Hosting.com Review 2026, Is the Former A2 Hosting Still Worth It?

Hosting.com is what A2 Hosting became after its rebrand, and it is still a solid host in 2026. Shared hosting starts at $1.99 a month on a four year term and renews at $13.99. The managed WordPress plans, which Hosting.com says it built through its partnership with Rocket.net, start at $4.49 for the first year and renew at $9.99. I rate it 4.2 out of 5: fast, well equipped and fairly priced up front, held back by steep renewals.

I have written about A2 Hosting on this blog since 2020, including how to pay for it from India, so the rebrand was something readers asked me about constantly. This review covers what changed, what you pay over four years, and who should and should not move to it.

A2 Hosting Is Now Hosting.com, What Changed

If you type a2hosting.com today you land on hosting.com. It is the same business under a new name, and Hosting.com now says it serves more than 700,000 customers and over 3 million websites. Three changes matter if you knew the old A2:

• New plan names. The old Startup, Drive and Turbo tiers are gone. Shared hosting is now Starter, Pro and Max.
• A separate managed WordPress platform. Alongside shared hosting there is now a WordPress only product with Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, WP Rocket and Object Cache Pro built in, which Hosting.com credits to its partnership with Rocket.net.
• AI features. Every shared plan includes an AI website builder for WordPress, and support now starts with Orbi, an AI assistant that hands you to a human when needed.

If you already host with A2, you now manage it under the Hosting.com name. If you are shopping for Black Friday, my A2 Hosting and Hosting.com Black Friday page tracks the sale as soon as it opens.

Hosting.com Pricing in 2026

Shared hosting is where the headline price lives. Read the renewal column before you buy, because that is what you pay from year five onward.

Plan	Websites	Storage	Intro price	Paid up front	Renews at
Starter	5	15 GB NVMe	$1.99/mo	$95.49 for 4 years	$13.99/mo
Pro	10	50 GB NVMe	$3.79/mo	$181.93 for 4 years	$19.99/mo
Max	50	100 GB NVMe	$7.79/mo	$373.90 for 4 years	$27.99/mo

The maths is simple. Starter costs $95.49 for the first four years, then $167.88 a year. That is still fair for five sites with email and daily backups, but it is seven times the introductory rate. My advice: take the longest term you are comfortable with, because the four year price is where the value is.

Managed WordPress Hosting Plans

This is the part of Hosting.com I find most interesting. These plans run WordPress only, with the caching and security set up for you.

Plan	Sites	Visitors/mo	Storage	First year	Renews at
Small	1	30,000	20 GB	$4.49/mo ($53.87)	$9.99/mo
Medium	5	120,000	50 GB	$4.99/mo ($59.89)	$17.99/mo
Advanced	15	250,000	100 GB	$10.99/mo ($131.89)	$25.99/mo
Turbo	50	500,000	200 GB	$14.99/mo	$34.99/mo

Every managed plan includes unlimited PHP workers, a 99.99% uptime guarantee, Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, a web application firewall, malware protection, staging, free migrations, and free licences for WP Rocket and Object Cache Pro. WP Rocket alone costs $59.95 a year for one site if you buy it yourself, so the Small plan's $53.87 first year is hard to argue with.

Rocket.net itself starts at $30 a month for one site. Hosting.com's Small plan renews at $9.99 for one site, on a platform it says was built with Rocket.net. That gap is what caught my eye. I would not call them identical without running both side by side, but on paper it is the cheapest way into that style of stack I have found. My Rocket.net speed test shows why that stack is worth wanting.

What You Get on Every Shared Plan

• Speed: LiteSpeed caching, tuned MySQL, AMD EPYC CPUs and NVMe SSD storage.
• Backups: daily backups stored off the server, with restore to any point in the last 30 days.
• Security: a web application firewall, malware detection and removal, and free SSL.
• Moving in: free managed migration of sites, email and domains, with a preview URL so you can check the site before it goes live.
• Extras: free domain registration, email accounts at your domain, and support for PHP, Node.js, MySQL and PostgreSQL.
• Guarantees: a 99.9% uptime SLA and a 30 day money back guarantee.

