Liquid Web is a household name for managed WordPress and managed WooCommerce hosting. While it may not be the right fit for those on tight budgets, the cost is worthwhile since they guarantee reliability, speed, and uptime at all times.
Searching for a powerful managed WordPress or WooCommerce hosting solution that never falls short on performance, reliability, or uptime? Then Liquid Web, starting from just $19/month, is the host for you.
Liquid Web is an amazing solution for those who need guaranteed reliability, performance, and uptime in order to handle websites that are growing at an exponential speed. Liquid Web provides these services to you all around the year.
Before making a choice to spend your money on a web host, take a look at my Liquid Web review. I take a look at all the features and services they have on offer for large scale WordPress websites.
Keep reading for a comprehensive review or skip to the end for a concise pro and con list! In this review, I will cover the following –
- Features: I will look at the main features of Liquid Web. This section will especially cover the three pillars of a good web hosting service; speed, security, and customer support.
- Managed WordPress Hosting: I will take a look at Liquid Web’s managed WordPress solution. They claim that this is the best product they offer.
- Managed WooCommerce Hosting: Liquid Web claims to specialize in managed WooCommerce Hosting. I take a look at it to see if it holds up
- Is Liquid Web worth it?: I will use the last section to tell you about my feelings for Liquid Web, whether you should invest in it, and also provide a concise list of pros and cons.
Liquid Web focuses on PHP workers which are responsible for executing your website’s PHP, rather than simply using a caching mechanism to ensure speed. All plans are provided with at least 10 dedicated PHP workers. Some of their managed WooCommerce plans even feature up to 300 PHP workers!
All WordPress hosting plans consist of multiple pre-installed plugins and automatic updates. They provide website staging facilities, regular backups, iThemes sync, iThemes Security Pro, as well as a free SSL Certificate. These plans have all the essential features you will need to run a website smoothly.
A Little Bit About Liquid Web
Liquid Web, established in 1997, has grown into a top name amongst reliable web hosting companies. They offer –
- Virtual Private Server hosting
- Managed Cloud Hosting
- Managed WordPress Hosting
- Managed WooCommerce Hosting
The Liquid Web team is based out of Lansing, Michigan. This web hosting company has over 30,000 customers spread across 130 countries (and counting, as it grows every year). Furthermore, it also has one of the highest loyalty rates in the industry, which speaks for the high quality of products and features offered. So, if you’re on the lookout for a reliable web hosting company where customers are not neglected, you should definitely take a look at Liquid Web.
By moving away from the highly competitive shared hosting race, Liquid Web has created a niche for itself in the hosting industry. They prioritize quality above everything else. In doing so, they manage to provide superior, premium hosting services that people are willing to pay for.
Liquid Web has created a specialized team that consists of more than 250 administrators, engineers, and technicians. This highly committed and extremely skilled workforce is constantly at work to make web hosting easier for you. All of this is to ensure that you have enough time and energy left in order to focus on the content and vision of your website. Afterall, Liquid Web wants to give you the best avenues for taking your business to the next level.
That being said, what is it that makes Liquid Web’s services worth the steep price? Let us try to figure that out.
Features of Hosting
Let us take a look at the hosting features that Liquid Web has to offer to their customers
Managed Hosting Services
Liquid Web offers stellar managed hosting services. Software updates and security patches are automatically taken care of, thus ensuring that your website is always running in the optimum condition without having its security compromised.
For instance, Liquid Web updates WordPress plugins present on your website every night. These updates are performed within a specialized testing environment to test for plugin vulnerabilities.This helps in reducing the downtime of your website as well. Your updates are only published live once the plugins are confirmed to be working fine.
This web host also provides website owners with ample opportunities of creating customized hosting solutions to meet their specific needs. For example, you can get help with PCI and HIPAA compliance, reseller hosting, and ecommerce site protection if you are on the hunt for something specific.
Most importantly, all custom hosting plans have a dedicated account manager. Their job is to be familiar with the client’s website and collaborate with the IT team to provide a seamless experience.
Impressive Loading Speed
In order to keep the traffic coming, and converting them into dedicated customers, your website needs to appear on the first page of a Google search. It is imperative that your pages perform well in terms of loading properly. Without speed, it will be difficult for your business to have an impact.
Recent studies done by Google and a lot of others have found out that even a one-second delay while loading a page on a mobile device can severely impact conversion rates.
Liquid Web provides stellar service when it comes to this. Not a single client is inconvenienced by their service on this end.
Performance
Liquid Web averages a less than 1 second load time, which is great for the hosting industry. However, going further and breaking the process down to 3 data centers highly improves the speed. You will be amazed to find that the web speeds are even better based on your geographic location. Have a look:
- US Central Region: 615ms
- US-West Region: 330ms
- EU-Central Region: 867ms
Liquid Web goes even further – at the end of the day, a fast performing website is made up of a lot more features than just loading speeds.
