a2hosting.com - A Discount Hosting Recommendation

Lately, when my clients have been asking me where they should host their smaller web apps, I've been sending them to a2hosting.com.

Why?

• Their shared hosting includes: MySQL 5.0, PHP 5 and Postgres. I've found Postgres to often be missing from discount hosting services.
• The service is dirt cheap - for about $47.00, you can get a year's worth of hosting. My clients love that their monthly fee for hosting their application is $3.95.
• The response to questions / issues has always been fast. On more than one occasion, I've needed to open up a ticket with them, and they got back to me in a totally reasonable amount of time. I even used their Live Help to ask about a policy question (can I move my server from MySQL 4.x to 5.x) - and got my question answered that way too.
• They offer a near instant installation of WordPress, if you need it. True, WordPress is pretty dang easy to install - but why bother with having to FTP all the files, and create the database, when you can just use their fast setup?

The highly discounted price won't work for everyone - as they limit you to a single database. However, for about $8.00 month, you get unlimited databases, shell access and lots of other goodies - which probably covers the bases for most small web apps and websites.

I have yet to try them out for a bigger app that requires either full server access or multiple servers, so I can't vouch for that sort of configuration. But for smaller apps, I find that my clients are quite satisfied with them.

Thanks to Jason, of TextCall fame, for searching them out and using them as his hosting provider.