asmallorange shared web hosting review:
This article deals with the web hosting provider asmallorange.com shared hosting plan usage,rating and review. Web hosting plays an important role in the development of website and online presence. Shared hosting a plan which is offered by many web hosting providers across the globe for making a online presence with the basic needs. In this article I am reviewing such shared hosting plan used by me from the last one year offered by asmallorange.com
Now coming to asmallorange.com the shared web hosting offered by them, plans can be divided based on the bandwidth and size of the web space allocation. The best part of the shared web hosting with asmallorange is that all the plans get same robust and performance and reliable ssd( solid state drive) driven web hosting accounts.
Tiny Shared Web Hosting | Small Shared Web Hosting | Medium Shared Web Hosting | Large Shared Web Hosting | Main Features of Shared Web Hosting |
$ 35/ year | $5 / month | $10 / month | $20 /month | Price |
250 MB | 1 GB | 5 GB | 15 GB | Storage |
5 GB | 20 GB | 100 GB | 300 GB | Bandwidth |
static websites that need no huge space | Ideal for start ups | Ideal for growing websites | popular websites that need huge bandwidth | Ideal for |
15 Reasons to choose asmallorange web hosting:
- Best Proactive Customer Support
- Prorated refunds
- No unlimited mess
- No up selling
- Affordable plans with anytime upgrade to another package available.
- Scalability on demand
- 99.3% uptime
- Knowledge base and video tutorials in customer support area.
- Low cost dedicated ip (starting at $2 per month)
- Easy to use control panel and application installations.
- Good Technical support staff in support centre.
- SSD Shared Web Hosting
- Enterprise class web servers
- Performance and Reliability
- Security and Stability
- More Software and Application Support
Best Proactive Customer Support:
Customer support is the selling point for asmallorange web hosting. You may have never seen ads by asmallorange.com on Google or Facebook. They focus on providing quality and customer support. The customers are their brand ambassadors, they will market the web hosting provider as they are highly satisfied with the support provided even after sales. This proactive support is very important in web hosting business and asmallorange staff identified it very well and they provide top notch support all the time even for the lowest paid plan on their web hosting services.When it comes to technical support most top web hosting providers ( claimed by some websites across the word wide web) fail as they not even provide general support. A small orange scores in all support areas be it billing/general/technical or other support. When you buy their packages you can be assured that you will be in good support company which cares customers. I have reached to more than 25 plus web hosting companies for which most websites wrote paid reviews and affiliate reviews all over the web. They all failed in customer support area which is the most important for any company and customer.All the reviews stating top web hosting companies and lists are just either affiliate reviews or paid reviews that is why you never see companies like asmallorange in their list. Only experienced web masters and website administrators know the truth, they cannot recommend anyone web hosting companies in those lists as they are just some list of web hosting providers which do not even stand for what they list. Did you ever saw comments for their reviews, the answer will be no, because they are just affiliate marketing websites and they do not even know how web server work, they just use time to compare web hosting and give reviews based on features and the amount of affiliate commission they receive.At Get Life Tips we review hands on everything before publishing any review, that is why people trust our reviews and we also answer all the queries that are posted in comments
Prorated Refunds:
Many web hosting providers do not offer 90 day refund. Even they offer they will have some hidden terms and conditions. With asmallorange web hosting you can get full refund on even the shared web hosting account. Actually I have tested them to refund the amount after I purchased an shared hosting plan and when my client wanted another plan I just filed a support ticket and they offered immediate refund and cancellation of web hosting account even after 30 days of usage.The billing staff at aso are very friendly and they are ready offer refunds if you have any reason to cancel an account in the stipulated period. As I have discussed earlier all this is possible as aso focuses on customer satisfaction and stand by what they speak.
