Hosting Q&A With MODX Site Sponsor, A2 Hosting

In May, A2 Hosting became and official Site Sponsor for MODX. Their support for the ongoing development and growth of MODX is sincerely appreciated. Many of you may have seen their sponsor ads in a few locations around the site and heard about them in the MODX Insider newsletter. We thought it would be good to give anyone curious about A2, their SSD servers and anything else related to their hosting, right here on the MODX forums.

Do you have any benchmarks to compare your hosting with?

Quote from: revitalagency at Jun 26, 2013, 06:26 PM

Do you have any benchmarks to compare your hosting with?

Hi There!

My name is Andy Melichar, I am the Community Brand Manager for A2 Hosting.

We have a couple tools you can use to compare our hosting. You can see how we stack up against several other common hosting providers here: http://www.a2hosting.com/all-inclusive-hosting

Also on our SSD hosting page: http://www.a2hosting.com/ssd-hosting we have a chart showing the performance improvements found on SSD hosting with WordPress, PrestaShop and MySQL Transactions. We typically see up to a 300% improvement in page load speed when using SSD's as compared to SAN or traditional Hard Drive storage. Our official MODX benchmarks are in the process of running and we will release those soon - we've manually tested MODX on both our standard hosting and our SSD hosting. The improvement in the speed of MODX with SSD hosting was definitely noticeable, and we're expecting our benchmarks to have a similar result as WordPress and PrestaShop.

I hope that answers your question, if there is anything else I can help you out with, please let me know!

Thanks,
Andy

Thanks Andy that looks great. I'll be switching over from Host Gator where they've stopped focusing on Hosting and Started adding more features that compete with me like Site Builders and SEO Tools. I need a host who focuses on Hosting and not selling web tools because my WHM account has over 100 sites.

If I am on a reseller account WHM/Cpanel with 15-20 accounts, how easy is it to move over to you? I am currently on HostDime and server performance is mediocre to say the least.

Quote from: smashingred at Jun 29, 2013, 10:06 AM

If I am on a reseller account WHM/Cpanel with 15-20 accounts, how easy is it to move over to you? I am currently on HostDime and server performance is mediocre to say the least.

Hi Jay!

Moving over is fairly easy, especially from a cPanel account. Our techs can perform a cPanel migration from your current server to our servers, which keeps most all of your settings and configurations intact. The longest part of the process is waiting for DNS to propagate and point your domain to our servers, which can take 24 hours.

Even if we're not able to run a direct migration from cPanel to our servers, our techs are able to assist you in getting everything copied over and configured on our servers quickly.

Once you sign up for your A2 Hosting account, you'll have access to my.a2hosting.com where we handle all of our support requests. You can create a ticket and request migration assistance - our techs will respond and gather the information they need to help you make it a smooth and easy process. In most cases we are able to complete migrations within 72 hours.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Thanks,
Andy

Quote from: revitalagency at Jun 28, 2013, 04:23 PM

Thanks Andy that looks great. I'll be switching over from Host Gator where they've stopped focusing on Hosting and Started adding more features that compete with me like Site Builders and SEO Tools. I need a host who focuses on Hosting and not selling web tools because my WHM account has over 100 sites.

We'll be happy to have you! We definitely maintain our focus on the hosting experience and performance - not with how many "extra" features we can add. Most of our feature additions are performance-related such as CloudFlare, Railgun and Solid State Drives.

Let me know if I can assist you in any way with getting set up or if you have any questions.

Thanks!
Andy

Mmmm. SSDs. Sounds tasty!

Quote from: sottwell at Jul 01, 2013, 10:57 AM

Mmmm. SSDs. Sounds tasty!

Tasty and speedy. And believe it or not, they are low-fat - so you can indulge without all the guilt.

Ok, you talked me into it (the discount didn't hurt ) Now to figure out what the MODx Manager login will be, since I selected a pre-installed MODx with the account. I will start out by presuming it will be the same as my ftp or cpanel login.

Heh. I posted too soon. Another email from Softaculous with what I need. Hmmm... default login username of "admin". Very bad! Must change immediately!