A Small Orange Full Review: All You Need to Know
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A Small Orange is another web hosting service under the umbrella of Endurance International Group. While it has various plans to choose from, many third-party apps, it has limited bandwidth and storage. It's a mix of sweet and sour, just like oranges.
Pros
Cons
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Quick Stats
A sweet and sour web host service, A Small Orange, was established in 2003 to provide different web hosting plans. It’s another hosting company owned by Endurance International Group (EIG), the well-known owner of HostGator, BlueHost, and many more hosting services.
Whether you’re looking for Shared, Cloud VPS, Reseller, or even Dedicated hosting, everything you need is available on A Small Orange. But we’re here to talk about their shared hosting plan, so keep reading to find out everything about it.
A Small Orange's Hosting
While we're going to focus on shared hosting in this article, but A Small Orange offers a lot more than that. Let's take a look:
- Shared Hosting: For small-medium businesses looking to grow their online presence. Plans start from $7.16/month.
- Dedicated Hosting: For large businesses, a dedicated server is usually recommended. A Small Orange offers dedicated hosting starting from $89.98/month.
- Reseller Hosting: If you want to sell a server to others, A Small Orange will give you a hand for $24.20-$48.40/month.
- Cloud VPS Hosting: If you want a cloud hosting server with excellent hardware, A Small Orange offers it starting from $26.62/month.
Choose a suitable hosting plan for your business to grow.
Shared Hosting Plans
A Small Orange offers four different shared hosting plans. The Tiny plan and the first package, which is very limited and is a bit expensive compared to the features offered, are only billed annually.
Let’s take a look at all the details:
| Tiny | Small | Medium | Large | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Domain Name | Not Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Websites | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Storage | 500 MB | 5 GB | 15 GB | 30 GB |
| Bandwidth | 5 GB | 50 GB | 150 GB | 500 GB |
| Backup | Not Included | Not Included | Not Included | Not Included |
| SSL certificate | Not included (Purchase Aside) | Not included (Purchase Aside) | Not included (Purchase Aside) | Not included (Purchase Aside) |
| Website builder | Weebly | Weebly | Weebly | Weebly |
| Email Accounts | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Price/Month | $7.16 | $9.68 | $18.15 | $30.25 |
There’s a generous 90-day money-back guarantee, which is a REALLY long time compared to other web hosts.
Start Hosting for $7.16/Month!
Payment Methods
If you're wondering how you can pay for your A Small Orange plan, you can do so using the usual credit card or PayPal. Unfortunately, A Small Orange doesn't accept cryptocurrencies or other payment methods popular among some countries.
A Small Orange Ease of Use
There’s good news and bad news, but I’m going to start with the bad news. A Small Orange’s sign-up process is not the simplest process. Well, you do start by choosing your plan, select a domain name, pay, and finally receive a verification email. Pretty easy? Right. WRONG! Some people face some problems after the email verification and receive reminders to repay the amount they already paid.
Let’s not get caught up with all the negativities. Instead, we’ll focus on the positive side for a second, the cPanel is easy to use, and you can find auto-installed apps like Drupal, WordPress, Weebly, or other apps to build your website. Anyone can use Weebly to create a website, so downloading it would be the best idea; with its drag-and-drop editor, building a website is like taking a walk in the park.
Customer Support
Friendly customer support is one of the keys to success in the hosting industry. All beginners will need help every now and then, especially at the beginning, to understand what to do. A Small Orange’s support is available 24/7 on live chat and email, and you’ll be able to connect with an agent within minutes. If not, you can refer to their knowledge base with helpful articles.
Sadly, there’s no phone support available, and over the year’s customers had problems with A Small Oranges customer support. Answers have been brief or unhelpful solutions which required more research, and that’s a bit time-consuming.
A Small Orange Security
A Small Orange package comes with good security features. All plans come with password-protected directories, IP-blocking, and hotlink/leech protection.
Password Protected Directories
If you don't want users to access a certain part of your website, you can place passwords to these parts. This can be done from your website cPanel.
Spam Assassin Protection
You don't have to worry about your email or to get any spam or viruses from your emails because your email comes with top-notch security. With spam assassin protection, all your emails will be filtered to remove any spam.
Hotlink Protection
You don't have to get a headache trying to find a way to protect your bandwidth and website. Hotlinking can be enabled from the cPanel. This way, other websites won't be able to link to your files or data.
Site Backup
To make sure your website's data is safe, A Small Orange backs up your website daily. You can always restore your data if you need it.
Extra Add-on Security Features
Unfortunately, the SSL certificate is not included with their plans, but you can purchase it separately for $39.95/year. If you want to walk an extra step for security, you can buy the SiteLock starting from $20/year, which depending on the package, will protect your website from malware scans, file change monitoring, and more.
Load Times, Reliability, & Features
The questions remain, is A Small Orange reliable? What features do the plans include? Is it the one for me? It all depends on what you’re looking for, but we’re here to tell you all about their features. Let’s dig in:
Uptime
A Small Orange has a 99.9% Uptime Guarantee. Excellent uptime is essential for customers to access your products, and based on our tests, A Small Orange kept its uptime promise.
Features
Let's take a look at the features offered with A Small Orange's Plans:
- cPanel: To make managing your website as easy as possible.
- WordPress Optimized Servers: One-click app installations, SSD servers, and NGINX to ensure your website experience runs smoothly.
- Unlimited Emails: All plans come with unlimited emails. POP3, IMAP, and webmail access are included, and mailing lists, email forwarding, auto-responders, filtering, and virus scans.
- SSD Storage: Enjoy faster loading times and lower power consumption.
- Free Domain: All shared hosting plans come with a free domain except for the Tiny plan.
- Large app market: Many applications to install like Magneto, Weebly, etc. that can help create an e-commerce store, but you’ll need to purchase an SSL certificate for a safer transaction between you and your customers.
While these features are impressive, we think the plans are slightly expensive compared to what is offered. Other web hosts offer lower prices and better features like Hostinger.
For Advanced Users
If you're tech-savvy, you'll be happy to know there are some developer-friendly tools. These include MySQL Databases and multiple coding languages like JavaScript, Python, Ruby on Rails, and PHP5.
Custom Error Page
You might need to know some coding to customize the error page, but putting in the effort will help you create a professional website. This way, if the website doesn't open, a customized error page will appear to guide customers on what to do.
Server Location
A Small Orange's servers are found in the US. Some are located in Texas, and others in Michigan.
Website Builder
Weebly is an easy-to-use website builder. You can install it to create a website with its drag-and-drop function easily and allows you to add different elements to make the website of your dreams.
E-Commerce Features
If you're creating an online store, you might want to purchase the SSL certificate to make sure that your website is secure for your customers.
Well, since we're talking about creating an online store, I might as well tell you Weebly is an excellent website builder for this type of website. It has many SEO and marketing tools that will get you noticed on search engines. You can easily add products, manage payments, and do everything you need to create your store.
Final Verdict
I told you A Small Orange is sweet with the Weebly website builder, unlimited emails, and excellent uptime. However, I also mentioned it’s a bit sour with the limited bandwidth and storage with every plan and the high price. I think you might get a better value for your money with other web hosting services like HostGator, GoDaddy, or Bluehost. But if you’re willing to try A Small Orange, there’s a 90-day money-back guarantee, so there’s time for you to change your mind.