If you’re looking for quality, affordable hosting for your WordPress site, two names that you’ve probably come across are A2 Hosting and InMotion Hosting.
Both are on the short list of web hosts that are not owned by hosting giant EIG. And both also have a generally good reputation in the WordPress community.
Because there’s not one clear-cut winner, you might be looking for a little guidance when it comes down to A2 Hosting vs InMotion Hosting.
Luckily for you, we’ve actually written detailed reviews about both A2 Hosting and InMotion Hosting, so we’re in a good position to compare these two hosts against one another.
Before we get into the comparison, we want to be clear what we’re comparing. That is, for things like speed test comparisons, it helps to know the specific plan that we used at each host.
For A2 Hosting, our test site was hosted on the Turbo Web Hosting shared plan. This plan retails for $18.99 per month. You can read our full A2 Hosting review here.
For InMotion Hosting, our test site was hosted on the WP-2000S plan. This plan retails for $10.99 per month. You can read our full InMotion Hosting review here.
While A2 Hosting’s plan seems more expensive at first glance, it’s worth pointing out that the A2 Hosting plan allows unlimited websites, whereas the InMotion Hosting plan only supports two websites.
InMotion Hosting does also offer an unlimited plan, but that’s not what our test data applies to.
Whenever we write a hosting review, we always use the exact same configuration on our test site. This allows us to compare performance times across different hosts under similar conditions.
Basically, that means we can show you exactly how fast both of these hosts loaded the exact same website.
The verdict? InMotion Hosting was a little faster. But honestly? Both hosts performed pretty admirably for the affordable WordPress hosting options that they are.
When we tested both hosts’ support teams, we were able to quickly connect to a helpful operator over live chat.
Honestly, both hosts offer above-average support for this price range, so you won’t go wrong with either. But if we had to break it down, we did get a slightly faster response time at InMotion Hosting.
In July 2018, Google will start branding all sites running on HTTP as insecure. That’s why it’s absolutely essential that you move your WordPress site to HTTPS.
Thankfully, both of these hosts offer free SSL certificates that you can easily access.
Both A2 Hosting and InMotion hosting use cPanel for their dashboard. And both run the newest cPanel theme – Paper Lantern.
That means there’s not much meaningful difference between either with respect to dashboards.
If you’re a beginner, you’ll dig that both hosts make it super easy to install WordPress.
A2 Hosting vs InMotion Hosting: What’s Different?
A2 Hosting charges extra for priority support, even on the higher tier plans.
Because you’ve only gotten our opinion so far, we wanted to open things up and see what the greater WordPress community thought about these two hosts.
It’s worth a reminder, though, that this survey is a better indicator of popularity, not necessarily performance.
A2 Hosting vs InMotion Hosting: Which Should You Choose?
A2 Hosting and InMotion Hosting, along with SiteGround, are three of the most popular cheap WordPress hosts with power WordPress users, so I don’t think that you’ll go wrong with any of these options.
Unless you need A2 Hosting’s unlimited websites, though, I think InMotion Hosting’s cheap managed WordPress plans are a better option because they have a slight performance edge and are still similarly affordable.
If you do need unlimited websites, A2 Hosting’s plan still offers good performance at an affordable price point. And you can always consider one of InMotion Hosting’s general business plans for unlimited sites.
So – slight edge to InMotion Hosting based on our testing, but you really won’t go wrong with either option in this comparison.