In May, we welcomed A2 Hosting as a MODX Site Sponsor. You may have seen their name and ads in the footer, forums and downloads page of the MODX website. Recently, I interviewed Brad Litwin, A2 Hosting’s Marketing Manager, to give you a little insight into the Michigan-based hosting company.
The Interview
Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Brad Litwin and I am the Marketing Manager for A2 Hosting.
Can you tell us a little about yourself as a person and what you do?
I have a very cool job. As you may know, there are quite a few web hosts to choose from these days. Working in the industry though, you start seeing some of the slimy things that other hosts do to attract new customers. One of my goals has always been to make sure we never fall into those practices and instead be a company that not only we can be proud of, but our customers are proud to host with as well. I feel like this is one of the reasons we’re able to attract quality partnerships like the one we’ve developed with MODX.
What do feel that you have to offer the MODX community?
As a proud, new MODX sponsor who offers MODX Hosting, we just wanted to take a moment to introduce our high-performance hosting solutions. Though MODX users will most likely be interested in our Web Hosting solutions, we also offer reseller hosting, VPS hosting, managed VPS hosting, dedicated hosting and managed dedicated hosting.
A service that is particularly interesting for MODX users is our solid state drive hosting. According to our SSD Hosting performance tests, sites hosted on our SSDs load pages up to 300% faster than when hosted on standard drives.
How long have you been around?
We were founded in 2003 and we’re actually celebrating our 10 year anniversary in June! We’re planning to give away some free hosting accounts this June to celebrate so I certainly recommend MODXers drop by to check us out. We have a highly amusing A2 Hosting historical timeline on our About page. I don’t think I could explain our history any better than what’s on that page.
Where are your Data Centers?
We currently offer hosting in our Southeast Michigan data center and just recently launched servers in our 100% green data center in Reykjavik, Iceland.
What does it mean that your Reykyavik data center is 'green', could you elaborate on that?
Good question! That means the data center uses natural cooling technology that pulls in the frigid Iceland outside air into its cooling unit. It runs the data center at very low power usage effectiveness levels and no carbon footprint is made!
What do your customers love about A2 Hosting?
Time and time again, I receive great feedback about our support staff. That’s why we have nicknamed them the Guru Crew. I always hear about how helpful, friendly and fast they are. This is extremely rewarding because these are my colleagues!
I certainly welcome MODX users to search Google for our reviews. I have no doubt that they’ll be impressed.
When people come to A2 Hosting what are they looking for?
I’m not going to name the hosting provider by name, they’re a big one, but I spoke to a customer recently and she mentioned we should market ourselves as a sanctuary for that company’s customers. Obviously we’re not going to do that, but users come to A2 Hosting looking for us to boost the speed of their site. We’re happy to help.
Our customers understand that their page load speed can very well determine the success of their site. There are a number of studies to back this up. A mere 1-second delay in page load speed significantly increases bounces and decreases conversion rates, visitor satisfaction and page views.
With that being said, all of our customers’ accounts are hosted on our high-performance SwiftServer platform. As I mentioned earlier, we also offer SSDs to provide an even larger speed boost.
What makes A2 Hosting different from other hosting companies?
I could keep talking about how we are the high-performance hosting provider—trust me I could. Instead, we really try to be the hosting provider we would want for ourselves. One of the ways we accomplish that is by offering what we call All-Inclusive Hosting. We’ve found that many hosts show a low price, only to hit their customers with a ton of upsells in their shopping cart such as backups, malware protection, SEO tools and premium support. We wouldn’t want to be treated this way as a customer, so we include all of those features and more in our Web Hosting packages for no additional charge.
On a final note, what could you tell us about the people at A2—not just related to the hosting business.
One of the coolest things about A2 Hosting is many of us telecommute, but we still get together regularly for meetings, parties, picnics etc. When we get together, it’s usually a blast because we have such a good team of people. One of the reasons is because our human resources department is very careful on who they hire.
In our day and age of online businesses, I think we sometimes forget that there are real people behind the companies we purchase from. I guess the reason I bring this up is that I want the MODX community to know that we have awesome people behind our company.
Thanks and Check Them Out
We would like to thank Brad and all his colleagues at A2 Hosting for being a proud Site Sponsor for MODX and we really encourage you to check them out.