A Small Orange Review
A Small Orange Review Based On My Personal Experience:
There are only a handful of good hosting companies that can claim to provide the best services.
With the highly unstable hosting market, it is really hard to maintain hardware efficiency while providing excellent customer support.
It’s even rarer that an organization that excels in the above features has the necessary infrastructure to expand or contract depending on market behavior.
However, A Small Orange that started in 2003 as a homegrown web hosting company has defined at market speculations to become one of the few consistently best companies in the world.
It offers a range of plans that is ideal for each type of business or customer. Moreover, the intuitive user interface along with the excellent customer support turns any customer into one of their true followers.
Every now and then you can find web administrators and blog owners hosting their websites with A Small Orange for as long as they can remember.
The internet is also filled with excellent reviews from their past and present customers.
Let’s glance at its catalog of plans and features that set it apart from all other competing web hosting companies.
Also read: A Small Orange Vs Godaddy Vs Bluehost
A Small Orange Web Hosting Plans & Features
A Small Orange provides a range of hosting plans suited for all kinds of customers and industries regardless of the amount of resource consumption or type of application.
All its hosting plans fall distinctly into one of the 5 following categories: Shared, Business, Reseller, Cloud VPS and dedicated servers.
Each category is again subdivided into distinct plans that are ideal for various types of personal, commercial or business oriented applications.
Let’s explore each plan to find the best one that suits you:
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting plans are mostly for beginners or web administrators who have limited traffic to their website.
Depending on the amount of traffic and type of web application to be hosted on the server, A Small Orange provides 4 unique plans for shared hosting.
Each plan comes with a set of features that allow easy deployment, configuration and administration of the website.
The traffic and web application performance depends the type of plan selected.
Here are the 4 types of shared hosting plans offered by A Small Orange.
- Tiny: Ideal for beginners and users who just want a static website or a small blog with limited audience. It comes with 500MB storage and 5GB bandwidth. Unfortunately it does not offer a free domain name even if the user registers for more than 1 year. However, a user can easily configure unlimited subdomains and still have 3 parked domains with this plan. The plan costs only $35 per year but is still powerful to run a small blog or corporate website.
- Small: Ideal for starters who want a powerful web application like wordpress, Joomla or other popular CMS’s. It comes with 5GB storage and 50GB bandwidth. It offers a free domain name on plans registered for 1 or more years. The resources offers are enough to run a powerful blog that can handle up to 500-1000 visitors a day. However you cannot host ecommerce applications as they require much more processing power and consume higher bandwidth.
- Medium: Ideal for fast growing bloggers and traffic consuming websites, this plan comes with 150GB bandwidth and 15GB storage. A user can easily host a small ecommerce application but with rising traffic he may have to upgrade to a higher plan. However, 15GB is enough to store any kind of media intensive application provided there is a controllable amount of traffic to the website.
- Large: Ideal for businesses and ecommerce applications, this plan comes with much higher resource that can easily handle up to 5000 users a day. The plan offers 30GB storage and 500GB bandwidth which is ideal for any large or growing ecommerce of personal blog. However, the business plans are a better suited for such applications, therefore you should check them out before you subscribe to this plan.
Business Hosting
Business plans are specially configured servers that support resource intensive web applications while maintaining the necessary performance.
They are mainly configured for ecommerce stores but can also handle any kind of high resource consuming application.
The plans also include a free SSL certificate to allow users to carry out secure transactions.
- Start-up: The start-up plan is ideal for new ecommerce websites that get a limited number of users. The plan can still handle up to 10000 unique visitors every day. This should be enough for most new ecommerce websites. If the traffic increases, you can easily upgrade to higher plans that come with higher storage and more bandwidth. The start-up plan costs only $20 a month but comes with 40GB storage and 600GB bandwidth.
- Small Business: This is the next higher plan with much more resources ideal for growing ecommerce websites or high traffic websites. It comes with 50GB storage and 800GB bandwidth and costs only $40. The extra bandwidth is for the rising amount of traffic. The plan can easily handle upwards of 15000 unique visitors every day. If you want more power, the next plan provide the utmost resources in the business section
- Enterprise: The enterprise plans for already established ecommerce or high traffic websites and comes with 60GB storage and 1000GB bandwidth. This high bandwidth is enough to handle most large ecommerce stores. It costs only $60 a month and is perhaps the best shared business hosting plan in the market. The highly optimized servers make any web application a breeze to setup and run.
Reseller Hosting
The reseller plan is ideal for web hosting companies and web designers who like to provide custom hosting solutions for their customers.
It comes with all the features of shared and business accounts and are flexible enough to build any kind of server configuration.
The administrator can easily manage, size
- Small: Ideal for starters in the web hosting industry, this is mainly targeted towards the web developer and designer who wants to host their client’s websites. The hosting plan comes with 20GB storage and 250GB bandwidth. It costs only $15 a month and can be easily upgraded to the next plan whenever required. Users can host up to 30 websites in the account and customize each hosting account as per their client’s requirements.
- Medium: Built for existing web designers and hosting companies, this plan comes with 25GB storage and 250GB bandwidth. Users can host up to 50 websites in each plan but can easily upgrade to the next plan as per requirements.
- Large: Ideal for growing hosting companies and developers with enough customers, this plan comes with 50GB storage and 1500 GB bandwidth. Users can host up to 100 website and customize each hosting account as per their client’s requirements.
Cloud VPS Hosting
The virtual private server is for dynamically growing websites that need much more power than usual shared hosting plans.
Users have much more control on a VPS plan than any type of shared plans.
A Small Orange provides highly customizable VPS plans ideal for all kinds of web applications.
These servers can easily handle any type of high resource oriented web application.
Below is a breakdown of all the plans provided by A Small Orange.
