RAM and CPU figures (SiteGround doesn’t on shared), runs LiteSpeed instead of NGINX, and renews at USD 14.99/mo against StartUp’s USD 17.99/mo. That’s a USD 3/mo renewal saving.
Three-year all-in math: SiteGround StartUp lands at USD 35.88 for year one plus USD 431.76 across years two and three at renewal, totaling USD 467.64. Hosting.com Starter lands at USD 47.88 plus USD 359.76, totaling USD 407.64. So the entry-rate advantage SiteGround appears to hold flips into a USD 60 saving on Hosting.com over three years on the cheapest tier.
Step-up tier: multiple sites, WordPress-ready
- Hosting.com Plus: USD 3.99/mo on a 12-month term. 30 GB NVMe, 2 sites, 3 GB RAM, 2 vCPU, LiteSpeed Cache. Renewal sits in the USD 10-11/mo range based on legacy Drive pricing carried over.
- SiteGround GrowBig: USD 4.99/mo on a 12-month term. 20 GB SSD, unlimited sites, ~100,000 monthly visits cap, staging, Ultrafast PHP, on-demand backups, free wildcard SSL. Renews at USD 29.99/mo.
Story flips here. The 2-site cap on Hosting.com Plus kills it for anyone hosting client work or running multiple subdomain projects. SiteGround GrowBig’s “unlimited sites” matters at this tier, and so does Ultrafast PHP for dynamic WordPress content. Set against that: GrowBig’s USD 29.99/mo renewal is roughly 3x what Hosting.com Plus renews at, and GrowBig’s 20 GB storage is 10 GB less than Plus.
Buyer split: GrowBig fits if you’re hosting 5+ small WordPress sites and need proper staging. Hosting.com Plus fits if you’re running 1-2 sites and want NVMe storage headroom plus a much gentler renewal curve.
Power tier: high-traffic single site or agency starter
- Hosting.com Pro: USD 6.99/mo on a 12-month term. 50 GB NVMe, 10 sites, 6 GB RAM, 4 vCPU, LiteSpeed. Renewal around USD 19.99/mo per legacy Turbo Boost data.
- SiteGround GoGeek: USD 7.99/mo on a 12-month term. 40 GB SSD, unlimited sites, ~400,000 monthly visits, staging, Git pre-installed, white-label client area, collaborator access, priority support routing. Renews at USD 44.99/mo.
This is where SiteGround GoGeek earns its renewal price for a specific buyer. Agencies and freelance shops managing 10+ WordPress sites for clients get white-label client logins, collaborator access without billing visibility, and Git pre-installed at USD 7.99/mo entry. That feature stack is unusual at any shared price point. Hosting.com Pro at USD 6.99/mo undercuts the entry rate by USD 1, gives 25% more storage, and has stronger CPU and RAM allocations, but lacks the agency tooling.
For one high-traffic WordPress site or WooCommerce store with no agency requirements: Hosting.com Pro is the cleaner pick. The renewal gap is real. GoGeek’s USD 44.99/mo renewal is 2.25x Hosting.com Pro’s USD 19.99/mo renewal at the same tier.
Top shared tier: outgrowing GrowBig but not ready for Cloud
- Hosting.com Max: USD 8.99/mo on a 12-month term. 100 GB NVMe, 100 sites, 8 GB RAM, 4 vCPU. Renewal around USD 24.99/mo.
- SiteGround Cloud (entry): USD 100/mo. 4 CPU cores, 8 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD, fully managed.
The gap here is structural rather than competitive. SiteGround has no shared tier above GoGeek; once a site outgrows it, the upgrade path jumps directly to Cloud at USD 100/mo. Hosting.com Max gives 100 GB NVMe and 100 sites at USD 8.99/mo intro, USD 24.99/mo at renewal. Nothing in the SiteGround shared lineup matches that resource ratio. If the buyer needs more headroom but isn’t ready for managed cloud spend, Max is the more honest upgrade. Worth comparing against alternatives in our cloud hosting roundup if you’re being pushed toward the SiteGround Cloud price tier.
