What is Liquid Web
Liquid Web (www.liquidweb.com) is a hosting company dedicated to web and cloud professionals. The company was founded in 1997 and currently employs over 250 administrators, engineers, customer service and technical experts.
The company has a range of cloud server packages, dedicated, reseller, virtual private server (VPS) and WordPress with enough flexibility to support National Geographic, Porsche, Eddie Bauer, Home Depot and Symantec.
Liquid Web does not have a low-cost shared hosting tier. If you are a small business or just starting out with a personal website, Liquid Web is probably not for you.
Liquid Web Features
Dedicated Server Hosting
Liquid Web offers high performance servers (https://go.liquidweb.com/dedicated-plans/) based in the United States and Europe. This service uses dedicated server hardware, meaning it is not shared with other users.
The servers are a mix of Intel Xeon with multiple cores, a minimum of 16 GB of RAM, SSD storage, 5 TB of bandwidth, backup disks, RAID configurations, backup applications, security programs and cPanel.
The prices are high, but keep in mind that this is a premium hosting server.
VPS hosting
The company offers 8 different VPS hosting plans (https://www.liquidweb.com/products/vps/) costing from $ 15 to $ 129 per month.
Just like dedicated servers, Liquid Web has opted for high-performance servers at premium prices. These servers include a minimum of 2 CPU cores, 40 GB of SSD space, 10 TB of bandwidth and Linux operating systems.
This increases to 16GB of RAM, 8 CPU cores and 200GB of SSD storage, but the 10TB bandwidth limit remains.
VPS hosting plans also include site protection, premium business email, free backups, InterWorx, Plesk Web Pro or cPanel Admin.
Managed WordPress Hosting
L'hosting WordPress fully managed (https://www.liquidweb.com/products/managed-wordpress/) is a popular option for small businesses, with benefits such as optimized servers, pre-installed copies of WordPress, free SSL, free site migrations, automatic updates, and access to the full range of WordPress plugins.
There are 7 managed WordPress hosting plans that cost from $ 19 per month for a single site, 15 GB of storage and 2 TB of bandwidth up to $ 999 per month for up to 250 sites, 800 GB of storage and 10 TB of bandwidth.
Cloud hosting
Cloud hosting plans can be standard cloud or dedicated cloud. Both offer high performance with the advantage of being scalable, easy to deploy and manage.
Standard cloud hosting plans start at $ 265 per month for a primary node, load balancer, 960 GB SSD and 10 TB of bandwidth up to $ 1,105 per month for 1 primary node, 4 web nodes, load balancer, 1440 GB SSD, NFS replication and 10 TB of bandwidth.
The plans run CentOS 7 or CentOS 7 with cPanel.
Dedicated cloud servers are for more demanding users who require higher performance. Dedicated cloud servers are powerful enough for entire LMSs, SaaS applications, and much more resource intensive uses.
Plans start at $ 149 per month for an Intel Xeon E3-1230 v5 with 4 cores, 15 GB of RAM, 452 GB SSD, 5 TB of bandwidth up to Intel Xeon E5-1650 v4 with 6 cores, 64 GB of RAM, 7.6 TB of SSD and 5 TB of bandwidth for $ 499 per month.
A custom option is also available upon request.
All use Windows or Linux and come with InterWorx, Plesk Web Pro or cPanel Pro.
Reseller Program
Liquid Web also has a reseller hosting plan consolidated (https://www.liquidweb.com/partner-community/reseller-hosting/). You can use a VPS, dedicated server or cloud VPS solution to resell services with company support.
Servers are available in the United States and Europe, and Liquid Web provides all the help you need to start earning money by reselling their services.
Discounts are modest but steadily increase as you sell more hosting.
Linux and Windows hosting
Liquid Web offers Linux and Windows hosting On different levels of hosting. Linux is by far the most popular option, but to host applications like Exchange, SharePoint, .Net and others, you'll need Windows servers.
Other web hosting services
Liquid Web offers a full range of dedicated business hosting plans and complementary services such as:
- dedicated cloud servers VMWare cloud servers
- Hosting compliant with HIPAA
- server clusters
- WooCommerce hosting managed
- Magento hosting managed
Each is a variation of the plans described in more detail above.
No shared web hosting? IThemes
Liquid Web does not offer shared web hosting, which is generally used by individuals and smaller businesses. Liquid Web is for higher level customers with more demanding requirements.
That said, Liquid Web has purchased iThemes (www.ithemes.com), a WordPress specialist offering shared themes, plugins and hosting under its own name.
Many Liquid Web reviews mention the lack of shared hosting, but few seem to have noticed that it is available through a secondary brand, iThemes.
Control panel options
There are several web host control panels including InterWorx, Plesk and cPanel. Each is available in hosting plans. Some may be limited to one or the other, but many plans offer the ability to choose your preferred control panel.
Some people like the ease of use of Plesk, while others prefer the hands-on approach of cPanel. Whichever you prefer, you should be able to use it with your hosting plan.
Data Centers
Although Liquid Web is based in the United States, it has a data center in Amsterdam (https://www.liquidweb.com/about-us/data-centers/). This makes it a viable option for European and American companies that need fast performance in their area of business. It also offers the ability to optimize your presence in the other market as well, especially if you opt for a cloud solution.
Security
Liquid Web offers firewalls, Secure Socket Layer (SSL), virtual private networks (VPNs), malware scanning and removal, and much more.
Some features are bundled with specific packages, while others will need to be purchased as add-ons (https://www.liquidweb.com/products/add-ons/).
