Liquid Web has made regular appearances on lists of the best hosting services currently on the market, including PakWired’s own.
Consequently, it’s time to dive deeper into what the company actually provides in terms of hosting, what its stand-out features are, and who can benefit most from its offer.
Keep reading for our in-depth, comprehensive Liquid Web hosting review.
What is Liquid Web?
To start with, what exactly is Liquid Web?
Liquid Web is a provider of robust web hosting services. They pride themselves on their lighting fast support, security, speed, and performance.
With good reason, as we’ll discover below.
Speaking to the quality and reliability of their services is that the company has been around since 1997. And the fact that they can count numerous big brands among their clients, including National Geographic, Porsche, Motorola, Audi and Home Depot.
What type of hosting does Liquid Web offer?
In terms of hosting types, Liquid Web provides managed WordPress, VPS, Cloud, and dedicated server hosting.
While all of their hosting types offer solid services, Liquid Web excels in managed hosting – an achievement that earned them PC World’s Editors’ Choice status.
With managed hosting, all servers are located in Liquid Web’s datacenters. Plus, it handles all the sites’ administrative aspects, as well as support tasks, no matter their scale and complexity. Especially for bigger businesses, and businesses hoping to scale up in the future, this is a significant advantage.
Liquid Web’s premium managed WordPress hosting also includes some additional perks to make users’ lives easier. These include a WordPress pre-installation as well as automatic updates and backups, free SSL certificates, and free migration.
In addition, users can choose between Liquid Web’s native WordPress dashboard, cPanel with WP-CLI/SSH Access, and iThemes Sync Pro. If you opt for the first of these, you also have access to one-click staging sites.
When it comes to cloud hosting, Liquid Web’s plans are based on their Storm platform. They include Cloudflare CDN, DDoS protection, enhanced security and SSD drives.
VPS servers offer numerous options for customization in terms of sizes and configurations, depending on the amount of disk space, RAM, and processing power you need.
How fast and reliable is Liquid Web?
One of Liquid Web’s points of pride is its speed and reliability.
In terms of speed, Liquid Web is actually faster than Amazon Web Services (AWS), Rackspace, and Digital Ocean.
One speed test by Cyber News found its Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) time to lie at only 666 ms – way below the 2.5 second threshold of acceptable loading times. Plus, this test was carried out on a bare-bones test website without any of the additional optimizations that can further increase your website’s speed.
In terms of reliability, Liquid Web guarantees a 100% uptime backed by SLA. It can boast three datacenters distributed across the US and another one in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. In Cyber News’ stress test using 50 bots to simulate an abrupt traffic surge, Liquid Web passed with flying colors.
Then there’s security. As mentioned above, managed hosting includes a free SSL certificate as well as automatic backups.
But Liquid Web’s hosting is also well-protected in and of itself. They offer standard DDoS protection, monitoring traffic and protecting your site from sudden attacks. Another standard package is ServerSecure, which automatically configures the optimal security settings to protect your site from malware attacks. Plus, there’s the integrated firewall you can activate on your dashboard to stop malicious traffic.
Going above and beyond: Heroic Support ®
Beyond the purely technical capabilities of Liquid Web as a hosting provider, the company also has one more trump card: its amazing support team. Liquid Web’s Heroic Support ® is available 24/7 via live chat, phone, and ticketing.
The standard response times are one minute if you reach out by phone, 30 minutes if you submit a ticket, and 59 seconds if you enter a live chat.
It’s not just the speed of the company’s response that’s outstanding, though. By all accounts and customer reviews, customer service agents at Liquid Web are thorough, friendly, and knowledgeable. In short, they have your back.
What are the downsides of Liquid Web?
After this extensive round of accolades, you may well be asking: “Hold up, where’s the catch?”
In fact, Liquid Web does have a few drawbacks.
For one thing, they don’t offer a money-back guarantee, unlike many other web hosts. There is a prorated refund on monthly cloud servers, but apart from that, its services are non-refundable.
This is tricky, especially considering the second significant downside of Liquid Web: It’s fairly pricey, as is outlined below.
Overall, that means you need to commit yourself and your budget to Liquid Web from the get-go.
What is Liquid Web’s Pricing?
Now, on to the financial side of things. As mentioned above, Liquid Web is a little more expensive than other hosting services at around the same level. However, reviews show that the vast majority of its users find Liquid Web’s vast range of functionalities to be well worth their cash.
Managed WordPress hosting starts at $15.83 per month (billed annually) for 1 site, 15 GB storage, 2 TB bandwidth, and 30-day backups. If you need to host more sites or require bigger bandwidth, there’s a variety of more advanced plans available.
VPS hosting starts at $25 per month, with 2 vCPU Cores, 40 GB SSD Storage, 10 TB Bandwidth, and your choice of AlmaLinux or CentOS 7.
Dedicated server hosting and cloud hosting options start at $169 and $149, respectively.
One thing to note: Liquid Web offers some pretty sweet introductory discounts in many of its pricing categories.
Conclusion
Overall, Liquid Web is a fantastic hosting option, especially if you’re looking for managed WordPress hosting. Though a little pricey, it offers a solid range of services and outstanding customer care, speed, and reliability.
Especially for businesses looking to scale, and website owners needing high-performing servers for mission-critical sites, Liquid Web is an excellent choice.
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
