Liquid Web is one of the leading managed hosting providers on the market. They provide high-performance managed web hosting infrastructure to power your site or web app. Their hosting services are optimized for popular apps, including WordPress, WooCommerce, premium business email, and more.
What earns Liquid Web the top managed web host rating is that they offer custom-built server clusters that are optimized for popular apps. They also help you manage everything, so you don’t have to handle any technicalities of optimizing and maintain your server, which gives you peace of mind. Unlike traditional hosting providers, they only offer managed hosting services for VPS and dedicated servers.
With managed WordPress hosting plans, you’ll get a custom control panel to manage multiple WordPress sites. With every other plan, you get a choice of using cPanel/WHM or Plesk. No matter which plans you’re using, they are highly reliable and flexible, so you can run your sites and apps the way you want without traffic limits.
Liquid Web has recently launched a managed WooCommerce hosting service, which allows you to build resource-heavy eCommerce store without having to spend your money and resources on optimizing your servers. Unlike other WooCommerce hosting providers, Liquid Web has built a separate set of WooCommerce tables to handle and store order data for boosting server performance.
- No pageview or traffic limits
- Full access to both the database and the server
- Automatic plugin updates
- Staging site
- Regular price $29 / mo but our users pay $19.33 / mo!
- Get started with Liquid Web now!
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Features
(5.0 / 5.0)
Liquid Web specializes in offering managed VPS and dedicated hosting services. Here’s how Liquid Web stacks up against the competition:
Fully managed services: All of Liquid Web’s hosting options are fully managed, meaning Liquid Web will help handle software updates and security patches. You’ll also get assistance whenever needed.
Automatic plugin updates: While most hosting providers only update your WordPress core, Liquid Web automatically updates your plugins as well to reduce the risk of newly-found vulnerability threats. To avoid conflicts, plugins are updated in a separate environment first before updating on your production site.
iThemes Sync Pro: iThemes Sync Pro enables you to manage all your sites from a single location. They constantly monitor Google Analytics data and SEO status, and control what clients see in wp-admin. You’ll also be updated about uptime/downtime,
Amazing speed: The entire platform is built on top of PHP 7 and Nginx in order to boost your site’s performance.
Developer-friendly hosting: With Liquid Web hosting, you get all the right developer tools such as SSH, Git, and WP-CLI.
Satisfaction guaranteed: Liquid Web is majorly invested in ensuring high customer satisfaction. They claim that they’re the most-loved managed hosting provider in the industry with a leading NPS score of 66.
Performance
(5.0 / 5.0)
Liquid Web Speed Tests and Uptime Guarantee
Liquid Web is a managed dedicated and VPS hosting company, but do they live up to their blazing fast promise and uptime guarantee?
To put their promises to the test, we created a test WordPress site on Liquid Web hosting using the default Twenty Seventeen theme and dummy content for theme development, including images.
We used Pingdom to test our demo site’s speed. Here are the test results:
According to Pingdom’s website speed test, our test site loaded in less than a second when tested from San Jose, California. That’s faster than 91% of all tested sites.
Apart from Pingdom, we also used a testing tool called Load Impact to figure out how Liquid Web handles visitors during a traffic surge. Load Impact sent some virtual users (VUs) to our site and gradually built up to 100 visitors at a time to test how the server handles it.
In the chart, you can find a blue line (VUs active) which shows the number of virtual users sent to our Liquid Web site and a green line (VU load time) which represents how much time it took to load a web page for a user.
Liquid Web’s server load performed consistently throughout the test even at peak traffic. Evidently, a traffic surge doesn’t have an impact on server load. Impressive.
Liquid Web Server Response Time
Next, we wanted to see how fast Liquid Web servers would respond to requests from different geographic locations. For this purpose, we conducted another test and recorded the server response time.
Before we dive into the test results, it’s vital to understand that the response time may vary based on the content of your site.
For instance, if your site contains too many images, it will take more time to load. In fact, images account for most of the downloadable bytes on a typical site.
To get an accurate server response time in our test, we ignored the content of our page entirely by using a testing tool known Bitcatcha.
Bitcatcha works a bit differently from Pingdom.
Bitcatcha ignores the content of your page and records the page loading time from eight different global locations: New York, LA, London, Brazil, India, Singapore, Japan, and Australia. The speed for each location is measured three separate times, and then the results are averaged.
As you can see in the results, our Liquid Web test site responded within less than a second. The response time was particularly great in the United States. Very impressive indeed.
Support
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Liquid Web Customer Support
Liquid Web is well-known for their superior customer support. They provide assistance via 3 modes: phone calls, live chats, or emails.
If you reach out via phone or chat, they’ll respond in under a minute, and if you reach out by email, you’ll get a response in less than 30 minutes.
In their knowledge base, you can find hundreds of helpful tutorials that help you enhance your Liquid Web hosting experience.
Ease of Use
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With every Liquid Web hosting plan, excluding managed WordPress hosting, you get a choice of using cPanel/WHM or Plesk.
With managed WordPress hosting plans, you’ll get a custom control panel built to manage multiple WordPress sites.
Pricing
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Liquid Web Plans & Pricing
Liquid Web is more expensive than traditional hosting solutions, but, if your business requires managed web hosting, you’ll find it well worth the extra costs.
Here are some of the hosting plans offered by Liquid Web:
PLAN | DISK SPACE | BANDWIDTH | PRICE |
Managed WordPress Personal | 30 GB | 5 TB | $19.33 / mo. (Annually) |
Cloud VPS | 40 GB | 5 TB | $29 / mo. |
Dedicated | 2 x 250 GB | 5 TB | $199 / mo. |
Managed WooCommerce | Unmetered | Unmetered | $39 / mo. |
FAQs
Having helped thousands of users choose a web hosting plan and start their websites, we’ve answered just about every question you can think of. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about Liquid Web:
Who is Liquid Web for?
Liquid Web is for you, if you’re looking for a VPS or dedicated managed hosting solution that also ensures 100% network and power uptime for your WordPress site or eCommerce store.
Are all Liquid Web hosting plans managed?
Yes, all Liquid Web servers come managed, meaning they’ll help handle software updates and security patches. You’ll also get assistance when in need, 24/7. Despite being a complete managed hosting solution, the company even lets you choose your desired level of management.
How does Liquid Web stack up against the competition?
Liquid Web is hugely invested in earning customer loyalty. They claim that they’re the most-loved managed hosting provider in the industry with a leading NPS score of 66. According to the Cloud Spectator, an independent 3rd party cloud analytics firm, they’ve proven to be faster than AWS, Digital Ocean, and Rackspace.
How do I choose a Liquid Web plan?
It’s recommended to choose the starter plan when you’re starting out and upgrade your hosting as you grow. Their friendly support staff is available around the clock to assist with selecting the appropriate hosting plan for your needs.
Where are Liquid Web’s servers located?
Liquid Web privately owns and operates their core data centers.
Their data centers are located in…
- US-central: Lansing, MI
- US-west: Phoenix, AZ
- EU-central: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Can I upgrade my Liquid Web plan later?
Of course! When you’re starting out, you can choose the most basic plan. As you grow, you can always upgrade to a higher plan per your needs.
What makes Liquid Web’s WooCommerce hosting unique?
Liquid Web’s WooCommerce hosting is a fully-hosted eCommerce service, like Shopify or BigCommerce.
That means, you can start an eCommerce store by simply choosing a plan, without having to worry about installing WooCommerce and configuring it. Although it’s a hosted eCommerce solution, you’ll get the full flexibility and control that WooCommerce offers to you.