Most Liquid Web plans include security of some kind. All plans are compatible with optional service add-ons for the plan or within your CMS. Security options include SSL, VPN, antimalware scanning, firewall, IP blacklisting and whitelisting, and other features.
If you use WordPress or Joomla, you can also add an extra layer of security within the platform for a little extra protection. You can also go much further with plugins like iThemes Security Pro.
You can also go much further with plugins like iThemes Security Pro. It's a WordPress plugin that you can use on any web host to make your website even more secure.
Backup
Most Liquid Web plans include automatic nightly backups included in the price. This is a significant benefit that protects you in case your security precautions don't work. Most plans offer some form of backup, while premium plans offer daily backups.
If you prefer to manage your backups, plugins like iThemes Backupbuddy provide all the tools you need to quickly restore your website in case of the worst.
Uptime
Liquid Web is one of the few web hosts that offers a 100% uptime guarantee on certain products. Most hosts only ever offer 99% to cover themselves in case of the unexpected.
Customer service
The customer service Is an area of business that Liquid Web has always tried to differentiate from the competition. Customer support is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for all customers.
They call it "heroic support" and promise that support staff will answer all customer support calls and live chat will be answered in less than a minute and all helpdesk tickets will be answered within 59 minutes.
We didn't get a chance to test Liquid Web's support to see if it was just a simple "Thanks for getting in touch" that you usually get with live chat or if it offered real help with the support staff. Either way, few web hosts are secure enough to offer anything close to those guarantees.
Documentation
Liquid Web has a documentation section on the website. It's not the most in-depth you'll ever see or the easiest to use, but it's comprehensive and you should find most of what you need there.
The categorization could be improved, but the search function is fast and usually finds what you're looking for.
Benefits of using Liquid Web
Liquid Web has many advantages. Let's take a more detailed look.
Free Email Account
When you run a business, you'll need to correspond via email with colleagues, customers, partners, suppliers and more. A branded email address that matches the domain of your website does a lot to establish your brand identity and instill a sense of professionalism and trust in the minds of those you interact with.
Fortunately, brand email accounts are free with Liquid Web's VPS service. These accounts are managed through the Liquid Web control panel.
Live Chat Support
Liquid Web has three main forms of customer support:
- Live chat 24/7
- Phone
- Helpdesk
The most efficient and fastest means of communication is the live chat. According to several live chat studies, 51% of consumers say it is important for a company to be available 24/7 for support. Fast customer support response times, including a positive chat experience, have been shown to increase sales numbers.
In case you're not interested in the three customer support options mentioned above, Liquid Web also has an extensive knowledge base. There you can browse through various articles, tutorials, and find answers for common fixes.
Uptime >99.99%
Liquid Web claims to have a average uptime of 100%. Most hosting providers will guarantee 99.9% uptime because you can't account for things like natural disasters.
In this test Liquid Web's uptime was tested for one year and was > 99.99%, with only 11 minutes of downtime, uptime of 100% almost every month except January 2021, where uptime was 99.99%.
Page loading speed
Liquid Web claims to be 200% faster than DigitalOcean, AWS and Rackspace.
Speed is one of the most important factors when choosing a website host. If your page takes too long to load, not only will potential customers abandon the site, thus impacting your conversion rate, but based on Google's upcoming Core Update dedicated to on-page experience, you may not benefit from this element as a ranking factor.
For example, an average speed index for desktop in 2020 is 4.7 seconds and for mobile devices 11.4 seconds. However, Google's best practice is to have a speed of less than 3 seconds.
Liquid Web counts an average page load speed of 338 ms, one of the best in the hosting industry.
Free SSL Security
An SSL certificate is a factor in determining whether your website is an HTTP or HTTPS site.
What's the difference?
HTTPS has advanced security, while HTTP is mostly unprotected and vulnerable to cyber attacks. Google actually labels HTTP sites as unprotected, which doesn't look good to potential customers.
For example, if you have a site ecommerce which is not HTTPS, the browser will send all the information to the server as plain text. If someone scans your website, they can steal your customer's sensitive information such as email addresses, passwords, credit card details and so on. That's why it's important to have an SSL encrypted website.
Fortunately, basic SSL is free and is installed by Liquid Web's support team. If you want more security, additional premium SSL certificates are available for purchase.
Free site migration
Suppose you have an established website on another hosting platform, but you are looking for a change. Migration is required to move the site from one host to another.
Liquid Web offers them as a free service (https://www.liquidweb.com/support/migrations/).
Liquid Web subscribers can get both internal migration (already on the Liquid Web server) and external migration for their own sites.
Control Panel Selection and Dashboard
Liquid Web has three control panels to choose from: Plesk, InterWorx and cPanel. All these plans are already included in the price but only if you choose the annual or semi-annual option.
Liquid Web's InterWox dashboard is quite logical to use. From there you can manage account settings, backups, domains, invoices and other hosting related services.
Overall, their custom control panel is easy to use and intuitive once you spend some time with it.
Opinions and reviews on Liquid Web
Liquid Web is a US-based web hosting company with over 45,000 customers in 150 countries. They manage over 500,000 websites from 10 global data centers.
Check out the customer reviews here https://www.liquidweb.com/liquid-web-reviews/. The reviews are extremely positive.
Prices
Liquid Web is more expensive than many of the hosting services. It has positioned itself as a premium hosting provider and is objectively more expensive than other options (https://go.liquidweb.com/dedicated-plans/).
WordPress hosting managed by Liquid Web starts at $ 12.67 per month, as stated above, with uptime of 100%, first-class customer support, high-performance servers and some hardware resources.
