Liquid Web Review for 2023, Are you considering a web hosting provider that offers managed WordPress hosting? Liquid Web of one of the foremost hosts in the managed WordPress hosting scene. But should you consider them as one of your choices? Below is our review of Liquid Web to help you decide.
Upon landing on the Liquid website. it is immediately apparent that they take their hosting business seriously. particularly managed web hosting plans using dedicated servers. Although enterprise-level hosting is their specialty. They offer smaller businesses more competitively priced plans.
First Impressions: Solid, with Notable Customer Support Indicators
Business hosting is not cheap, but to make it a bit more worthwhile. Liquid Web extends technical support to the highest grade. ‘The most helpful humans in hosting’ and ‘heroic’ are some ways they have described their support staff.
This dedication to exceedingly helpful support has led to support reaction times of 59 seconds or fewer and 100% uptime from specialized experts. Liquid Web employs a customer-facing team of 250 support staff and personnel that ‘monitor sonar’. This team’s sole purpose is the immediate resolution of server issues–sometimes before the user even knows there is a problem.
By deciding that user help is an important component of web hosting. They awarded Liquid Web a leading NPS or Net Promoter Score. A customer loyalty benchmark has been given to businesses. Ahead of stiff competition from log names such as JetBlue, Amazon, and Apple.
Liquid Web can also count itself among the 2017 best web hosting provider list compiled by PCMag. As well as being one of the Fastest Growing Companies by INC 5000 list honorees 8 out of the past 10 years.
About the Company
Founded in 1997 by Jim Geiger. Liquid Web is a managed internet hosting provider with 3 data centers in Lasing, Michigan. With over 30,000 customers spread out in over 150 countries. This provider began offering managed WordPress web hosting in 2015.
Liquid Web manages about one million websites. Employing over 500 web hosting experts to deliver managed WordPress hosting to its users. Liquid Web hosts big brand websites such as Motorola, FedEx, and National Geographic.
Hosting Options
Liquid Web provides advanced hosting. Making them ideal for those looking to upgrade from shared hosting.
Liquid Web hosting plans differ from regular shared web hosting in several ways:
VPS (Virtual Private Servers) Web Hosting Plans
Shared hosting plans and VPS plans are quite similar. They both involve a physical server that hosts several sites. They differ, however, in their performance. A good web hosting provider strictly delineates between websites being hosted on a VPS–whereas shared hosting pools resources on a server and shares them out to several websites hosted within. VPS servers allocate resources to individual websites.
Dedicated Servers
We dedicate the next level up to VPS hosting server hosting. This describes a form of hosting that allocated the entire server’s resources to the hosting requirements of a single site. They awarded the configuration control of this server to the user. With plans that are more limited.
The web host places restrictions on what applications it can run, and so forth. Dedicated servers allow the user to select the best options for their requirements.
Dedicated servers are the most highly performing and secure web hosting solutions. This is critical for those who run a site that is highly trafficked while handling information that is highly sensitive. VPS plans offer tight security (as do some shared plans) but no other form of hosting offers more performance and security than dedicated servers.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting describes the hosting of a site within a dispersed server network. There is a variation in the scattering. But basically, its main transformational feature is the advantages that are realized with a distributed network. This means it is super-reliable because of fail-over and redundancy. Make your website accessible continuously should any one or even several network parts fail.
Do You Require Liquid Web Specialty Hosting?
No, and yes. This is highly reliant on the host, and your site’s requirements, subject to several factors. Some web hosting providers do not provide the requisite features required to establish a secure online shop, particularly if you intend to open an internet storefront. Shared hosting plans may not accommodate your site because of its resource requirements.
Online storefront owners may not be thinking of performance when starting out, but growth. Especially in audience numbers, often makes them consider this facet of hosting. As it may affect the bottom line if not dealt with promptly, because of poor performance. A hosting option that incorporates the likelihood of growth is a smart way of running your business.
Features
Hosting Specific to WordPress
While operational since 1997, 2015 was the first year Liquid Web unveiled the managed hosting packages targeting the WordPress platform. While slightly late to the WordPress-specific hosting party. Liquid Web came out guns blazing and served notice to the rest of the industry that they were serious players. Find out if this host is right for you by delving into this detailed Liquid Web review.
WooCommerce Hosting
WooCommerce users, in particular, should definitely consider Liquid Web as their web hosting partner. While many hosts have latched on to the WordPress hosting bandwagon. Very few have done the same with WooCommerce hosting. Liquid Web is one of the few, as with its other hosting packages. This one is excellent.
Main Features
When attempting a comparison of managed WordPress web hosting plan presented by Liquid Web. you first have to consider the 5 options on offer:
- Commerce.
