Web hosting services provide the platform over which your website can be managed and displayed for users all around the globe. The internet revolution has sparked a huge rise in these services with hosting being an area of opportunity and business growth. For the customer, choosing a service has become extremely difficult. This is due to the umpteen number of hosting service providers.
Most of the hosting companies offer a similar range of plans and have a very complex arrangement. You may sign-up thinking you have chosen the perfect plan and then be asked to upgrade instantly to avail the benefits.
In this post I will share my review of A small orange hosting experience across the last 6 months and above all, apologise to all of the readers that moved their sites over A Small orange BACK OFF now my advice.
I am really sorry about all of the problems you guys have had with this so called homegrown hosting(it sucks badly). So let’s get down to business and why you should avoid A Small Orange. In the past I have tried various hosting companies such as Inmotion, Bluehost, Siteground, Knownhost and others. Knownhost was a managed VPS. Then I decided to move away from these hosts and find a solution that gives me complete peace of mind.
A Small Orange Review 2024: Dont waste your money
Here is an example of just some of the things they have done-
- Deleting live customer data without taking a backup
- Lots of site down time/slow loading.
- Losing connecting to the server in the post editor
- Repeat broken promises from their team
- Support is a rolling joke for me. They dont have any professionals who can handle their support.
You must be wondering that how is a small orange any different from other web hosting services? Well, I am going to discuss about exactly that!
At any other hosting service, there is a select list of plans. When you choose one, the chances are high that you are getting all you want but also are paired with certain features which are of no use to you and you have to purchase a costly upgrade to be able to gain more control over the entire process.
A small orange, invites its customers to buy only the resources that they need. Their plans are diverse and designed in such a way that you can avail at each step of site development. For instance, if you are a newbie you can opt for the fast shared plan or if you are established and need bigger services then you can go for bigger plans. Moreover, the plans have another subset of options or packages to choose from.But their services suck and servers goes down without notice.
BloggersIdeas was itself running on A small orange proudly but things changed here, they were worst and most scam hosting service I have ever seen. Their servers go down all the time & my blog was facing downtime issue frequently & I faced a lost of $4000+.
Above screenshots means that my local machine was losing connection with the server and timing out completely. This happened every single time I tried to edit, write or publish a post without fail.
My previous $3 per month host didn’t have that problem. It was better than A Small Orange. You can ask my writers & my team who handles editing of blog posts & handles my server. Rahul Rakesh( my writer), Sonam Chawla( Writer & content marketer) , Aditya Jha Nath( Handles server issues) , Jithin Matthew ( optimize data), Arun Singh( Server optimization expert) & Ashwani Singh( WordPress issues).
What business loses I faced with Scam A Small Orange hosting:
I lost $4000+ due to downtime issues
My readers got annoyed & everyone complained about my site downtime.
I was ranking for many keywords which were fetching me traffic & good conversions too but all lost due to ASO pathetic servers and their poor after sales services.
Hosting plans they offer but trust me they suck at providing quality services. so dont buy any hosting plans from them. You will regret after buying it just like I suffered a huge loss to my business.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting services are provided by almost all hosting companies but this one stands out on a few grounds. There are four kinds of shared hosting plans.
Business Hosting
The business hosting plans seem to be powerful, secure and built for ecommerce. They can also be customised to suit the needs of other high traffic generating websites. PCI compliance is guaranteed and you also get a free SSL certificate, whatever package you choose. The business packages are relatively cheap and range from $20-$60 per month. For a business website, that isn’t much.
Another thing which I would like to point out here is that there are hidden limitations with a small orange as they dont tell their customers about downtime and their servers suck all the time. .
For many website owners, owning a server and maintaining it can be a difficult task. Thus a small orange has a unique service called Semi-dedicated hosting where they will take care of your server needs to a certain extent. There are various packages here too. You can choose how many CPU cores would be enough to smoothly run your site and then choose from the options which range from $60 a month which gives you 2 CPU cores to $100 a month where you get 4 CPU cores.
Dedicated Servers
If you want to outsource 100% of your server needs then you can opt for the dedicated servers packages where you can choose the best performance server for your needs and avail numerous benefits like
- Terabytes of bandwidth
- Daily Backups
- Reliable and secure infrastructure
- Easy upgrades
Cloud VPS hosting
With more and more interest developing towards cloud computing and big data today, you may be inclined to shun the shackles of hard-wired infrastructure and might be looking for Cloud hosting services. A small orange does provide these services too! You simply have to create an estimate of your requirements and see whether the costs are in your budget. For instance, a combination of 2 CPU cores, 2048 MB RAM, 40 GB storage and 1 TB bandwidth will cost you around $30 per month.
