Indeed, A2hosting’s support is top notch, very responsive, very helpful and as long as your site doesn’t need to cope with high traffic or memory intensive tasks, they’re great and cheap.
I do have some problems with A2hosting. One of my apps running at a2hosting uses send_file to send an mp3 file (ranging between 3-10 MB) and after about 10 downloads, an “Failed to allocate memory” message pops up or the mongrel is terminated. I think this is caused by the combination of freezing the rails gem in the vendor’s directory (I had to do this, because otherwise the acts_as_attachment plugin fails to load and the mongrel fails to start properly) and having to use “:streaming => false” (if I don’t, every download just kills the mongrel without any error reporting). All I’m saying is: if you have a low profile site, a2hosting is a great shared host, if your site has to handle file downloads and you have the cash, go for a VPS from Rimuhosting.
Best regards
Peter De Berdt