- Agency Plus.
- Enterprise.
- Agency.
- Professional.
- Personal.
They planned the range that each plan can host is between 10 and 200. Depending on the specific plan, with storage ranging in size between 100 GB and 1 TB.
Liquid Web Starter: Hosting Plans and Their Prices
The prices charged by Liquid Web for their entry-level web hosting plans are slightly higher when compared to other web hosting providers. This is due, in part, because they accommodate their WordPress hosting product in a managed VPS environment. Also, what other hosts offer as paid features, Liquid Web provides as part of its larger service, price inclusive.
Usability
For the smooth operation of your server and hosting environment. Liquid Web offers the Plesk control panel.
While popular in its own right. It is not as ubiquitous as cPanel. It is a platform used with Windows server hosting environments, whereas cPanel is used in Linux hosting. CPanel owes part of its popularity to its ease of use. while Plesk contains a slight learning curve to master.
That being said, it should allow you to full use of its account management characteristics, track usage of resources, or manage domains. For remote website management, Plesk is available in iOS and Android smartphone-compatible versions. Which should suit busy online business owners just fine.
What more can Plesk help you achieve? Here are the top ten of many more:
- Track bandwidth usage.
- Email setup.
- Connect web hosting to domain names.
- Website backup.
- Website authentication.
- Third-party app installations.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) improvement. Which is important in increasing sales and conversions.
- Onboarding of new customers.
- Building websites.
- Functionality addition.
In addition, Plesk grants access to the tool Softaculous. which enables through several clicks the addition of many websites features such as
- Surveys and polls–Important for customer sentiment capturing.
- Tools for social networking.
- Wikis.
- Image galleries.
- ERP.
- Advertisement management.
- Many eCommerce features.
- Project management.
- Customer management tools and live chat software.
- Customer support and discussion forums.
- Blogs and micro-blogs.
Besides Plesk and cPanel, Liquid Web offers their customers a third control panel option; InterWorx. You can find more details on how the three compare and which will work best for you on the Liquid Web website.
Liquid Web VPS Environment
They a commonly held belief among web hosting professionals that VPS offers superior performance when compared with shared hosting. This is the main reason Liquid Web went with VPS servers as the basis of their managed WordPress web hosting product, in part to make sure their customers receive the very fastest in website performance.
Fully Managed WordPress Hosting
When hosting your WordPress website on a shared hosting plan. Regularly updating it and its plugins can become a chore. WordPress will have its updates automatically enabled. As well as its associated plugins if Liquid Web is your web hosting partner.
This feature ensures your site is permanently secure. Leaving you with more time to tackle other pressing tasks like driving traffic and creating interesting content. Automatic updates also provide a way of keeping your site secure as they seal off loopholes in outdated WordPress versions that hackers can exploit.
Website Transfers
They bake a free migration feature into Liquid Web’s offerings. Where an existing WordPress site is transferred from your current web host to their servers, free.
WP-CLI Supported
Every Liquid Web-managed WordPress hosting plan comes with enabled WP CLI. This is a command-line instrument that customers use in plugin management. Multiple WordPress installations and achieve other such tasks without having to use a GBI or graphical browser interface.
Similar to other managed WordPress hosting providers. Liquid Web makes sure it installs this popular CMS on your behalf. Once a hosting plan is chosen, site customization can begin using a range of plugins that can be within the Fantastico Library.
They bundled the backend which is a part of WordPress with several themes that can be used in the customization of your site’s look and design.
Performance
The current online marketplace is hyper-competitive. A fast website can give you the edge in a crowded web space. Quick page loading times often ensure more productive browsing experiences, which results in higher rates of success with more conversions for your web-based business.
In order to guarantee rapid website performance. They optimize every Liquid Web-managed WordPress hosting server using technologies like Mod_PageSpeed and MemCached.
In addition, Liquid Web offers a Content Delivery Network (CDN) on the server side to lessen page load times and boost speed, in concert with full Solid-State Drive (SSD) deployment. As mentioned above, there are no compromises to the sheer performance of Liquid Web’s on-site performance because of their complete use throughout their servers of SSDs.
Although SSDs are more expensive to buy and run than regular disks, solid-state drives are comparatively faster. As well as being more reliable.
As a website owner, you should not compromise either on whether your chosen web hosting partner deploys SSDs for disk space. The publishing of this review, Liquid Web advertises it owns and operates three data centers in Lansing, Arizona, and Michigan. which are SSAE-16 certified. Since they control their network infrastructure completely, the company confidently promised 100% uptime.