Performance and Infrastructure: The Honest Read
Both providers run modern stacks. The differences are real but smaller than either marketing copy suggests.
What SiteGround actually runs
Google Cloud Platform across 11 hostable regions: Iowa, Virginia, Texas, California in the US; Eemshaven (Netherlands), Frankfurt, Madrid, London, Paris in Europe; Singapore; Sydney. Paris is the recent addition. Ultrafast PHP (SiteGround’s PHP container layer) ships on GrowBig and above and adds roughly 30% request throughput per their own benchmarks. SuperCacher runs three layers: NGINX direct delivery for static files, dynamic NGINX-cached HTML for PHP output, and Memcached for object queries. The SiteGround CDN 2.0 spans 170+ points of presence on Google’s anycast network. HTTP/3 enabled.
The honest critique: independent monitoring isn’t always flattering. Hostingstep’s Q4 2025 measurement clocked SiteGround at 632ms TTFB globally, ranking it #22 of 34 monitored hosts. Same data shows highly geographically uneven response (32ms in New York, several hundred milliseconds further out). SiteGround’s strongest suit is consistency from a nearby region, not raw global speed.
What Hosting.com runs post-rebrand
Every shared plan ships LiteSpeed Web Server Enterprise, NVMe SSD storage, and AMD EPYC processors. LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress comes pre-configured. Free CDN across plans. The data center map: Irvine, San Francisco, Louisville, Newark, Dallas in the US; Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt in Europe; Mumbai, Singapore in Asia; Sydney; Mexico City. That’s 12 publicly listed locations. Hosting.com markets “40+” elsewhere, but only 12 are confirmed on the data center page itself.
Hostingstep’s same Q4 2025 run measured Hosting.com at 462ms TTFB globally and ranked it #11 of 34, ahead of SiteGround’s 632ms and #22 placement on the same methodology. Online Media Masters’ 2026 testing put Hosting.com WordPress page loads at 1.2 to 1.4 seconds with caching active and sub-500ms for cached pages. LiteSpeed gives Hosting.com a measurable first-byte advantage on cached pages; SiteGround’s GCP network gives it a slight lead on dynamic database queries from a nearby region. For a typical 25k-monthly-visit WordPress blog, you won’t notice the difference. For a high-traffic site serving global audiences, Hosting.com’s TTFB consistency now reads better than SiteGround’s.
Uptime: the part marketing avoids
Both publish 99.9% SLAs. Hostingstep’s Q4 2025 monitoring puts Hosting.com at 99.98% uptime and SiteGround comfortably above 99.97% on the same methodology. That’s roughly 1.75 hours of annual downtime for Hosting.com against SiteGround’s roughly 2.5 hours. Statistically a tie at this measurement window.
One historical note that belongs in any honest read: A2 Hosting suffered a multi-week ransomware outage in 2019 with customer data loss. That’s six years back, ownership has changed twice, and the infrastructure has been rebuilt under new management. But institutional memory is a legitimate part of the “skip if reliability is your top criterion” calculus.
Data center coverage by audience
European audiences are well-covered on both (SiteGround adds Madrid and Paris; Hosting.com adds Amsterdam). North American audiences are well-covered on both. SiteGround’s Sydney region serves Pacific traffic strongly; Hosting.com matches with its own Sydney location. Where the maps diverge: SiteGround has no native South American or Middle Eastern presence, while Hosting.com fills part of that gap with Mexico City (but not São Paulo). For Indian audiences, Hosting.com’s Mumbai region wins outright. SiteGround does not host in India.
WordPress: Endorsement vs Updated Stack
Two different bets on the same buyer. SiteGround sells the WordPress.org logo. Hosting.com sells the post-rebrand spec sheet. Pick the one that matches how you actually buy.
SiteGround’s WordPress story
Officially recommended on WordPress.org alongside Bluehost and Pressable. The endorsement is decades old at this point and shows up in the product. SiteGround Migrator plugin is free on the WP.org repository, with the latest release in April 2026. Staging environments live on GrowBig and GoGeek. Git pre-installed on GoGeek. The SG Optimizer plugin handles caching configuration without forcing you to install LSCache or W3 Total Cache. WordPress Starter wizard for new sites. Auto-updates on core and plugins.