No Unlimited mess Shared Web Hosting:
When it comes to web hosting people are always lean towards the Shared web hosting providers which claim to offer unlimited storage , unlimited bandwidth even for $3 web hosting. They do not even know and think logically that there is no such thing as unlimited. Have ever came across a unlimited host beware to read their usage policy and terms and conditions for what they mean unlimited or un metered.It is best to avoid unlimited claiming web hosting companies as they come with hidden terms and conditions. Most of the web servers of the companies are over sold and the servers often crash and they fail to provide bandwidth they promise. The most bad thing is they may stop your server when your website hits traffic flood on digg day. With aso web hosting you are away from unlimited mess and you will get what you have purchased, be it bandwidth or storage. Believe me you will never use 20GB bandwidth even if you host a website , blog and email on single hosting account with average traffic of 5000 per hits per day.It is always a good thing to remember that stay away from web hosting companies that claim unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage. With limited things you can ask the web hosting companies for loss in the event if your website is stopped due to digg effect or sudden traffic spike. Choose wisely and choose a host like asmallorange.com which offer limited things.
No up selling Shared Web Hosting:
If you are into buying web hosting you see that most of the companies just up sell the web hosting plans which are not needed by customer. With asmallorange shared web hosting you do not need to buy what you never will use.
For example: some web hosting companies offer $3 hosting if you purchase their hosting for 3 years. This is not shown in the landing pages but hidden in terms and conditions and will reflect in billing after you are ready to input the credit card number. Let us see what may happen. If you buy for three years, if you are not satisfied after 1 year of usage you will not get any refund and the companies will gain. Many people who are new to buying web hosting are lured by such offers and feel bad when things run bad. Stay away from up selling web hosting.
Many web hosting companies offer free Facebook credits,bing credits, yahoo credits,google ad words credits, etc.. actually they are not loosing a penny for giving those credits as all those credits are offered to them for free and actually you can receive free credits yourself when you sign up for bing or any other advertising program. This is also one kind of up selling.
With no up selling aso wins among the crowd of web hosting providers. You will have better support and reliable, quality web hosting.
Affordable plans with any time upgrade to higher plans:
With aso (asmallorange.com) shared web hosting you get quality,reliable and affordable web hosting in the industry. It is very affordable as you can pay monthly and yearly and no long term contracts. Most of the top web hosting providers plans are not affordable and charge for everything.Most of the web hosting companies do not offer flexibility to upgrade the packages and plans. With asmallorange upgrading to a different plan is easy and affordable. If you want just some extra bandwidth staying in tin plan you can just pay for extra bandwidth only, this flexibility is very good for small businesses and start ups which are low on budget.
Scalability in Shared Web Hosting:
ASO offers something like cloud web hosting providers, if you are expecting a huge traffic any time in future, you can just file a support ticked for upgrading bandwidth without moving to a new plan. Similarly if you just need increased storage space without need for additional bandwidth you can upgrade your web hosting space as well with ease. This scalability makes aso the recommended web hosting provider for anyone.
All shared web hosting plans are provided with these standard features:
No Hidden Limitations
Many shared web hosts put artificial limits on what you can do in order to force you to upgrade your account. Not asmallorange:
Unlimited POP3/IMAP Mail Accounts
Unlimited MySQL Databases
Unlimited Mailing Lists
Unlimited Email Forwarders
Unlimited Sub domains
Unlimited Parked and Add on Domains
Unlimited FTP Accounts
I actually hosted four websites on a small shared web hosting plan. One word press, one joomla and two static websites along with personal email program. Their solid hosting plan lived up to expectation without performance lag.
Daily Backups in Shared Web Hosting
Automated daily backups ensure that your data is safe against calamity. Your website and information are safely stored and can be retrieved whenever they are needed.
They provide R1 Soft backups which has got easy to use interface from which you can ever your website any time from backup copies. This pretty useful when you are testing any new website.
