Liquid Web – is a leading WordPress, VPS, cloud, and dedicated hosting provider widely known for its premium server speed, amazing customer service, and top-notch performance. The US-based company was first introduced in 1997. Since then, the provider has hosted over 3 million websites around 1.5 million of which are active at the present day. Liquid Web has ten data centers in different areas of the world to ensure speedy loading times and premium services to all clients regardless of their location. Perhaps that’s the reason why globally known brands such as FedEx, Audi, Red Bull, and others rely their website hosting particularly on Liquid Web.
Liquid Web is not among the cheapest hosting providers. And yet, it comes with plentiful features that help it stand out. We have composed an in-depth review to show what you should expect from Liquid Web and see if it fits in your project.
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Liquid Web Pros and Cons
The platform comes with plenty of benefits like a great selection of plans for extra flexibility, but the pricing policy could be better. But these aren’t the only factors to consider. Let us showcase the main pros and cons of this hosting provider:
Liquid Web Pros: | Liquid Web Cons: |
| ✔ Robust hosting plans ✔ Premium customer support ✔ Perfect uptime ✔ High-end server specifications ✔ Prorated VPS hosting plans ✔ cPanel included ✔ High security ✔ DDoS protection ✔ WooCommerce hosting available | ✘ Expensive ✘ No shared hosting is available ✘ Few refund options |
Liquid Web Features
While the prices may seem a bit steep, the functionality you get is OK. The provider offers plenty of features that you’d expect from a web hosting service. Take a look below to find out more.
- SSL certificates: Liquid Web provides free SSL certificates to all its users regardless of their hosting plan. This feature is great when it comes to protecting sites that handle financial transactions, file transfers from a PC to a server, as well as connections to email servers or the web. Thanks to SSL certificates, the data to be transferred between your user’s browser and the host gets encrypted, allowing no one to intercept in that process. Furthermore, Google will not certify your site as Not Secure.
- Free Site Migration: Liquid Web provides free site migration for both internal and external moves. If you don’t succeed in migrating your WordPress site to the Liquid Web managed WordPress hosting area on your own, you can use the free Migrate To Liquid Web WordPress plugin. The latter takes care of all the important steps to be performed starting with copying the data and ending with importing them to the host’s servers. The dedicated support team of the provider is always ready to assist in this. This isn’t a standard feature since most website hosting providers either suggest transferring your site on your own for free or providing site migration services at hefty prices per site.
- Visual Comparison: Every time an automatic update is performed on WordPress plugins, the site may go break. This depends on whether the site has any technical glitch or not. To back up its users in such scenarios, Liquid Web makes copies of all its sites with screenshots of imported pages before the update. After the site plugins update, if the system detects any visual change during the process, the Visual Comparison feature alerts the user. After reviewing the saved screenshots, you can either approve the update or go back to fix the glitches.
- MySQL: This feature ensures faster read speeds of table data, which affects the site performance and loading speed.
- Unlimited Bandwidth: In comparison to other hosting companies, the bandwidth offered in Liquid Web hosting plans is unlimited. This way one can welcome as many as several millions of visitors with no restrictions.
- Real-Time Monitoring: Thanks to this feature, a user can blacklist or whitelist trackers, certain countries, or IPs. This way you can block the access of those users who are hiding behind proxies.
- Free CDN: During traffic spikes, requests are normally routed to the nearby relatively less overloaded data center. This way the company excludes any packet loss and high ping of faraway network facilities while keeping the speed of the website.
- Virtualization: The company supports dedicated server virtualization that allows each section to carry its own applications, drivers, and operating system. The feature is especially appropriate for resellers.
- Daily Backups: Liquid Web sets up automatic backups regularly. This feature allows users to store sites and apps of up to 10 TB.
Liquid Web Add-Ons
Besides the standard features provided with all Liquid Web hosting plans, the company has a bunch of add-ons to choose from. If a user finds he needs some extra power to enhance the performance of his site, he can find all the available extensions organized into different categories:
- Storage and Backup: To boost the protection of your important data, you can add Acronis Cyber Backups, Storage Area Network, Cloud Block Storage, Log Storage, and Cloud Object Storage extensions.
