A Small Orange vs. HostGator (2018)

Since 2003, A Small Orange has been building a company culture that's "homegrown" to embody two focuses: (1) solutions built to help customers grow online and (2) a workplace environment where employees thrive and stay. Three team members walked us through both what draws customers to A Small Orange hosting and what drew them to work for this passionate and creative company. Director of Marketing Zach Kwarta, Director of Technology Ryan Echter, and Datacenter Operations Manager Matt Harris introduced us to A Small Orange hosting solutions, allowing us to then take the servers for a spin with our own performance testing.

ASmallOrange.com says, "People are at the center of everything we do. This includes our employees, our customers, and our communities. It's that simple." When chatting with a few of the all-star people at A Small Orange, we were debriefed on the meaning of the term "homegrown," as used frequently throughout the hosting company's marketing message. We interpreted their definition of "homegrown hosting" to have two focuses:

1. QA’d Technology For Specific Customer Needs
2. Quality Support For Problem-Solving & Hand-Holding

Based on the passion the team shows for their customers and the services they offer them, "homegrown" indicates the care that goes into engineering new solutions and nurturing customers as they learn to use them.

The technology behind A Small Orange emphasizes speedy and secure performance. With that mission in mind, all A Small Orange shared hosting plans are equipped with SSD servers for 15 times faster page loading. "We're known for our technology," Zach said, and especially since the company's acquisition by the powerful Endurance International Group (EIG), the team continually strives to offer more and more performance in the services they build for their customers.

In building their "one-of-a-kind" cloud platform, as an example, the team has engineered several unique templates that are specific to various operating systems. They're loaded with caching technologies and powered by SSDs. Some of their cloud services are SAN-based, some are on local disk, but their templates are all built in house based on what they see their customers doing and needing to host their business. "We have a WordPress-optimized template that actually uses NGINX instead of the Apache web server to deliver faster content loading for the customers’ visitors," Matt shared with us, as an example. "We’ve set up PHP-FPM and other PHP-level caching technologies as well." By building these templates from scratch in house, A Small Orange offers a great deal of flexibility and boosted performance potential to their users.

The teammates told us that A Small Orange's product portfolio centers around the customer and his or her needs — and getting to play by the "Endurance playbook" has only broadened their potential to serve the customer. "It's the best of both worlds," Ryan said, referring to their experience with EIG. "Endurance has let us run with our growth mode and spirit in mind, so we've been able to scale a lot quicker and get some really cool hardware. We ultimately get the best of both worlds with this entrepreneurial freedom while also having the backing of one of the largest companies in the hosting space."

A Small Orange centers their business model around helping you build your business model on the Web. For this reason, they don't promise unlimited resources with hidden agendas and up-charges, they do offer a free cPanel license with all hosting plans, and they make sure their highly-trained staff is on hand to help every step of the way. "You get what you pay for and most people are satisfied with that," Zach said. "They’re really able to leverage the technology of the server."

Matt told us that on the support end of things, it's a personal experience. "Support has always been a big deal at ASO and I think customers recognize that," he said. "We offer a personable type of support; we treat the customers like we would want to be treated." All of their support is conducted in house and they're a US-based team — readily available and more than happy to solve problems (or hand-hold, if need be) 24/7/365.

A Small Orange has been around since 2003 and the team members we spoke with have been with the team for about a decade, collectively. "There’s definitely been a lot of longevity on this team," Matt said. "I think a lot of it has to do with the people." The passion for the people they work with and work for (you!) transcends into the pleasantry of the overall hosting experience with A Small Orange. High-tech hardware, in-house performance enhancements, and a team that truly cares — that's reliable hosting in the truest sense of the words.