For agencies, GoGeek’s white-label and collaborator features are the actual differentiator. You can grant a client a restricted login to their site without exposing your billing or other clients. That’s a USD 7.99/mo entry feature, USD 44.99/mo at renewal, but comparable agency tooling on competing hosts costs noticeably more.
Hosting.com’s WordPress story post-rebrand
No WordPress.org endorsement. But the actual stack on every plan? LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress (LSCWP) pre-installed, which is arguably the strongest WP cache plugin available right now. NVMe storage. EPYC processors with disclosed RAM allocations. Free WordPress migration on every tier. Staging available on Pro and Max. One-click WordPress install with auto-updates. WP-CLI access on shared.
What it lacks compared to GoGeek: native Git on shared, white-label tooling, collaborator-style restricted client logins. Solo bloggers and small business owners don’t miss those. Agencies running 30 client sites do.
For most solo bloggers and small business sites, Hosting.com’s LiteSpeed-out-of-the-box stack delivers more raw WordPress speed than SiteGround StartUp at a similar entry price. You also don’t have to climb to GrowBig before staging unlocks. For agencies, GoGeek’s tooling is hard to match. For a managed-WordPress experience at the next price tier, our managed WordPress hosting USA guide covers Kinsta, WP Engine, and other contenders if neither shared host fits.
Support: Who Picks Up the Phone
Both providers run 24/7 across multiple channels. The differences are quieter than either marketing claim suggests.
Hosting.com (Guru Crew)
24/7 live chat, phone, and email/ticket. The phone number is publicly listed on the contact page (the “request a callback” pattern SiteGround uses isn’t required). The Guru Crew support brand survived the rebrand. Independent 2026 reviews report chat reply times under 5 minutes, with phone wait times typically under 2 minutes off-peak. Quality has slipped from the late-2010s reputation: more first-line script-driven responses, more upsell pressure on routine tickets. Still rated above category average overall.
SiteGround
24/7 live chat, phone (request-a-callback), and ticket. Phone access works but is gated through a chat-initiated callback rather than a direct dial-in. Live chat reply often lands inside 20 seconds in independent testing. Tickets average around 15 minutes, with GoGeek and Cloud customers getting priority routing to senior agents. Support team is based primarily in Bulgaria (Sofia, Plovdiv, Stara Zagora) and Spain (Madrid). Same reputation drift as Hosting.com: 2025-2026 reviews flag declining warmth versus the late-2010s legend.
If picking up a phone when a checkout page breaks at 2am is your support test, Hosting.com pulls ahead because the phone number is directly dialed without going through chat first. If chat speed matters most, SiteGround answers faster on first response. Neither matches the support reputation either provider had in 2018. Both qualify for buyers who value 24/7 coverage over support polish.
How to Choose Between These Two
Forget the feature checklists. Real decisions look more like the scenarios below.
Solo blogger, single WordPress site, 5-15k monthly visits, budget under USD 5/mo entry
Pick Hosting.com Starter at USD 3.99/mo (12-month). 15 GB NVMe and 2 GB guaranteed RAM with LiteSpeed Cache pre-installed beats SiteGround StartUp on raw infrastructure at a USD 1/mo entry premium. Skip SiteGround StartUp here. The 10,000-visit cap is enforced, the 6x renewal multiplier (USD 17.99/mo from USD 2.99/mo) compounds fast, and StartUp lacks staging. The USD 1/mo savings disappear in month 13.
WooCommerce store, ~100k monthly visits, staging that actually works, budget under USD 30/mo all-in
Go with SiteGround GrowBig at USD 4.99/mo entry (USD 29.99/mo renewal). Ultrafast PHP, daily plus on-demand backups, full staging, free wildcard SSL, and unlimited sites at this tier isn’t matched cleanly in the Hosting.com lineup. Hosting.com Plus’s 2-site cap kills it for serious WooCommerce. Year-one cost is similar across both. Year two is where the renewal stings. Honestly, if your store is already generating revenue, USD 25/mo extra rarely outweighs the staging-to-production workflow GrowBig handles.
