What is A Small Orange?

A Small Orange (ASO) web hosting may have a strange name, but their zesty and unique attitude to business will surely get the juices flowing! ASO offer an ongoing 10% discount on or a free small plan to qualifying non-profit organisations and charities.

They have 4 core values to their company; people, dependability, integrity and relationships.

We love what we do, and it shows. Besides our ongoing and comprehensive training, A Small Orange employees are consistently encouraged to explore new projects and find ways to improve the customer experience.

Visit ASmallOrange.com (£4.58/Month)

On the face of it, ASO seemed like a really refreshing web host. Their claims were bold and their customers seemed entirely at the forefront of their business. Before signing up to their plans, it was important for me to check out what REAL customers were saying about their experiences.

It was hard to find much about the company online. They only had 16 TrustPilot reviews, achieving only a 2 star rating. The outlook at this point didn’t look great.

The general consensus was that A Small Orange used to be great, but has slipped downhill quite rapidly. People are reporting a distinct lack of customer support which obviously isn’t good to hear.

A Small Orange seem to have quite a good social media prescence. Their Facebook page shows they tend to respond to messages within an hour, and recent comments support this notion. Perhaps this is the route to go down if their website’s customer support isn’t very good.

A Small Orange Server Speed & Uptime

ASO guarantee a 99.9% uptime SLA. This is applicable on all of their shared plans. Whilst it’s great to see there is an uptime guarantee, I can’t help but feel a little disappointed. So many of the smaller hosting companies don’t seem to be able to offer much more than 99.9%, whereas larger companies can guarantee 99.99%.

The 99.9% uptime guarantee also features daily backups, with multiple restore points. Password-protected directories, IP-blocking, and hotlink/leech protection are all also included.

I signed up to ASO and was pleased that over the space of 6 months, my uptime was 99.98%. I’m very happy with that result because I was worried initially. Their uptime guarantee wasn’t great, but the ACTUAL results surpassed expectations.

My website’s response time was averaging around 682ms which isn’t bad at all. It’s well under 1 second which is what you want to be aiming for. Unfortunately though, when I loaded my website with 50+ users, my site’s speed and response times were struggling to process the requests.

Visit ASmallOrange.com (£4.58/Month)

A Small Orange Features

A Small Orange seem to have a lot of the features that most shared web hosts have. They offer 24/7 customer support (including live chat), SSD for faster performance, and the industry loved cPanel.

Included within their Tiny plan (£4.58 per month), you’ll get the following features:

500MB storage
5GB bandwidth
1 website
24/7 support
Free Weebly website builder

Although their Tiny plan doesn’t offer much in the way of features, it does include a free website builder. Once you move onto ASO’s Small plan (and beyond) you’ll get a FREE domain name, unlimited email accounts and more.

Included with ALL of their shared plans, let’s take a look at the following:

• Weebly Website Builder: Weebly’s website builder is FREE with all of A Small Orange’s shared hosting plans. The easy drag and drop builder is perfect for those wanting to build a simple website in a matter of hours.
• WordPress Optimised: A Small Orange’s hosting is optimised for WordPress websites. This means they should run faster with this host. From 1-click installs to NGINX, your site should be running smoothly.
• SSD: Solid State Drives (SSD) are essential to your website running quickly. SSD’s are up to 20x faster than standard HDD’s, so it’s great to see A Small Orange implementing this technology.
• cPanel: cPanel is the most popular control panel in the web hosting world. It’s reliable, easy to use, and offers a lot in the way of features. From anti-spam tools to analytics, there’s a whole world inside cPanel that you may not know about yet.

A Small Orange Customer Support

A Small Orange claim to offer 24/7 customer support, including live chat. We’ve already seen that they’re reasonably active on social media, but customer reviews suggest their support isn’t up to scratch.

Their support center offers a lot of knowledgebase articles. The articles are carefully categorised to make finding potential answers a lot easier. You can also enter your own question into the search box and the results will be filtered for you.

If you want REAL support though, or want to ask any questions, you’ll need to login to your account. This is a shame as there’s no live chat option for potential customers who might want to ask some pre-sales queries.

I was dubious about speaking to ASO because of their reputation. However, in my experience, I’ve received nothing but helpful support via live chat and email. One of the downsides is that they don’t have telephone support.

A Small Orange Pros and Cons

When they were originally launching their business in 2003, they may have been considered small and not part of the ‘big boys’ of the hosting world. Since then, ASO has obtained two data centers in Dallas (Texas) and Dearborn (Michigan).

They’ve been doing business for a long time, and my personal experience of A Small Orange doesn’t appear to reflect some recent customer reviews. Let’s summarise my pros and cons of this web host.

Pros

Uptime: Although they only guarantee an uptime of 99.9%, my tests showed an overall uptime of 99.98% over the course of 6 months. I’d consider this to be solid, reliable and stable, which is what you want in a web host.

Support: I found ASO’s customer support to be friendly and knowledgeble. Whilst the general consensus from the other reviews I’ve seen don’t seem to support this notion, I can’t comment otherwise as I’ve had a good experience.

Features: They may not offer LOTS of features, but A Small Orange offers their premium features on all of their plans (apart from the Tiny plan). These include SSDs, a free website builder, and backups.

Cons

Limits: Most web hosts have some terms and conditions surrounding acceptable use. If you exceed any of the limits set out by A Small Orange, they will suspend your account immediately. This seems pretty harsh considering the resources are shared.

Poor Reputation: Although I personally haven’t had a bad experience, A Small Orange has a very poor reputation. We’ve seen the reviews and comments made by other customers, and this would definitely put me off if I hadn’t read an in-depth hosting review.

A Small Orange Pricing

As I mentioned briefly earlier, A Small Orange have 4 shared web hosting plans. These start from just £4.58 per month and go up to £19.32 per month for their Large plan. Aside from the Tiny plan which doesn’t include a free domain, the other hosting plans are very similar.

There’s a clear difference in storage space and bandwidth between the plans, however the features are EXACTLY the same.

Do I Recommend A Small Orange?

Yes I do recommend A Small Orange. Despite other reviews suggesting a negative experience, mine has been nothing but easy and reliable. In my tests, I received a solid uptime of 99.98%, a decent response time, and their support was friendly and helpful.

However, there are PLENTY of other web hosts out there who offer similar, or even more features at a lower cost. Take BlueHost for example, they cost £2.43 per month and offer unlimited bandwidth and storage space.

Here’s a quick summary of A Small Orange:

SSD technology (this means up to 20x faster website speeds which my site definitely received)
Good customer support (they have a live chat option, email and knowledgebase which were all really helpful)
Free website builder (when you sign up to ASO you’ll get access to Weebly’s website builder for FREE)
Free domain name (apart from the Tiny plan, you’ll get a FREE domain name included in the price)

Harsh acceptable usage limits (if you exceed the limits, your account will be immediately suspended)
Very negative reputation from other customers (this would put a lot of people off)