A Small Orange is a web hosting company that is serving tens of thousands of clients worldwide. There data centers are located in Michigan, Dearborn and Michigan, and provide great speed, connectivity and reliability for the respective clients.

As we may judge from its name, A Small Orange, the company claims to be a different hosting company in the sense that unlike other companies, they do not offer any “unlimited plans” that in reality may require costly upgrades. The company believes that the client should pay for the resources they actually need, and nothing more.

This means, they offer the usual business, reseller and shared hosting, as well as could VPS with usual options such as Softaculous and cPanel in a range of plans that are certainly cheaper on the low end, but the top-end plan is definitely not inexpensive offering 500GB bandwidth, 24/7 email, live chat support and 30GB storage.

While I found the design aesthetic is slightly quirky, there are a range of options that make perfect sense for small businesses such as dedicated servers, semi-dedicated servers, managed servers and a service to build tailored WordPress sites. The semi-dedicated, business, VPS and shared hosting services come with a 90-day money back guarantee. A small orange offers automated daily backups and a bunch of additional services that complement the existing hosting plans.

Here is a detailed A Small Orange review with closer look at the features, pros and cons. So, let me take you through what A Small Orange is all about, what I like about it and what not.

Performance

We wanted a good way to test the performance of different hosting companies. You can see a comparison for different hosting companies on our WordPress hosting page (soon). 

We run a speed test on a domain that is 1.2MB (just under the average page size of the website on the Intenet) that is hosted with A Small Orange every 24 hours using the speed testing website webpagetest.org and the results are shown in the chart below. 

To see the results of the speed test, click any of the data points in the chart. When done click back in your browser to see the chart again. 

We test 4 for aspects of performance for A Small Orange: 

Speed Index: The Speed Index metric was added to WebPagetest in April, 2012 and measures how quickly the page contents are visually populated (where lower numbers are better).

Load Time: The Load Time is the time from when the user started navigating to the page until the Document Complete event (usually when all of the page content has loaded).

First Byte: The First Byte time is the time from when the user started navigating to the page until the first bit of the server response arrived. The bulk of this time is usually referred to the "back-end time" and is the amount of time the server spent building the page for the user.

Visually Complete:Time of the last visual change to the page (in ms, only available when video capture is enabled)

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As you can the see the average values for each day are excellent for a shared hosting company, in fact they are some of the best metrics we have tested in terms of performance vs price. 

A Small Orange promises an uptime of at least 99.9 percent. The reasons for their great uptime track record are many. They have state of the art data centers and a quality server. The servers are placed within multiple lines of physical security, and the data centers are closely monitored 24X7 over CCTV. Apart from this, the company uses the standard climate control, redundant power batteries, diesel power and fire suppression to make sure that the data centers operate appropriately at all times. While supervising the uptime, we also kept a track of the page loading times, and we found that the average response time is around 665 ms on average, which is pretty good. The company has invested substantially in improving loading times and has deployed SSD disks with 3X speed compared to mechanical ones.

A Small Orange Hosting Plans

When it comes to hosting plans, A Small Orange offers a rich choice to its clients. While some people may find the variations a bit confusing, but it certainly helps because you can buy a plan that meets your needs the best. There is some web hosting plans for each category, so let us take a look at various options available:

Reseller Web Hosting

• Small: $15/month with 20GB Storage, 250GB Bandwidth, 30 hosted sites
• Medium: $25/month with 25GB Storage, 500GB Bandwidth, 50 hosted sites
• Large: $35/month with 50GB Storage, 1500GB Bandwidth, 100 hosted sites

The reseller plans come with:

• 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
• Superfast Solid State Drive (SSD) Servers for 15 times better performance
• Access to Reseller WHM
• 24/7 Expert Tech Support Based in the USA

Shared Web Hosting

• Tiny: $2.92/month with 500MB Storage, 5GB Bandwidth, 1 domain
• Small: $5/month with 5GB Storage, 50GB Bandwidth, Unlimited Domains
• Medium: $10/month with 15GB Storage, 150GB Bandwidth, Unlimited Domains
• Large: $20/month with 30 GB Storage, 300GB Bandwidth, Unlimited Domains

Shared Web Hosting plans come with:

• 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
• Superfast Solid State Drive (SSD) Servers for 15 times better performance
• 24/7 Expert Tech Support Based in the USA
• Unlimited Email Accounts and Mailing lists

Business Web Hosting

• Startup: $20/month with 40GB Storage, 600GB Bandwidth
• Small Business: $40/month with 50GB Storage, 800GB Bandwidth
• Enterprise: $60/month with 60GB Storage, 1000GB Bandwidth
• The business plans come with:
• Free SSL Certificate ($39 value)
• Lower Customer Densities
• Regularly-Scanned, PCI Compliant Servers
• PostgreSQL Database Support

Features

A Small Orange provides a host of features such as unlimited MySQL databases, POP3/IMAP mail accounts, mail lists, FTP accounts and subdomains. Apart from these basic features, you also get some advanced features such as Perl, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python, SSL and several others. However, all hosting plans offered by A Small Orange have limited bandwidth and storage including the most expensive plan. One of the biggest merits of A Small Orange is that it utilizes the cPanel, which is user-friendly and features easy-to-recognize icons and icon names, so managing files, email and other things becomes a breeze. Also, the company offers Softaculous, a 1-click installer to simplify the software installation process. This installer is integrated with cPanel, and with this tool, you can successfully install more than 100 scripts in a hassle free manner.