Cores | RAM(GB) | Storage(GB) | Bandwidth(TB) | Cost($/Month) |
1 | 1 | 20 | 500GB | 20 |
2 | 2 | 30 | 1 | 30 |
2 | 3 | 45 | 1.5 | 45 |
4 | 4 | 60 | 2 | 60 |
4 | 5 | 75 | 2.5 | 75 |
6 | 6 | 90 | 3 | 90 |
8 | 8 | 120 | 4 | 120 |
8 | 10 | 150 | 5 | 150 |
You can easily upgrade to any plan depending on your resource requirements.
You can build any type of web application in the world class server infrastructure while leveraging the best customer support for your tasks.
Dedicated Server Hosting
Dedicated plans are for serious web administrators who require utmost control over their hosted servers.
Each plan comes with enough power equivalent to a thousand shared hosting plans.
Mostly large organizations and growing companies leverage these plans for their customers.
Here are the four unique configurations offered by A Small Orange. All the plans come with 5 free IP’s and 5TB bandwidth.
- Starter: The starter plan costs on $125 but comes with Intel Xeon E3-1220 V2, 3.1 GHz and turbo boost up to 3.5GHz. It is a four core processor with 6464 CPU score. The plan comes with 5TB bandwidth and 5 free IPs. Moreover, Users can select either a 1TB HDD or 128GB SSD on Raid-1.
- Standard: Ideal for high performance oriented web applications, this plan comes with Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 processor with 3.2GHz and turbo boost up to 3.7GHz. This is also a four core processer with 8883 CPU score. It comes with 8GB RAM and allows the same storage option like the starter plan.
- Professional: A much more powerful four core 3.5GHz and turbo boost up to 3.9GHz server with 16GB RAM and 9700 CPU score. It offers the same 1TB HDD or a 256GB SSD as a viable storage option.
- Ultimate: The most powerful server also provides the most powerful configuration option for users. It comes with a Dual Intel Xeon E5-2620 12 core processor with 2.0GHz with turbo boost up to 2.5GHz. With a CPU score above 12000 it really sets a standard for high performance servers. The storage options are similar to the professional plan.
Upgrades and Migration
Upgrades to existing plans are extremely easy through A Small Orange’s control panel.
You can upgrade or downgrade anytime depending on your requirements.
For migration, the company provides premium migration services as part of their web design services.
You can sign up for the service and their experts can transfer your existing website from your previous host to A Small Orange.
The above screenshot is a part of A Small Orange’s support page that shows how easy it is to upgrade, downgrade or even migrate to any type of plan s per requirements.
Therefore, you will hardly find any negative reviews for their migration or web design services.
In case of complex or custom applications, you can collaborate with the company’s team to transfer the applications as per your requirements.
A High Performance & Reliable Web Hosting Company
A Small Orange is primarily popular for its right performance servers with SSD storage.
Solid state drives greatly increase the performance of any web application and powerful dedicated resources for any type of hosting plan makes A Small Orange one of the most reliable hosting platform on the web.
You can easily build sophisticated apps or host the most resource consuming applications on the server without any hardware or performance constraints.
However, it is a general feature that most resource consumption apps tend to take up high bandwidth.
Therefore you may have to upgrade to higher plans as per your bandwidth consumption.
The company follows a strict notification policy of informing each of their clients weeks before any scheduled maintenance on their servers.
Therefore you get enough time to handle your traffic for the time period.
Most of the times, the server go down for a maximum of 5-10 minutes and then they are back up with more efficiency than before.
Thus if you are hosting a small website, it won’t matter much for you.
My website started out as a normal one but suddenly grew to up to 3000 page views in a day.
I had the tiny plan but still the bandwidth consumption was much less than expected.
The total bandwidth automatically got adjusted over time and the performance wasn’t hampered at all.
A Web Hosting Company That Knows That The Page Speed & Uptime Matter To You
A Small Orange uses standard page speed techniques with recommended mod_page speed module for Apache.
This allows websites to remain complaint with Google’s recommendations for page speed increment and optimization.
The above page speed graph shows a statistical report over a certain period and as you can notice the stability in the graph, the server remained at its highest potential.
But if you are using high resource consumption applications like crawlers that automatically consume more CPU resource, the page speed of other application on your hosting server wouldn’t be affected.
Moreover, unless and until your bandwidth is running out, you won’t notice any lagging page speeds.
However you need to cache your content with the appropriate CDN’s to ensure that your users get the most out of your website.
A Host That Care About Customer Support & Usability
A Small Orange really shines in terms of customer support.
They have highly skilled people who are always ready to guide you through your setup and installation phases.
You can also rely on them in case of any bugs or errors you may encounter while running your websites.
Often most web hosting companies do not offer any post-sales support but A Small Orange has the highly experienced technical people to assist you through any kind of problem in your website or hosting plan.
You can reach A Small Orange’s customer support team with any means available to you.
They provide live chat through their website which is always available to your whenever you need.
This really helps when you are configuring your website for the first time or setting up a new web application.
You can also email them at info@asmallorange.com.
More self-study people, there is a comprehensive knowledge base that has all possible answers to scenarios faces by users.
You can also find their scheduled maintenance from their server status page: status.asmallorange.com.
The page also documents any interrupted service and their estimated restoration time.
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Conclusion: Why I Choose A Small Orange & Why I Recommend Them
A Small Orange is among the best hosting companies in the world today.
This is mainly because of their excellent server infrastructure and customer support.
With its wide range of plans, you can move your existing website from any other hosting company or start fresh and keep upgrading as your traffic and resource consumption grows.
Their hands on migration and web design services also help you build robust web applications as per your requirement.
Thus you should definitely go with A Small Orange if you are expecting top quality service at affordable prices.