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If you are looking for quality web hosting, you have come to the right place. You can spend many hours researching web hosts and you will not find a better one than A Small Orange. If you are looking for a Dedicated Server, Cloud Hosting, VPS, professional Business hosting, or Shared hosting to run your sites or a Wordpress blog, ASO has quality hosting packages for you. If you are doing e-commerce and operating an online store, A Small Orange also has affordable PCI-compliant hosting plans for you to choose from. Click the link below to view the high-quality hosting plans available to meet your needs:
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I have been where you are. I've been a newbie with no idea about the differences between a good web host and a bad host. I've spent hours and hours searching for a good web hosting company. I've read countless reviews. I've hosted with crappy oversellers. I've encountered incompetent support that makes me jump through hoops that I shouldn't have to jump through when the problem is with the server and not with my browser's cache or ISP's network. I've compared hosts, compared plans, and dollar for dollar have never found a better value than ASO. Quality is what is important to me. And that is why I am here and intend to stay for a long time to come. If quality is important to you, make the smart decision and choose A Small Orange.
If you are a non-American, you can find a home here, too. A Small Orange hosts a number of clients from Europe and elsewhere around the world.
I highly recommend ASO because I believe in the values the company operates under and I have experienced the high-quality hosting service and competent support this company provides. I speak from experience and my recommendation carries 5 years of weight. Five years is a long time. Being here that long, you know that I have been here for a reason: because the service is exceptionally good.
This post is partly a thank you to the ASO team who has made hosting here a joy and partly an encouragement for any prospective customers out there to make the smart decision to join ASO. I consider my recommendation of this web hosting company a public service to all my fellow webmasters out there. Finding a good web host takes a lot of research and that requires a lot of time and careful thought. ASO is the best of the best. I know you will be happy here.
I cannot recommend this company highly enough.
I have some coupon codes in my signature line below to save you some money $$$. See the bottom of this testimonial for the discount codes.
This post is going to be a little long. I want to give you the reader as much information as possible about why you should choose to host your sites with A Small Orange. I'll tell you why we came here, where we came from, and why we love ASO and intend to stay for years to come.
Go Daddy Refugees
I was part of a group of guys that started a website back in 2005 because we were not happy with what was currently available representing our particular interest. Having little experience creating websites and no experience with a real web hosting company, we chose Go Daddy. Big mistake! Go Daddy was okay at first. Our web pages didn't load quickly, but it was acceptable for us who had no knowledge of what a real hosting company is like. But over time, server performance got worse and worse. Pages were taking forever to load. A SMF Forum page was taking 30 seconds to load from click to render at peak times. The SMF script had a timer in it that started at the top of the script and stopped at the end and output the page creation time at the bottom of the web page. It was taking the server 20 seconds just to process the PHP script and several more seconds to deliver the content to the browser. No web surfer is going to wait 30 seconds to view a web page. Wordpress was taking forever to load, too. This was completely unacceptable.
After contacting Go Daddy support, I got a bit of a run-around. Their support made it sound like it was a possible problem on my end. I had to do a traceroute, clear the browser cache, and stuff like that. The fact of the matter was that Go Daddy's server was extremely overloaded and that is the reason it was taking 20 seconds for a PHP script to execute and generate the page content. This went on day after day, week after week. We didn't even want to visit our own websites because of how slow the server was. It was a bad situation to be in.
Go Daddy is what is known in the web hosting industry as an “overseller”. Oversellers promise huge amounts of server resources to customers for a price that doesn't come close to covering the cost of delivering those resources. These oversellers work on the assumption that most clients won't take advantage of all the resources promised to them (even though some will try to). Then the oversellers cram as many customer accounts on the server as possible in an attempt to wring some profit out of their razor-thin margins. Inevitably, server performance suffers. It always does. You will read this type of horror story again and again from former clients of Go Daddy and other oversellers.
We spent many hours looking at other web hosting companies and comparing plans. After several days, we settled on one. Prior to canceling at Go Daddy, we thought it would be a good idea to set up at the new host to test things out. Well, we chose another overseller and the server's performance was terrible. While it was much better than Go Daddy, the SMF forum script was indicating that it was taking 8 – 9 seconds for the PHP script to execute during late afternoon peak times. (On A Small Orange, that same forum script took a fraction of a second to execute during the same peak time of day, which is excellent for a shared server. As you can see, that is a huge difference in performance.) We asked for and received a refund from the new host.
Wisely Choosing A Small Orange – No Overselling & Great Support!