- Security and Compliance: When it comes to website hosting, having solid security comes as essential. No matter if your site is backed up with spam filtering, SSL, etc., you can enhance its protection with such tools as Firewalls and VPN, DDoS Attack Protection, Compliance Assistance, Data and Server Protection, Web Application Protection, Threat Stack Oversight Intrusion Detection System.
- Performance: To get your site content to your site visitors faster, activate Cloudflare CDN, Load Balances, Akamai CDN.
- eCommerce: If you are searching for user-friendly WooCommerce plugins to create a profitable and fast eCommerce store without any skills in site-building, consider IconicWP and KadenceWP tools.
- Fundraising: If you have set up a WordPress site with an aim to increase online donations and manage donors, Liquid Web recommends using the GiveWP fundraising platform.
- Events: The Events Calendar still leads the market of WordPress calendar plugins. Currently, it powers over a billion events globally. If you plan to manage either live or virtual events, do it effectively with this plugin.
- Membership: There is a big array of challenges you will have to overcome if you plan to manage and grow a membership site. To help you through them, Liquid Web offers two powerful plugins – Restrict Content Pro and WPComplete.
- Security and Backup: To back up a WordPress professional with premium security and backup tools, Liquid Web suggests using iThemes Security Pro, iThemes Sync Pro, and Backup Buddy.
- Templates and tools: Via the best WordPress page-building tools, utilities, and templates, Liquid Web separates KadenceWP and iThemes.
- Software: To take full control of your servers from server management to reselling options, Liquid Web would recommend integrating InterWorx Unlimited, WHM/cPanel, Plesk, WHMCS, iThemes tools.
Liquid Web Dashboard
Liquid Web is designed primarily for large businesses and enterprises. However, they do their best to explain their services in a user-friendly manner. Unlike most other hosting companies that provide only a cPanel dashboard, Liquid Web introduces 3 choices to its users – cPanel Pro, InterWorx, and Plesk Web Pro. Furthermore, the company provides an in-depth overview of each to show the main similarities and differences. To help you distinguish better, you can even contact the support team and they’ll answer your inquiries.
Account registration goes as simple as this: you determine which plan meets your requirements and choose it, insert your payment details, and conduct the payment through a credit card or PayPal. In a couple of minutes, you’ll get a welcome email with a link to your account and support resources, as well as the login and password.
Building a Website
Liquid Web offers several ways of establishing a website. Perhaps the easiest option is the managed WordPress account since it comes preinstalled. The company also suggests migrating your existing website completely for free. If you can’t make it out of the site migration, feel free to contact the support system.
The dedicated or VPS server comes with a cPanel preinstalled. The major perk of this feature is access to Softaculous. The latter is a platform that has combined hundreds of the best apps (WordPress included) under one roof. And they are all installable with a single click.
If you don’t have any preferred site builder, Liquid Web comes with free site builders such as the premium Beaver or Weebly. To build an eCommerce site, you will be provided with a top-notch Astra pro theme. Mind that you won’t find any WordPress theme for free at cheap shared hosting platforms.
Templates and Customization
As you know, Liquid Web provides its users with an opportunity to build a site for free or migrate an existing one. One of the available Liquid Web recommended tools for establishing a brand new website is Nexcess. With a beautiful design and automated site maintenance, users don’t have to hire a web designer. It’s a great platform for shop owners, store creators, and personal site owners. Depending on the niche of your website, you will most surely spot an appropriate template to make it look professional and attractive. The available categories are:
- Apparel
- Health/Beauty
- Home Goods
- Electronics
- Digital Downloads
- Jewelry
With this platform and Liquid Web hosting, it becomes possible to create and run a fully customized, elegant, and unique site in a few clicks.
Security
Liquid Web appears a generous hosting provider when it comes to security measures. It suggests a number of services and extensions. For instance, if you opt for Dedicated or Cloud hosting, you will be provided with round-the-clock managed support, while the DDoS protection and CDN aimed at enhancing the site performance are provided at no charge.
The standard security features include an integrated Firewall, ServerSecure advanced security, and root access. If all this doesn’t suffice you, Liquid Web has some great extra plugins to add as well. Consider integrating protection and remediation tools, WEB Applications, vulnerability scanning, Hardware Firewall, and others. To add any extra protection, contact the support team.
