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When you visit Liquid Web's official website, it is clear that they specialize in enterprise hosting with a focus on fully managed hosting and dedicated servers. While specializing in services for larger businesses, they also have more affordable hosting plans for smaller businesses.
In contrast to the higher cost of hosting your business, Liquid Web offers a higher level of technical support. They refer to their support team as heroes and the most helpful people in managed services, which means 100% uptime and certified technicians, and an average support response time of only 59 seconds. In addition to a team of 250 customer-facing support staff, Liquid Web maintains a sonar monitoring team whose sole purpose is to resolve server pitfalls immediately -- often before the customer is aware of the problem.
By focusing on providing the best customer service, this company earned the highest net referral value in 2015, a metric that is based on customer loyalty to the business and outperformed heavyweights like Apple, Amazon, and JetBlue. In addition, they have been ranked in major media reviews and have been named one of Inc.'s 5000 fastest growing companies several times over the past decade.
About Liquid Web
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Liquid Web is a privately held web hosting company founded by Jim Geiger in 1997, but it wasn't until 2015 that they launched their WordPress-specific hosting package at the Word Camp USA conference. To date, this company has over 30,000 customers in over 150 countries and has won the Inc. Fastest Growing Business Award for several years.
Hosting Options
This is a provider of premium hosting services, so perfect for those looking for more than a shared hosting plan, here are the hosting options for Liquid Web.
- Virtual Private Server (VPS)
VPS and shared plans are very similar in that they both host multiple websites on one physical server, however, the biggest difference is that VPS plans offer higher performance.
Web hosting maintains strict boundaries between sites hosted on the VPS server, with all resources allocated to you being used only by your site; whereas shared plans provide a pool of resources from which any site on the server can call.
- Dedicated server
A dedicated server is an entire server that is used solely to serve your site, and you have complete control over the server's configuration and settings. Other hosting options may have limitations on software usage, but a dedicated server allows you to make any adjustments to meet the unique needs of your site.
Most importantly, this is the most secure and highest performing hosting option, and dedicated hosting will be important if you need to handle sensitive information for high traffic sites. Sure, you can protect the site with a VPS plan (or sometimes even a shared plan), but a dedicated server will give you the best security and processing performance.
- cloud hosting
Cloud hosting basically means that parts of the site are hosted on a distributed network of servers, the exact distribution of which is difficult to determine, but with cloud hosting you get all the benefits of a distributed network: with the reliability that comes with hardware redundancy and failover, if any single (or even multiple) nodes of the network fail, your site will still be up and running.
Features of Liquid Web
WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems, and according to statistics, it powers at least more than 25% of the websites on the Internet. As a result, a growing number of web companies are offering hosting solutions specifically for this platform, and Liquid Web is one of them.
- WordPress dedicated hosting
Despite being a late entrant into the WordPress-specific hosting niche, Liquid Web has raised the bar for other companies wanting to offer similar services, even spinning off this business separately and enabling a new brand, Nexcess, to manage it in order to provide you with faster performance and flexibility, as well as WordPress platform with features such as automatic scaling and email.
- WooCommerce
If you are a WooCommerce user, then be sure to try Liquid Web. While many companies offer web hosting specific to WordPress, they go a step further and offer packages dedicated to WooCommerce that contain excellent premium themes, plugins, SSL certificates, and other content designed to optimize the performance of the online store from all angles. Poor performance is directly related to declining profits, so as an individual or small business owner, you definitely want to minimize these types of problems as much as possible.
- How to create a WooCommerce online store
- Custom hosting
Finally, if you are a Microsoft user who needs custom hosting (e.g. web applications running on ASP.NET), Liquid Web will provide support for such servers.
Main Functions
When comparing Liquid Web's WordPress-specific hosting plans, there are several options available.
Spark
$19/month
- 1 site
- 15G storage space
- 2TB/month traffic
- 30-day data backup
- Unlimited Email Accounts
- iThemes Security
- iThemes Sync
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- Maker
- $79/month
- 5 sites
- 40G storage space
- 3TB/month traffic
- 30-day data backup
- Unlimited Email Accounts
- iThemes Security
- iThemes Sync
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- Builder
- $149/month
- 25 sites
- 100G storage space
- 5TB/month traffic
- 30-day data backup
- Unlimited Email Accounts
- iThemes Security
- iThemes Sync
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- Producer
- $299/month
- 50 sites
- 300G storage space
- 5TB/month traffic
- 30-day data backup
- Unlimited Email Accounts
- iThemes Security
- iThemes Sync
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- Executive
- $549/month
- 100 sites
- 500G storage space
- 10TB/month traffic
- 30-day data backup
- Unlimited Email Accounts
- iThemes Security
- iThemes Sync
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- Enterprise
- $999/month
- 250 sites
- 800G storage space
- 10TB/month traffic
- 30-day data backup
- Unlimited Email Accounts
- iThemes Security
- iThemes Sync
- View Details
- Depending on the plan chosen, you can host 1 to 250 WordPress sites, and storage space ranges from 15GB to 800GB. liquid Web's entry-level prices are slightly higher than most web hosts, which has to do with the fact that they offer WordPress hosting in a VPS environment, and more importantly, their prices already include other web hosts as retroactively sold with many of the features.