Technical Support

When it comes to choosing hosting companies, technical support is an important criteria, especially for small business owners. So, we explored all the different ways in which A Small Orange offers technical support. The company indeed takes its customer service seriously and offers 24X7 technical support through different channels such as live chat, toll-free phone call, and email. The company is pretty quick in responding to customer queries. Another thing that makes their customer service great is the fact that their customer support employees have at least five years of experience, which means whenever you call up the technical support, you do not talk to a call center operator, but to a technical expert. The tech support staff has to go through a strict selection process and undergo continuous training, which makes them qualified to be able to solve customer queries. The only downside is that the average response time is around 50 minutes, which may not be the best in the industry.

Pros

Several shared hosting plans to choose from The thing that we like about A Small Orange is that you do not have to pay for anything more than what you are using. If you intend hosting a small personal website, then the Tiny shared hosting plan would be a great choice for you. If you are looking for more disk space and bandwidth, then there are medium and large plans, and you can choose the one that best meets your needs. If you think you need more room, and these packages are not enough, you can anytime upgrade to a dedicated hosting or VPS plan.

A Small Orange does not oversell

In the world full of “unlimited” everything, A Small Orange comes across as an honest company that does not oversell you on anything more than they can provide. This means you exactly know what you get, and you can stay assured that your website will always run at optimal performance. Unlike many other hosting companies, A Small Orange does not assume that the large percentage of their client will use only a small percentage of the resources. Instead, they make sure that there are enough resources available for each client even if each of them is using the resources at their maximum.

Complete range of hosting services

A Small Orange provides a complete range of hosting services including VPS, dedicated and shared hosting. While shared hosting plans offer enough bandwidth and disk space to meet the needs of most people, but in case you want greater control and security, and you are ready to pay a little more, then dedicated hosting and VPS should work well for you. The company also offers reseller hosting, which makes a great choice for those who intend venturing into the web hosting business. They offer specially designed plans for businesses, and all these plans come with a dedicated IP address and a free SSL certificate.

Unlimited Email addresses with each domain

A Small Orange lets website owners create unlimited email addresses with each domain hosted by the company. This is a great feature especially for businesses as each employee can be assigned a personal email. They also allow website owners to create a catchall email, which helps in case someone sends an email with an address in their domain that does not exist. So, you can never miss a mail even if it is sent to a non-existent address in your domain. Great selection of apps One of the best ways to customize your website is by way of apps, and what we loved about A Small Orange was that they have a great collection of apps. You can simply click and install WordPress or any other blog app if you want to start a blog. In case you want a forum or calendar on your website, or you want to host some online games, you will find apps to serve the purpose. Whether you want to create an e-commerce site, educational site, survey tools or wikis, A Small Orange has you covered.

Easy Sign-Up

For a beginner, an easy sign-up process comes as great help. From live chat support to help you choose the right hosting plan for your need to an easy registration and payment process, the entire sign-up process is smooth and hassle-free. You can get started in a matter of minutes. Responsive technical support A Small Orange may not be a huge company like some of their competitors, but they are certainly doing great as far as technical support is concerned. They offer phone support and live chat and 24X7 email support. Although chat support is not available during the weekends, there are other channels that you can use. The good thing about the service is its quality. With experienced tech support team on the other side, you can stay assured that you will get a solution the very first time.

Eco-friendly initiatives

A Small Orange makes efforts to minimize their impact on the environment matching 150 percent of their energy consumptions with renewable energy certificates. They also allow a lot of their employees to work from home, thereby saving some more energy. Although this may have nothing to do with their web hosting services, it surely shows the company in good light and demonstrates their responsible nature.

90 Day return policy

A Small Orange lets you try their web hosting for 90 day period without any obligations. In case you are not satisfied, you can choose to cancel the service within the 90 day period and get a full refund. Even if you decide to cancel the services after the 90 day period, you can still receive a prorated refund.

Cons

No Unlimited Packages

A Small Orange has disk space and bandwidth limits on all packages, which may not appeal to some people especially when there is a deluge of “unlimited everything” packages in the market. The upside to this is that you pay for what you use, but the downside is that with an upper limit of 25GB disk space on shared packages if you need more the only option you have is to upgrade to a dedicated hosting or VPS package.

No mobile sites

Today, mobile phones have become more popular than ever before, so business owners want to make sure that they are accessible to their customers through mobile devices as well. However, A Small Orange does not have any tools to help you create a mobile website. Although the company offers a user-friendly site builder (Weebly) with customizable templates, which can be helpful to many, those who want to create a mobile friendly site are left longing for more.

Bottom line