Advanced Email Services with Shared Web Hosting
Unlimited email accounts are available with every A Small Orange hosting account. You can send and receive via your favourite email program. Web mail is also provided with your choice of 2 web mail systems, Horde and Squirrel Mail, to allow you to access your email from just about anywhere. Mailing lists and email forwarders are also standard with every account, allowing you to better manage and filter your email.I have used their email services they support blackberry mail and iphone. It is easy to configure your email account with mobile client or desktop client as well. The email services are top notch and reaches business mail account standards. Unlike some web hosting companies that limit the features or email accounts, asmallorange do no limit any email services. So you are paying for web hosting even covers business email services.
Astonishing Speed in Shared Web Hosting
Experience blazing fast shared hosting with our fully SSD driven shared hosting environment. SSD drives are at least 15 times faster than the traditional mechanical drives used by most other hosts. Seems ideal right? Well, it gets even better. SSD disk drives are actually more reliable than mechanical HDD drives are.This is really true, I have tested with gtmetrix and google page speed two web hosting providers with same static HTML files and same web server configuration. The ssd driver asmallorange showed the difference in response time. This makes the storage offered by asmallorange a premium storage when compared to other web hosting providers. The disk caching is also improved in aso web hosting when used caching plugins in word press compared to other web hosting account which offers hdd web hosting. Here the clear winner is asmallorange shared web hosting.
Powerful Control Panel in Shared Web Hosting
A Small Orange gives all accounts access to the leading control panel software on the market: cPanel. This powerful package puts control of your entire site at your finger tips. Using the Softaculous script installer, you can quickly and easily add features such as message boards and news scripts.Cpanel offered by aso is top notch which truly wins over the rest of web hosting providers it is also easy to use and configure things. Whether you are a newbie or experienced web server administrator you will find the cpanel very easy to use and learn. It gives various GUI for commonly used scripts and software. Thus making it the best. Using the Softaculous automatic script installer, installing new additions to your site couldn’t be easier. With just a few clicks you can have a working message board, content management system, or even a full Internet store set up in seconds, rather than hours. Softaculous is the best tool which makes installations/configuration/un installation smooth easy,fast and secure.Even a newbie could install word press,joomla,drupal,magento and many other applications.
The best part is cloud flare is integrated in cpanel itself this makes it best for enabling or disabling cloud flare directly from cpanel.
Technical configuration:
Performance
ASO use only enterprise class server hardware, no desktop rigs here! Our entire shared hosting environment uses the latest generation Intel Xeon E5 Dual Hex Core processors and fully solid-state-drive (SSD) driven storage in raid 10 arrays.
Security/Reliability
Daily backups
R1Soft Bare Metal Backups with multiple restore points
CloudLinux operating system for enhanced security and site performance
99.9% uptime guarantee
Password protected directories and IP-blocking
Hotlink and leech protection
Mod security is enabled by default to all the shared hosting plans,which is best in class web application firewall out there.
Software/Access in shared web hosting plans
PHP(multiple versions) , Perl, Python scripts support along with MySQL database access
Ruby on Rails support using Passenger for enhanced performance and reliability
e Commerce ready (SSL encryption available)
cPanel control panel with Softaculous script auto-installer ( More than 100+ installation apps,software and scripts in seconds)
FTP and SFTP access
Jailed shell upon request
phpMyAdmin to manage databases
Cron jobs for scheduled tasks
Customizable error pages
NodeJs Support.
NodeJs Support.
Email
POP3, IMAP, and web-based email access
Email spam and virus filtering
Mailing lists
Email forwarding, auto-responders, filters, and aliasing
Tracking Statistics
Web-based file manager
Webalizer and AWStats site statistics
Some FAQ on shared hosting.
What is shared web hosting ?
For dummies who do not even know how websites work, here is a small briefing that explains about how a website gets served over Internet to a browser.
Website consists of mark up documents /scripts / frameworks / databases / executable back end files.
All the website files should be stored on a computer which is connected to Internet with multiple backbones and Internet service providers. This is also called a web server. This is called a ‘web server’ as it servers website and web applications over Internet or intra net.
When a user enters a url (uniform resource locater) in the browser address bar and hits enter, the dns will lookup the url location and ip address and serves the files from the web server.