We spent many more hours researching hosts until we finally ran across A Small Orange. One of the attractive features of ASO is that you can host as many add-on domains as you want. This is a nice feature because sometimes me and the guys will sit around and talk about website ideas, get what we think is a good idea, then register a domain name. Many oversellers charge extra to host additional domains. Not ASO. You pay for your hosting package and you are allowed to use your allotment with no artificial limits placed on the number of add-on domains.
What really impressed me about ASO were all the positive comments from customers on the forum. The people who host here love the company. Giving a recommendation is one thing; emphatically declaring your happiness with your web host is something that I had not seen before. After being here for 5 years, I can understand why ASO customers are so happy. I am one of the happy ones.
Based on how much traffic we got and how much we expected to grow, we found a very good-priced plan at ASO for about $1 a month more than we were paying for crappy hosting at Go Daddy. What a difference!
Before even uploading our files to the ASO server we noticed how much better this company was. Go Daddy used a cheap, slow, and difficult-to-use proprietary control panel whereas A Small Orange uses cPanel for its shared plans. cPanel makes every task a webmaster needs to do much more efficient. On Go Daddy, if we wanted to make a backup of the files on the server, or download them to move to the new server, we had to FTP the files down. Using FTP to transfer thousands of files takes a very long time (close to 2 hours for two relatively simple websites and a forum when we left Go Daddy). Using cPanel on A Small Orange, we can upload zip archives to the server and decompress them into a folder of our choosing. When doing backups, we can compress folders into a zip archive and download one big file instead of thousands of small files. What can take an hour or more by FTP takes minutes with cPanel. Using cPanel, we can also edit files directly on the server. Need to make a quick change to a file? Open the file using the cPanel File Manager, edit it, save it, and you are done in seconds. Fast and efficient.
After getting the files uploaded to the ASO server, creating the databases and testing everything out (a pretty painless process), we were amazed at the performance of the server. Our web pages loaded fast. Even during peak times of the day, our sites were loading quickly. We were happy and I'm sure our visitors were happy not having to wait 30 seconds to view a page during peak times.
Five years later, our sites still load fast. ASO never oversold the server. In five years time, I would say that A Small Orange has gotten even better. We use Wordpress and as resource-intensive of a PHP script as it is, it loads impressively fast on A Small Orange. If you are having problems with slow-loading times using Wordpress, it could be that your web host doesn't have the available resources. A Small Orange does because it does not oversell its servers like many other hosting companies do.
ASO's Culture Of Quality
A Small Orange knows there are other hosting companies out there. ASO's business model is based on providing quality at a good value. That is how A Small Orange differentiates itself from the competition. You want to save a measly $1 or $2 a month on a shared hosting plan? Go somewhere else. You want quality hosting that will provide your visitors with a good experience matched with competent technical support for you? Come here.
In my opinion, the best kind of support is the kind that you never need to use. It has been quite a while since I had to contact technical support for any kind of problem. The hosting has been rock-solid for a good long time now. But if I need to contact support, they will get back to me quickly with a response. If there is a problem, they will start working on it (if they aren't already working on it). A Small Orange will not pretend there is no problem or try to make me think the problem is on my end like some other hosting companies do.
A web hosting company's culture affects everything it does from the most inexpensive shared hosting plan all the way up to the dedicated servers. If a host can't get the basics like shared hosting right, are you going to trust them for Dedicated Servers, Cloud Hosting, or Virtual Private Servers? I certainly would not.
Business & E-Commerce – Who Needs A Small Orange?
If you make money from your websites (as we do) or rely on your website to represent your business on the internet, you need a quality web host. Downtime and slow loading can mean lost revenue and money out of your pocket. Web surfers are fickle. They want to find the information they are looking for and find it quickly. This is especially important if you are running CPM ads or operating an online store.
What about businesses that are not doing e-commerce? A quality web host is just as important. Your website is your signpost on the internet. Your website conveys important information about your company and the products or services you sell. Your website is going to be your first impression for many people. You want that impression to be good. If you are looking for a web host with email for your business, A Small Orange is a terrific choice.
If you are a web designer or web developer, ASO has a reseller package so you can host sites for your clients. This can help you establish long-term relationships with your clients and develop a source of recurring revenue. By establishing long-term relationships with your clients, they will be more likely to call on you if they need more work done in the future than on someone else. With A Small Orange's high-quality hosting, you can be confident your clients will be happy hosting their sites with you.
With over 5 years of experience as a happy customer of A Small Orange, I can attest to the quality of this company's hosting service and support. I am confident that we will be here for years to come. If you want a great web hosting company, you will not find a better host than ASO.
Sign up today! You will be glad you did.
