As an A2 Hosting customer, did you know you can earn a $50 hosting credit for referring new customers to us? It’s all a part of the A2 Hosting Refer-A-Friend program. Best of all, you don’t even have to sign up for the program! Each A2 Hosting customer already has a Refer-A-Friend link found right in the Client Area of their My A2 Hosting account. That means whenever you have a friend, customer, family member, neighbor or colleague who needs hosting, you can just send them your Refer-A-Friend link and earn your $50 hosting credit!

Google has begun to roll out algorithm updates intended to remove hacked site spam from their search results. The goal of these updates is to help keep their searchers and users safe by removing these potentially harmful sites from their search results.

It’s been just over a year since we launched A2 Optimized WordPress. The goal of A2 Optimized WordPress was to take the guesswork out of how to get the fastest page loads and most secure settings. It is safe to say A2 Optimized WordPress has been a success with optimized WordPress sites loading up to 6X faster than non-optimized sites. A2 Optimized WordPress is available on all of our Hosting packages and we have since have made it available to all WordPress users regardless of their host (with a few feature limitations).

Ghost has launched its first major interface update in two years. I personally can’t believe it’s been that long since Ghost was launched and took the blogging software audience by storm. This update is exciting news especially if you’re a current Ghost user, or you’ve tried it in the past but didn’t think it was quite ready for prime time. Some of the new features you’ll see in this version of Ghost include:

You just launched a new site for your small business. Congrats! You may be a bakery, a dog salon or an ice cream shop. Now the trick is getting the word out. Focusing on SEO is a great way (and in most cases entirely free) to promote your website and more importantly your business. After all, over 90% of consumers use the internet to find local businesses. Here are a few relatively quick tasks you can complete in a day or two to help those consumers find you.

At A2 Hosting, we’re all about making sure you get the fastest page load speeds possible. That way your audience can have an excellent user experience when they visit your site. Your audience’s experience is a big part of the puzzle for you to be successful, but you need an audience in the first place.

When we launched our Turbo Servers back in November 2014, we touted up to 20X faster page load speeds thanks to a number of features like the A2 Optimized Site Accelerator, fewer users per server and enhanced performance over Apache. If 20X faster page loads weren’t enough for you to give our Turbo offering a try, we’ve updated these servers and included even more features:

According to a recently published Google study, hacked sites are up 180% over the past year. In an effort to help keep your websites and account from becoming another victim, we are excited to announce that we are rolling out our new security solution called Patchman. Patchman is a multi-function security tool that provide the following 3 services free of charge! We are rolling out Patchman on all Shared SSD Hosting accounts and on HDD servers numbered 81+. As Patchman requires cPanel, we are also investigating ways to offer this service on our Reseller, VPS and Dedicated Servers as well.

With all the Magento 2 Optimizations we can expect, it’s not surprising you want to get your hands on the latest version of Magento. From performance boosts to an enhanced dashboard, Magento 2 certainly sounds like the real deal. However with Magento 2 still in beta, it may be a bit of time before we can move to 2.0 on production sites. While we sit and wait for the latest and greatest version to get released, Magento published a rough timeline of events so we can at least have a reasonable idea of when this new version will be made available.

Recently we took a look at a technology stack comparison of Magento 1 vs Magento 2. Just a few of these improvements featured in Magento 2 include PSR compliance and CSS3. Of course the technology stack is just one of the many optimizations found in Magento 2. Here’s a quick look at some of the other improvements featured.