Also promised is reliable, 24/7/365 network availability because of the way the three data centers are designed. With state-of-the-art installations. In order to ensure fast connections and minimal latency at any point in time, Liquid Web engages up to 4 providers of Tier One bandwidth.
For reducing the likelihood of power outages by taking servers out of service. Liquid Web keeps on standby emergency generators since they use UPS systems. It houses every server in humidity and temperature-controlled rooms, to keep them performing at optimum levels.
Security
Server data security is one hallmark of a great web hosting provider. Many threats can compromise data availability and safety when a website’s hosted in an offsite space. Website security is a hosting facet that Liquid Web takes seriously indeed. This is because threat detection and elimination are key to how they tackle the safety of all user data.
To begin with, they strictly secured all data center sites all year round. Only sanctioned technical personnel are allowed access to server rooms. Server theft and break security guards mitigates – at every site, backed up by round-the-clock camera surveillance.
Should hacking be a concern of yours? You will be happy to learn that Liquid Web activates a CSF firewall on every server by default. Another default feature of managed WordPress hosting options. As well as an additional benefit is SSL website encryption.
With an encrypted website, a perk of your online business will buy secure checkouts that do not leak client credit card details. Automated, nightly, and free website backups will be scheduled by Liquid Web. Which should aid in website recovery should an event that involves data loss occur.
Support
Liquid Web has gone above and beyond in differentiating its customer support from the rest of its contemporaries. Individuals can contact dubbed ‘Heroic Support’ through live chat and phone. Also available as support channels are ticketing and email. Over a hundred certified Red hat experts are on hand to provide help.
Meaning inexperienced agents will not handle your support requests. The clincher is access to this Heroic Support will not cost you more because they accommodated most managed WordPress hosting options within fully managed VPS servers. other than the Enterprise hosting plan.
The Liquid Web Heroic Customer Support Promise states that the company commits to delivering quick response times whenever a user requires help. Including under one minute of wait time for live chat and phone support while it will communicate tickets to the help desk in half an hour.
Help materials include guides to ‘getting started, tutorials, and help articles on ‘how to’. And a frequently asked questions section. They can use these materials as web hosting learning resources and common problem-solving referrals.
Useful Extras
Liquid Web does not offer incentives such as free ad credits. A gesture that is extended by many other hosting companies. What they provide are services that add value to their hosting plans at no extra charge. The list of bonuses provided by Liquid Web managed WordPress hosting options are:
- Their servers can support unlimited visitors.
- Free transfer of websites.
- Free solid-state drives.
If you are considering managed WordPress hosting (and you should if you run a WordPress website). Liquid Web should be among your top choices of web hosts, given their feature list. Below, find a quick glance at the strengths and weaknesses of the service offered by Liquid Web vis-à-vis managed WordPress hosting:
Pros
- Free site migration.
- ‘Heroic’ customer support promises quick response times.
- Uptime guarantee of 100%.
- Installed SSDs.
- Every Liquid Web managed WordPress hosting option supports websites no matter how many visitors they receive, unlike some other web hosting providers.
- Every plan receives SSL certificates from GlobalSign.
Cons
- Lack of free advertisement credits.
- The entry-level price is high.
- No money-back guarantee.
Conclusion
As detailed above, the Liquid Web managed WordPress hosting’s largest weakness is pricey entry-level costs. That said, while high, it is worth it in the end. Liquid Web extends exceptional Heroic support, decent features, and state-of-the-art VPS servers. In addition, the offered hosting plans are highly scalable meaning.
If your site grows and needs further server resources. Liquid Web will capably accommodate you. On the whole, if you can afford managed WordPress hosting prices are at a premium. Liquid Web ought to be among your top considerations.
Liquid Web Technical Details
Website Caching: You have the choice of Varnish Caching (provided by Liquid Web) or any other caching service or plugin.
CDN: Cloudflare integrated international CDN access to every managed WordPress hosting option.
PHP: The default enabled is PHP version 7.2. Although you can switch between 7.1, 7.0, and 5.6 via your dashboard.
HTTP/2.0: all plans use Nginx and HTTP.
SSL: Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates are applied automatically. But you have the choice of using one purchased elsewhere and/or earlier.
Database Access: phpMyAdmin accesses the database connected to your WordPress site.
Staging Sites: A staging service for testing out site improvements and upgrades is available to all managed WordPress hosting customers.
Plugin Restrictions: All plugins are allowed
FAQs
What is the uptime guarantee of a Liquid Web?
100% power and network uptime guarantee.
How much does Liquid Web charge for site transfer?
It is a free service, although there are cases where there may charge, for more involving migrations.
Is there a free trial period with Liquid Web?
They extended new web hosting customers during a free trial period of 30 days.