- Control panel
Liquid Web offers the Plesk control panel in order to allow you to manage your server and website hosting environment, and although not as popular as cPanel, it is still a very popular option.
The WordPress plan comes with an automatically installed SSL certificate, segment management, unlimited email accounts, BeaverBuilder editor, 24/7/365 in-house live support, and more. Plesk, on the other hand, offers to provide mobile apps for iOSAndroid, so you can manage hosting tasks anywhere, anytime, for busy individuals and small business owners. For busy individuals and small business owners, this is a nice addition.
What can Plesk be used for? The full answer contains hundreds of functions, here we list only some of the commonly used ones.
- Build a website
- Backup Website
- Managing new customers
- Adding new features to the site
- Checking traffic usage
- Improve SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- Install any third-party applications you want
- Connecting a domain name to a web host
- Set up email for the website
- Set up various forms of authentication for the website
- In addition, Plesk gives you access to Softaculous, a tool with the help of which you can add hundreds of features to your website with just a few clicks of a button, such as
- Blog and Weibo
- Discussion and Customer Service Forum
- Live chat and other customer service tools
- Project Management
- Extensive e-commerce capabilities
- Advertising Management
- Enterprise Resource Planning
- Photo Gallery
- Knowledge Base
- Social Networking Tools
- Voting and Surveys
- VPS server environment
VPS servers are known to have better performance than shared hosting, and Liquid Web has decided to host WordPress sites on VPS servers to ensure that your site runs faster. Its WordPress hosting service is powered by HipHop VM (HHVM), a virtual machine platform specifically designed to make PHP run faster, and once PHP gets faster, WordPress will get faster too.
- Web Hosting vs.
- Fully managed WordPress hosting
Keeping WordPress and plugins up to date can be a hassle when hosting your website on a shared server, fortunately, when you use Liquid Web to host your website, they will automatically update WordPress and its themes and plugins for you. With this feature, your website will always be secure, while allowing you to focus your time and energy on the important aspects of running your website, such as creating great content and increasing visits.
- Web Hosting vs. WordPress Dedicated Hosting
- for WordPress optimization
In today's competitive online marketplace, fast-running websites are crucial not only for a better browsing experience for visitors, but also for more conversions and success for online businesses. To ensure fast page loading, Liquid Web uses technologies such as Memcached and Mod_PageSpeed, which are used to optimize all servers hosting WordPress websites.
In addition, they offer server-side CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) designed to improve delivery speeds and reduce load times.
- Free website migration
If you already have a WordPress site, Liquid Web's expert team can easily help you migrate it over at no cost.
- WP CLI support
All WordPress hosting plans support WP CLI, a command line tool that allows users to manage plugins, install WordPress sites, and perform many more operations without using a graphical browser interface.
Like most web providers offering dedicated WordPress hosting, Liquid Web makes sure to install this content management system for you and comes with the Fantastico library, which contains hundreds of premium plugins. By default, WordPress comes with several themes that you can use to customize the design and look of your website.
Security and Backup
Protecting the data stored on the server is one of the features that any reliable web host should provide. When hosting a website offsite, there are countless threats that can jeopardize the security and availability of the data.
- Website security
Liquid Web does not disappoint when it comes to website security, as they try to address almost all threats, keeping the data stored on their servers safe from attacks and leaks at all times. All data centers are under strict 24/7/365 security monitoring, and server control rooms are only accessible by authorized technicians. To prevent hacking and server theft, Liquid Web deploys real-time security, and all facilities are under constant camera surveillance.
- Firewall protection
All servers have CSF firewall activated and another benefit of using a dedicated WordPress hosting plan is that SSL encryption is a standard feature.
- nightly backup
By encrypting your website, all customers can check out securely without fear of having their credit card numbers compromised. On top of that, Liquid Web offers free automatic nightly backups to ensure that in the event of any event involving data loss, your site is restored to its original state.
Summary
As mentioned above, perhaps the biggest drawback of Liquid Web is that the entry-level pricing is a bit pricey, and for those looking for affordable options, it may be worth looking at this list.
However, their web hosting is powerful, customer support is fast and efficient, and they host WordPress websites on high-performance VPS servers. In addition, this company offers hosting plans that are scalable, which means that if your website grows and needs more server resources, they can always accommodate you.
Advantages
- SSL certificates included in all hosting plans
- Unlike WP Engine, Liquid Web does not charge based on the number of site views
- Solid state drives on all servers
- Heroic customer support, fast response time guarantee
- 100% uptime guarantee
- Free Website Migration
- Disadvantages
- Entry-level prices are slightly higher
- No free advertising and marketing credits offered