Agency or freelance shop managing 10+ WordPress client sites
Pick SiteGround GoGeek at USD 7.99/mo entry (USD 44.99/mo renewal). White-label client area, collaborator access without billing visibility, Git pre-installed, and priority support routing are hard to match in shared hosting at this price. Hosting.com Pro at USD 6.99/mo entry undercuts on entry rate and offers better CPU and RAM allocations, but lacks agency tooling. If your billing model requires separated client logins, GoGeek pays for itself within 3-4 client sites. If it doesn’t, save the money on Hosting.com Pro. Running 30+ clients? You’re outgrowing both. Look at managed WordPress at the next tier, or our shared hosting roundup for buyers in the in-between zone.
Single high-traffic site outgrowing the step-up tier, not ready for Cloud spend
Choose Hosting.com Max at USD 8.99/mo entry (renewal around USD 24.99/mo). 100 GB NVMe, 8 GB RAM, 4 vCPU at that price beats the upgrade path SiteGround offers, which jumps you to Cloud at USD 100/mo. For a buyer who needs more resources but isn’t ready for managed-cloud spend, Max is the cleanest landing. Skip SiteGround Cloud unless your team specifically needs guaranteed dedicated CPU on Google Cloud. If they do, Kinsta or a Hetzner-hosted setup also belong in the comparison.
Hidden Costs Both Providers Don’t Volunteer
The headline price is rarely the final price.
Domain renewal. Both offer a free domain in year one. Hosting.com’s .com renewal sits around USD 14.99/year. SiteGround’s lands around USD 17.95/year. Niche TLDs (.shop, .store, .io) cost more on both. The “free domain forever” line in entry-level marketing is misleading on every shared host, and both qualify here.
Email storage. SiteGround keeps email free across the plan term but caps mailbox storage at the plan’s storage allocation. StartUp’s 10 GB doubles as your inbox cap, so heavy email use eats into site storage. Hosting.com keeps email free across plans without raiding site storage, but defaults to spam-filtered shared MX servers; serious senders are pushed toward Google Workspace integration.
Auto-renewal. Both auto-renew at the higher rate without prominent advance warning. SiteGround at least shows a “regular price” badge on the public pricing page. Hosting.com surfaces the renewal rate at checkout but not on the marketing pages. Set a calendar reminder for month 11, or you’ll find out the hard way.
Storage softness. SiteGround’s “GB” figures for storage cap site files plus database plus mailboxes plus backups in the visible quota. Hosting.com’s NVMe figures cover site files only on most tiers, with backups stored separately. Two providers, two slightly different definitions of the same word. Read the fine print before you compare numbers blindly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is A2 Hosting still around in 2026?
The brand was retired. World Host Group acquired A2 Hosting in January 2025 and consolidated it under hosting.com on April 28, 2025. All a2hosting.com URLs now 301-redirect to hosting.com. The product, support team, and Guru Crew branding largely transferred. The customer-facing change is the new domain, restructured plan names (Starter, Plus, Pro, Max), and the standardization of LiteSpeed plus NVMe across every shared plan. If a 2024 review compares A2 Hosting to SiteGround, treat it as outdated.
Which is faster for WordPress, Hosting.com or SiteGround?
Hosting.com on cached pages and global TTFB; SiteGround on dynamic database queries from a nearby region. Hostingstep’s Q4 2025 measurement put Hosting.com at 462ms global TTFB versus SiteGround at 632ms on identical methodology. LiteSpeed plus LSCache handles cached WordPress pages with a measurable first-byte advantage. SiteGround’s GCP network plus Ultrafast PHP closes the gap on dynamic queries (cart updates, search, comment submissions) on GrowBig and above. For a typical 25k-monthly-visit WordPress site, the speed gap is invisible. For a high-traffic WooCommerce store with frequent dynamic queries, the answer depends on whether your visitors mostly read cached pages or mostly hit the database.