The free migration is the feature I would use first. Their team moves cPanel sites with a backup and restore and does other hosts manually, at no charge and with no limit on the number of sites. For anyone stuck on a slow host because moving feels risky, that removes the excuse.

Where Hosting.com Falls Short

These are the things I would want to know before paying:

• The renewal jump is steep. $1.99 to $13.99 on Starter, $3.79 to $19.99 on Pro. That is the industry pattern, but it is still a big step.
• The best price needs a long commitment. The $1.99 rate is tied to a four year term paid up front. Shorter terms cost more per month.
• Starter has no staging. You need Pro for staging sites and preview URLs.
• Shorter backup history on managed WordPress. 14 days of retention, against 30 days on the shared plans. Keep your own off-site backups as well; my backup plugin guide covers how.

What Hosting.com Customers Complain About

Hosting.com scores 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 7,254 reviews, with 88% five star and 7% one star when I checked on 11 November 2026. Two things to know before you lean on that number. Hosting.com invites customers to leave a review, and Trustpilot labels the profile that way. And most of the five star reviews thank a named support agent right after a ticket. So the score tells you the support is good, which matches my experience. The one star reviews tell you where it goes wrong, and they cluster around four themes.

• Price rises for existing customers. People moved over from brands Hosting.com bought, A2 Hosting and WebHostPython among them, describe renewals going up year after year. One reseller customer says the bill went from about $20 a month to about $45. Hosting.com's replies put it down to rising licensing and running costs.
• Billing surprises after the rebrand. Some former A2 customers did not recognise invoices under the Hosting.com name, treated the emails as spam, and then found charges for accounts they believed were closed.
• Domain problems. Domains left on “waiting for activation” after payment, and a renewed domain whose nameserver changes did not show up.
• An AI first line of support. Orbi, the AI assistant, answers first. The unhappy reviews describe going back and forth with it before reaching a person who could fix the problem.

One more I take seriously. A reviewer found more than 17,000 wrong URL references across sites on a shared cPanel server after a server IP change, and Hosting.com's own investigation pointed most likely to a WP Toolkit restore or sync. That is a risk on any shared host, not only this one, and it is exactly why I keep an independent backup on every host I use.

My take: none of this changes my verdict on support, and the reviews back that part up. It does change how I would buy. Take the four year term so the renewal jump comes later, put the renewal date in your calendar, whitelist emails from hosting.com, and check the renewal price a month before it is charged. If you are a former A2 customer, log in at my.hosting.com and look at what is set to renew.

Hosting.com vs Hostinger vs Cloudways

	Hosting.com	Hostinger	Cloudways
Entry price	$1.99/mo (4 years)	$2.49/mo (48 months)	$14/mo, or $8.40 with TREAT26
Renewal	$13.99/mo	$10.99/mo	No increase
Managed WordPress	Yes, from $4.49	Yes	Yes, on your own server
Best for	Small business sites that want help moving	Lowest total cost for one blog	Your own server and several sites

If price is all that matters, Hostinger renews cheaper. If you want your own server and room to grow, Cloudways. Hosting.com sits in between and wins on the managed WordPress tier and the hands-on migration.

Who Should Choose Hosting.com

• Choose it if you run a small business site or a few blogs and want email, backups and security in one bill.
• Choose the managed WordPress plan if you want WP Rocket, Object Cache Pro and a Cloudflare Enterprise CDN without configuring anything.
• Look elsewhere if you will not commit for more than a year and want the lowest monthly bill; the short term prices are less attractive.
• Look elsewhere if you need root access or a custom server stack; that is VPS territory.

Hosting.com Review FAQ

Related Hosting Guides

• A2 Hosting and Hosting.com Black Friday deal tracker
• Cloudways promo code, 40% off for four months
• Cloudways vs Rocket.net vs WP Engine, tested in 18 locations
• Black Friday hosting deals, ranked by four year cost

Disclosure: I earn a commission if you buy Hosting.com through the links on this page, at no extra cost to you. Every price here was read off hosting.com on 5 November 2026. You can read exactly how I test, verify and update everything on this site.