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Hosting Review: A Small Orange

[ Icon: A Small Orange ] Perishable Press switched to A Small Orange [ASO] in March of 2007. At the time, I was looking for highly recommended shared hosting with several key features:

  • Solid customer service and extremely reliable server uptime
  • Unlimited domains with plenty of disk space and bandwidth
  • Unlimited Email accounts, MySQL databases and everything else
Update: A Small Orange is no longer my host. ASO service was great at the start, but after three years quality of service has declined considerably. There are some great people at ASO, but I can no longer recommend them for serious web hosting. For more info, check out my post on switching to Media Temple.

Hosting Plans

A Small Orange delivers all of the above in every shared hosting plan. ASO provides hosting plans perfect for any size operation:

Plan Space Bandwidth Price
Tiny 75 MB 3 GB $25/year
Small 400 MB 10 GB $5/month
Medium 1000 MB 25 GB $10/month
Large 2500 MB 60 GB $20/month
Super 4500 MB 100 GB $30/month

Plus, ASO will give you 2 free months of service with any 12-month purchase.

Excellent Service

Without a doubt, A Small Orange provides the best customer service I have ever experienced. Update: not so much anymore, so I left ASO</update>. Regardless of severity or complexity of the issue, the professional ASO support team deftly deals with all requests and quickly resolves every concern. ASO provides five excellent avenues of support:

  • Live chat support
  • Support ticket system
  • Active Community Forums
  • ASO Community Wiki
  • ASO Knowledgebase

Combine all of that with ASO’s shared hosting packages, and you you’ve got everything you need to take your online empire to the next level.

Excellent Reliability

A Small Orange delivers consistent, reliable uptime. As shown below, ASO provides an average uptime of 99.95% for my sites. As we all know, reliable server uptime is of the utmost importance. Plenty of hosts promise 99% uptime, but few actually deliver it. Using BasicState.com, I have been monitoring Monzilla Media on an ASO server for many months. Here is what I mean by “excellent reliability”..

DAILY UPTIME AND PERFORMANCE SUMMARY


monzillamedia.com                           
----------------------------------------------------------------------
date          uptime       dns   connect   request      ttfb      ttlb

2007-07-18    100.00     0.000     0.030     0.030     0.151     0.153
2007-07-17    100.00     0.000     0.015     0.015     0.066     0.067
2007-07-16    100.00     0.000     0.015     0.015     0.072     0.073
2007-07-15    100.00     0.000     0.015     0.015     0.078     0.078
2007-07-14    100.00     0.000     0.015     0.015     0.070     0.071
2007-07-13    100.00     0.000     0.036     0.036     0.121     0.126
2007-07-12    100.00     0.000     0.080     0.080     0.152     0.161
2007-07-11    100.00     0.000     0.018     0.019     0.188     0.199
2007-07-10    100.00     0.000     0.017     0.018     0.108     0.116
2007-07-09    100.00     0.000     0.017     0.017     0.106     0.115
2007-07-08    100.00     0.000     0.036     0.036     0.093     0.094
2007-07-07    100.00     0.000     0.015     0.015     0.072     0.073
2007-07-06     99.35     0.001     0.078     0.078     0.224     0.228
2007-07-05    100.00     0.000     0.099     0.100     0.278     0.280

----------------------------------------------------------------------
minimum        99.35     0.000     0.015     0.015     0.066     0.067
maximum       100.00     0.001     0.099     0.100     0.278     0.280
average        99.95     0.000     0.035     0.035     0.127     0.131
----------------------------------------------------------------------


------------------------------
source: http://basicstate.com/
------------------------------

Overall, A Small Orange truly delivers superior service. I have been working online since 1999 and have experienced countless web hosts. None of them provide the level of care, support, and service that I have experienced while here at ASO. I can honestly say that, for my needs, they are the best that I have been able to find. I highly DO NOT recommend A Small Orange for your next web hosting provider.

Update: Again for anyone who missed it: I no longer recommend A Small Orange for Hosting. Find something better, you deserve it. This article remains online for reference and historical purposes only.

About the Author
Jeff Starr = Fullstack Developer. Book Author. Teacher. Human Being.
The Tao of WordPress: Master the art of WordPress.

2 responses to “Hosting Review: A Small Orange”

  1. Thanks for the mention of basicstate.com.

    I especially liked seeing the email report reproduced.

    Just in case other readers don’t know, the basicstate.com uptime monitoring service is FREE.

  2. Perishable 2007/08/15 8:46 am

    Sure! I highly recommend basicstate.com. I have tried a few of the others out there, but basicstate.com is the easiest and most consistent of them all. And yes, they are 100% FREE!!

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Perishable Press is operated by Jeff Starr, a professional web developer and book author with two decades of experience. Here you will find posts about web development, WordPress, security, and more »
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