These files are usually markup documents like (HTML,css,asp,php etc..) These markup documents will render pictures,information,applications,documents,audio visuals and other functionalities on user browser window.
In order to view such website and documents from a url, we need some computer to serve those files and this is done by web server.
So web server is basically a computer customized to fulfill the needs of various frameworks,scripts,executables and application that websites or web application needs. It stores the files that a website or web application needs.
As the web server is always connected to Internet, it needs to be reliable,robust,secure and performance oriented. We need to pay for this web server as it is to be maintained by the companies. Buying a hosting space from a web hosting company is better than maintaining own web server in many cases. Web space is nothing but disk space / storage space that web hosting service provider offers to customers.
Shared Web Hosting: This one of the types of web hosting offered by web hosting providers, which entitles shared space,bandwidth,resources and security for the hosting plan. Shared hosting is the most affordable and inexpensive form of web hosting that many companies offer for customers who wants to build websites and get an online presence.
Why shared web hosting is cheap?
As you are sharing your hosting user account with several other users the companies offer the web space for low amount.
For your easy understanding shared hosting account is like user account on your pc/laptop/desktop with a hard disk partition and preloaded and installed applications and software.
Consider the same with the server here the hosting accounts are small chunks of hard disk / storage partitions which are divided among several users who are using the server. In this way hosting companies do not need another bare metal machine for each user as several users share the same machine resources and Internet maintaining the single machine is so easy and more over in shared hosting account some administrative privileges are not given in the control panel/ end user interface that can potentially crash/break the web server there by providing more security and almost enabling the web hosting companies maintenance free.
Who should use shared web hosting ?
Any one can choose to use shared hosting as it is affordable and ease of use. Shared hosting is best suitable for small websites / portals /startups/ websites with less executable scripts etc..
What can shared web hosting run ?
The shared hosting account can render almost most complicated applications also, basically it depends on the servers installed software and applications that are back end for websites and web applications.
For example a LAMP stack acronym for Linux Apache Mysql and PHP
It will run word press, joomla, drupal, and many other popular frame works and applications.
Most of the websites need lamp stack to run as a back end, only few websites need Microsoft servers.
So a shared hosting space can be classified into Linux machines and windows machines similar to our computers in home.
What makes shared web hosting not desirable for some people?
As shared hosting has got some limitations over control/administration/privileges/security and others it is not recommend for people looking for some more control over website /web application. Shared hosting is also not applicable for a site like Digg , I mean a site that has got super flooded traffic that are resource insensitive.
Still have questions? Feel Free to comment below, we are happy to answer.
Verdict:
After using for almost an year and hosting several websites of my clients and my own. I can assure and recommend asmallorange shared web hosting for any web master looking for quality,reliable and affordable web hosting these days which also offers a great after sales support and 24/7/365 technical support.I have tested the website security with owasp tools like accunetix, performance tools like gtmetrix,google page speed and performance and uptime monitoring tools like pingdom.
The web hosting offered by asmallorange is definitely the gem in web hosting industry, but just because they do not advertise aggressively, they are not lagging behind and great customer support has really boosted up their customer base over the years. If you cannot afford to have some costly web hosting and complicated web hosting companies like rackspace/mediatemple/softlayer/liquidweb you can buy the shared web hosting offered by aso which is not only good on pocket but also easy to maintain and use.
Best for Bloggers,Web Developers,Business Websites,Personal Websites,Forums,News Websites and small-medium e-commerce websites. It is probably only advanced shared hosting to offer advanced frameworks like Node Js.
I give 4.5/5 for this web hosting company.
Disclaimer: This is an exclusive review by www.getlifetips.com author,copying/reproducing it will lead you to legal consequences.All the screen shots shown here are the software’s of Cpanel and its partners.The Hands on Review of this product was made by us by using the web hosting and testing it with our developers and webmasters.This is not a paid review,Get Life Tips blog provides unbiased hands on review which we have personally evaluated/used.
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