Why did A2 Hosting rebrand to Hosting.com?
World Host Group, the new parent company after the January 2025 acquisition, owned the premium hosting.com domain as a parked asset. WHG chose to consolidate under the more recognizable domain rather than maintain two separate consumer brands. The 23-year-old A2 Hosting name was retired April 28, 2025. Plan names, term lengths, and resource disclosures changed at the same time, but the infrastructure footprint and the support team carried over.
Does SiteGround still have the WordPress.org official endorsement?
Yes. SiteGround remains one of three hosts officially recommended on wordpress.org/hosting/ in 2026, alongside Bluehost and Pressable. Hosting.com is not on that list. Whether the endorsement matters depends on how much weight you put on WordPress.org’s vetting. For some buyers it’s a real trust signal; for others it’s a partnership disclosure with marketing weight behind it.
Is SiteGround’s renewal really 6x the entry price?
Yes for StartUp and GrowBig. USD 2.99 to USD 17.99 is exactly 6.0x. USD 4.99 to USD 29.99 is also 6.0x. GoGeek’s USD 7.99 to USD 44.99 is 5.6x. That puts SiteGround among the steepest renewal multipliers in mainstream shared hosting. Hosting.com’s renewal markup is also real (Starter at 3.76x), but the dollar gap is smaller because the entry rate is higher and the renewal rate lower in absolute terms.
Can Hosting.com handle WooCommerce as well as SiteGround?
For most stores, yes. LiteSpeed Cache for WooCommerce is one of the most effective caching plugins available for WP-based stores, and Hosting.com’s spec sheet (NVMe storage, EPYC processors, disclosed RAM allocations) handles checkout-heavy traffic well. Where SiteGround pulls ahead: GoGeek’s staging-to-production workflow is smoother for stores that ship frequent code changes. Ultrafast PHP also handles dynamic database queries (cart updates, inventory checks) slightly faster on GrowBig and above. For a 50-orders-per-day store, either works. For a 500-orders-per-day store with frequent deploys, SiteGround GrowBig or GoGeek is the steadier pick.
Can I migrate from SiteGround to Hosting.com or the other direction?
Both ways. Hosting.com offers free WordPress migration on every shared plan. SiteGround offers the free SiteGround Migrator plugin for inbound WordPress moves and assisted migration on GrowBig and GoGeek. Budget 24-48 hours including DNS propagation. Email and database transfers usually run smoothly. Custom server-level configurations (special PHP modules, .htaccess rewrites tied to a specific server stack) sometimes need manual rework on the receiving end.
Final Verdict
Hosting.com (formerly A2 Hosting) for buyers prioritizing infrastructure spec per dollar. The Starter and Max tiers especially outclass anything in the SiteGround shared lineup at comparable entry pricing. LiteSpeed plus NVMe plus EPYC at USD 3.99 entry, 462ms global TTFB ranked #11 of 34 by Hostingstep, and a 99.98% measured uptime makes the spec sheet hard to argue with. Skip Hosting.com only if institutional memory from the legacy 2019 ransomware incident still weighs on you, or if the WordPress.org endorsement is a non-negotiable trust signal for your audience.
SiteGround for WordPress agencies and freelance shops where GoGeek’s white-label, collaborator access, and Git integration earn the USD 44.99/mo renewal. Skip SiteGround StartUp entirely. Hosting.com Starter beats it on every measurable spec at USD 1/mo more entry, USD 3/mo less at renewal. And skip GrowBig if you don’t need unlimited sites or the staging-to-production workflow on Ultrafast PHP. The renewal cliff is steep, and the speed advantage doesn’t survive Hostingstep’s global measurement.
Re-run this comparison every 18 months. The post-rebrand math on Hosting.com may shift again as World Host Group settles its product strategy. Still weighing options? Our hosting finder tool matches you to providers based on traffic, budget, and audience location. The SiteGround vs Hostinger comparison covers SiteGround against another mass-market shared host if you want a wider read on where SiteGround sits in the 2026 market.