Performance
The number of a website’s hits is directly comparable with its accessibility level. Liquid Web ensures a great performance and online availability of a client’s website through a high uptime guarantee. Apparently, the higher the uptime guarantee of a hosting provider, the fewer chances you get to have your site unavailable at some point. Here, at Liquid Web, we are provided with a tremendously high uptime guarantee – 99.999%! That’s nearly 100%. With this said, your website will be accessible to your visitors constantly, while the remaining percentage is allocated for any unseen situation in which the company’s servers might have issues. This is unlikely to happen since the company fixes any problem within the shortest possible time, and no Liquid Web user becomes aware of that.
Another metric affecting a website’s performance is the response time. The smaller this indicator is, the quicker your site will launch. For instance, Google considers fast only those sites that launch within 200ms after a visitor clicks to open it.
To see how fast a website hosted by Liquid Web is, we tested a site hosted by this provider with Bitcatcha service. The results were more than satisfying. The average response time was 241ms which is a superb result.
Customer Support
They say you can find out how much a company cares about its users by the quality of the delivered customer support. This refers to not only the availability of different ways to get in touch with specialists but also to the average time an issue is responded to. Liquid Web makes a go of it. Unlike many other hosting providers that allow contact to their representatives only registered clients, Liquid Web has a number of contact ways available to both subscribed users and first-time visitors. Here are the basic contact forms:
- Telephone call: 800.580.4985 (for US users), 1.517.322.0434 (international number)
- Live chat: available 24/7
- Helpdesk (for signed-up users)
Besides these direct contact means, Liquid Web also features a knowledge base and blog richly packed with highly useful articles. These are tutorials and a series of articles mostly aimed at facilitating the use of Liquid Web for new users.
Pricing
Affordability is not one of the merits that Liquid Web can boast of. Apparently, the cheapest plan is for Managed WordPress hosting starting at $9.50 per month if you buy it in a 1-year package. However, the company suggests trying out the platform for free for 14 days before paying for it. Here are the hosting plans available at Liquid Web:
- Dedicated – starting at $169/mo
- VPS – starting at $15/mo
- Cloud Dedicated – starting at $149/mo
- VMware Private Cloud – starting at $510/mo
- Managed WordPress – starting at $9.50/mo
- Managed WooCommerce – starting at $9.50/mo
- Magento Cloud – starting at $49/mo
- Private VPS Parent – starting at $149/mo
- Server Clusters – starting at $743/mo
- High Performance – starting at $1.127/mo
- High Availability Multi-Server – starting at $1.448/mo
- Database hosting – starting at $1.498/mo
- HIPAA – starting at $344/mo
If these high costs repel you at first sight, look into the services provided in another context. This company caters to powerful sites which need robust and flawless hosting. It does not deliver underpowered products. For instance, you won’t find any shared hosting plan by Liquid Web since sharing resources and the cost of a server with other users is not acceptable for Liquid Web. Shared hosting is something you can find on cheap hosting platforms. For the past several years, Liquid Web abandoned delivering shared hosting and concentrated on supplying unrivaled high-end hosting with powerful features and dependable support.
Verdict
Liquid Web is a premium-level hosting company catering to those users who prioritize quality when it comes to hosting services. Quality always comes at a price, and the Liquid web hosting services are worth every dollar they cost. To find out if Liquid Web is the appropriate choice for your site, see if you meet any of the following categories of users:
- Your WordPress site has medium to high traffic, and you plan to grow it even larger.
- You would rather concentrate on your business and its promotion than manage the server.
- You prioritize the uptime, security, and performance of a hosting provider.
- You are a beginner in the sphere of website running yet feel ambitious to monetize it and seek reliable service with professional support.
So, if you are serious about hosting your website, we would definitely encourage you to try Liquid Web since the WP hosting provided here is of unmatched quality just as all other services.
On the other hand, if your site is small and you have no plans on growing its traffic, you may find Liquid Web too expensive and excessively powerful. And if you are short on money, you definitely should search for something less expensive.
To sum up the review on Liquid Web, this isn’t the cheapest platform around. However, it is one of the most powerful companies in terms of speed, performance, and customer support.