Overview of ASO Cpanel Screenshots:
Here comes the real face of A Small Orange
Pathetic & most Stupid Customer Support: Check this conversation
I had chat with their customer services about my downtime they have fucking stupid reply all the time that they are checking. Their support agent Jeff B. replies are very irritating and annoying for me. They dont have answer to my questions why servers goes down all the time. Their tech team is very slow in replying and my blog was down for 4 hours+ repeatedly. So I feel very irritation and they have cross their limits by giving useless reasons for their servers down.
Here is mail conversation with their support on different days and I was facing downtime issues again & again. In June & July Month I faced downtime of atleast 50-60 times. That is terrible and big loss for my business. But still A small orange didnt care for it. They keep providing useless reasons.
I asked for my refund but they refused as 90 days exceeded.
Wrapping It Up: Dont Buy A Small Orange Scam Hosting (A Small Orange Review 2024)
It is a utter shame to see the demise of A Small Orange in this manner. Like I said at the start of the article they were one of the best hosting companies I had ever worked with by quite a stretch.
In my professional career I have dealt with a range of hosting companies from the likes of inmotion – none of them could stand up to the service & support A Small Orange used to offer.
In my opinion when A Small Orange first started it was a business founded out of passion & innovation. That was clear from the level of support and knowledge displayed when I first moved over to ASO.
However I think they grew too quickly over the past couple of years which has caused them major problems. They have hosted many sites on their single servers and then things changed here. Their server crashes lot of time.
So Dont buy hosting from A Small Orange and better shift to other hosting services. You can check our top web hosting services, top vps hosting providers & best wordpress hosting.
hiiiiiiiiiii
i total with agree for u and thnx
Absolutely the worst hosting company. Used to be great, now they are worse than terrible whatever that its. You would be better off having your grandmother host it in her attic. No support. Account issues. Content disappeared. Terrible, terrible, terrible. RUN AWAY!!!!
ASO is really bad Hosting provider. Now I migrated from ASO to DO 🙂 Let ASO people know about it..
Cancellation Reason for ASmallOrange: Worse customer service ever!
During sign up process the information provided was that I could enter the EPP number of the domain I want to transfer from GoDaddy after completion of sign up process.
When I returned to the site to update EPP number, they asked for $15 fee to transfer, which I was willing to pay BUT the web interface kept saying product not in the cart to complete transaction.
I chatted with their agent who was not helpful at all and opened a ticket
After 2 days I opened another ticket but no response.
For such a simple thing when you are acquiring a new customer, they have such BAD customer service… I just cannot imagine what it will be like afterwards. And they do not have any phone number to call either.
Also, they said 90 days money back guarantee and now while cancelling they said my account was non-refundable… simply amazing customer service.
I have NEVER experienced such bad customer service from anyone for new customers in my life even not from telephone service providers who are the worst.
Gosh!
A Small Orange used to be a great host. I have used them since 2011. However, they were purchased by EIG – the Death Star of hosting.
Now they are a very poor quality host, and should be renamed A Small Indian Orange. The problem is Indians. Indians immigrate and all they can think about is how to extract as much money from everything. I have Indian recruiters calling to lowball me on rates. Indians have taken over the large consulting companies and are all about ripping off customers. Indians are fine as workers, but when they move into management, its going downhill fast. I think its a greed addiction.
CEO Hari Ravichandran leads an Indian operation that reduces hosting quality while keeping customers from leaving by changing the contracts after the fact. I am looking for a small hosting company that is not Indian. As soon as EIG buys your host — leave that host. No one should sign a long term hosting deal, because any host can be purchased by EIG at any time.
I TOTAL AGREE WITH THIS BLOGGER. ASO IS THE WORST EVER!!!
Hello,
I have a complete different experience. I purchased a VPS from them on Cyber Monday / Black Friday 2015. I have a website which receives around a million views every month. I was skeptical first, but thought its just $150 for 2 years, so went ahead with them, thought if it could’t handle the load, I would put all my clients on it. It took around 2-3 days for the VPS to be setup as I was getting 2x RAM i.e. 4GB RAM, and it was Black Friday, so they must have a lot of orders on their hands. Well I received my cPanel credentials shortly thereafter.
I logged in to the VPS and created my domain. I used BackupBuddy to transfer all the data to the server and after the DNS change took effect. I would like to tell that BackupBuddy is awesome. It is a very simple process and it doesn’t even need WordPress installed to move the website. Anyways so coming back the website was up and running fast.
Two months from that time till now, the website gets around 2 million views now, yes around 1 million more in just 2 months, maybe it was the previous hosting which was not capable enough for the load and just time out the queries. The VPS runs at just around 0.1 to 0.3 load and handles the traffic like a breeze. I haven’t got a single email from Jetpack and Pingdom that my website was not reachable in these two months. I am more than happy with ASO, and I would certainly recommend their VPS.
I do know that sometime back they were having a lot of problems with their cloud servers, but they all seem to be sorted now.
WARNING
Be careful when you cancel your account – if you paid via Paypal with a recurring payment then even after cancelling they will get your next payment.
It is vital you check on Paypal as the asmallorange billing information is incorrect and says ‘Credit Card’ as the method of payment, even if you payed via Paypal.
I only found this out after they took an extra $100 off me which so far I have not been able to get back….
I can’t believe they can get away with such scams…
Agreed. I’m paying for a tier 2 VPS, and I’m just about at the end of my rope. They make mistakes (such as my server being installed with a bad cpanel license) and the support is absolutely terrible. I’ll send an email, they respond with a short cookie cutter response that is maybe marginally helpful if I’m lucky, and the cycle continues. Out of curiosity, I looked at their hiring page and was surprised to see that their support people start at $12/hr — how do you justify paying people who should have solid technical skills little more than minimum wage? At least it makes sense that they hire people without sufficient skills (and motivation) to be able to help more, rather than just thinking that they’re all dismissive jerks. Right now I’ve not been able to access their “cloud control” for my site for over a day and I’m pretty upset that I’m paying for this kind of service.
We run a busy photography studio, and our site averages 300 unique visitors per day. We signed-up with A Small Orange hosting and their Small Business hosting plan ($400 USD/year) largely because we thought business accounts are treated better than their $2/month accounts. We also wanted to be hosted by a small company, as our experience with large hosting companies has been negative. Apparently, we were wrong on this assumption. We pay for site uptime monitoring, and receive an e-mail every two days that our site is down, usually for about an hour. Their support is also slow and e-mail only. When we initially signed up, they offered tech support by phone. Over the years, that option has disappeared. When our site was recently down for a number of hours consecutively, during our busiest season, all we could do is e-mail them and hope and pray. The final nail in the coffin was when they e-mailed all of their customers on Black Friday, about a ridiculous deal, where they offered 75% OFF on all hosting plans. Upon inquiring, we were told the deal is only valid for NEW customers. Who on Earth does this? Who e-mails a deal to current customers when it’s in fact only valid for new customers? After speaking to Anna J. in sales, they tried to get us to upgrade to a more expensive plan at a discounted rate. No thanks. We’ll be looking for a new host come January when our term is up.
ASO VPS down for past 96 hours in a stretch. I have lost thousands of dollars by now. I had to learn this lesson the hard way.
Stay away. ASO is for those people who host for fun.
Came across your site after googling asmallorange reviews after my hosting is down yet again! I am looking for another host now as the constant downtime is unbearable. It seems every time I work on my sites or try to use my VPS it is all down. It makes me wonder how often it is down when I am not watching or trying to work.
I would love to convert to WPEngine but $99 a month is a tad expensive right now for the sites I have up.
Who else would you recommend for a VPS with good website speed and uptime?
I can only confirm everything you wrote. As I type this, my server is down for the 8th time in the past 8 months. They started off really great but now they just cost my company money because of all the downtime. I fear we will loose our top google ranking due to the f*ck up service and inability to fix their damn servers. Stay away from them as far as you can.
What do you think of Arvixe?
Hey Carsten, they suck at services. I dont prefer Asmallorange ever to anyone. Arvixe is good. I have used their services and happy with them. Use my coupons to get discount on Arvixe : https://www.bloggersideas.com/arvixe-hosting-coupon-codes/.
Hope it helps you.
I am currently using ASO. I think they are good for websites with less traffic. We are a WordPress theme development company and now once our themes are out for sale, we are expecting huge traffic. Definitely, I wont be using ASO. Thanks for the detailed review.
Their affiliate program is also the worst of all.
Dont use ASO. They are worst in their services. I lost my business while being with them
Hosting is the most important part of your blog, you should always go with reliable and well known hosting providers. if you are not sure then ask fellow bloggers about their hosting get genuine reviews and then purchase any plan.
Woah ! This one is your first bad review about any campaign, Thanks For Noticing this bro ! It will really help newbies 🙂
Even reading Your first bad review was an awesome experience. It was cool because you make people notice to not to use their worst service.. also feeling sorry to losing your money by them…