See for yourself:
- Liquid Web has access to over 25,000 servers. These are present in privately owned and operated core data centers.
- Data centers optimize performance by using redundant cooling, networks, and power. This further ensures both site uptime and enhanced loading speed.
- Liquid Web offers a Tier-1 bandwidth connection. This minimizes latency and provides superfast connections to all parts of the globe.
- Liquid Web uses experts to monitor network performance.
- Users are provided with access to a built-in image optimization solution. This comes with your hosting package.
- Liquid Web is compatible with HTTP/2. This not only increases your website speed and performance but also adds an extra layer to your site security.
Last but not the least, Liquid Web supports PHP 7. This is a good thing because PHP 7.1 is on a security fix only schedule, and PHP 7.2 is about to follow suit. The cherry on top is that PHP 7.4 is expected to be released soon.
Web hosts that do not support PHP 7 are not capable of providing you with the site speed and performance that a loyal customer deserves.
Excellent WordPress Hosting
Liquid Web has come up with one of the best WordPress hosting platforms available to make hosting simple so you can focus on growing your site. Their fully managed WordPress hosting is a foolproof, holistic solution and the best choice for goal-oriented, mission-critical WordPress sites.
All plans provide pre-installed plugins, automatic updates and website staging. They have provisions for nightly backups, iThemes sync, and iThemes Security Pro. They een provide their customers with a free SSL certificate, along with amazing additional features to fit every type of website and its respective needs.
Liquid Web’s managed WordPress platform was custom-made from scratch. This was done to deliver better speed and provide more reliable features. Liquid Web’s platform doesn’t rely on caching to ensure top speeds. Instead, the focus is on handling concurrent requests. Simultaneously, a high number of PHP workers are deployed to guarantee that your WordPress powered site is extremely fast, completely stable, and very secure.
Some more benefits are:
- Liquid Web does not charge over-usage fees, have traffic limits, or create metered page views
- Customers get automatic plugin updates along with visual comparisons
- Unlike WP Engine and Kinsta, there are no restrictions on the kind of plugins you can install and use
- Liquid Web customers get access to a free image optimization plugin. This directly helps in improving page-speed
- Your regular plugin updates are tested in a staging environment before being published live
- Liquid Web provides iThemes sync and iThemes Security Pro
- Customers get to enjoy free site migrations. There is an entire team dedicated to help you move your data from your last host.
- Liquid Web offers a 100% uptime worry-free guarantee. If you do not receive a 100% uptime, you are credited with 10 times the amount.
- Customers have complete server access along with Developer tools such as SSH, Git, and WP-CLI
- All customers are given free SSL certificates
- Customers have access to staging sites so that new designs and updates can be tested remotely
- Customer support can be accessed via phone, email, and live chat support is available round the clock
Liquid Web has an exciting managed WordPress dashboard. It makes accessing all the features and tools required for managing your website, really easy.
WordPress hosting plans begin at just $19 per month. There are no hidden fees, so you can rest easy.
WooCommerce Hosting
For those who are unaware – WooCommerce is one of the most used ecommerce platforms on the internet. Liquid Web claims to have built the first complete hosting solution for WooCommerce, giving stiff competition to other solutions like Shopify.
It goes beyond just the WordPress and the WooCommerce plugin. The managed WooCommerce hosting is super fast and extremely reliable. They have optimized the platform to majorly reduce query loads by 95%.
This web hosting company’s managed WooCommerce hosting is packed with the following features:
- Access to tables that can store order data. This reduces the query load by 95%
- They have Jilt abandoned cart email services. Emails are customizable. You can send them back to the abandoned cart via a one-click link
- Scheduling control
- You can run more than 20 performance tests to prepare for traffic fluctuation
- Total support for physical, digital, dropshipping, and marketplace shops
- Access to free “White Glove” site migrations
- Access to a built-in page builder. This allows for easy site creation
- Use pre-packaged Astra themes optimized for online stores
- Optimize your site for mobile viewing
- Access to free SSL certificates as well as a subscription for iThemes Security Pro
- Get automatic plugin updates along with visual comparisons
Managed WooCommerce hosting offered by Liquid Web has the following bundles free with all plans:
- BeaverBuilder – This is a premium page builder plugin that would otherwise cost you at least $99 per year
- IconicWP – Access to all premium WooCommerce plugins that would otherwise cost you around $200 every year
- Jilt – This is a premium abandoned cart plugin valued at $850 per year
- AffiliateWP – This is a premium affiliate management plugin for your website otherwise available for $99 per month
- GlewAnalytics – Complete access to a robust ecommerce analytics software. Purchasing this separately will cost you $199 per month
The WooCommerce Beginner plan starts at just $19 per month. Like their WordPress hosting, you do not have to worry about hidden fees or getting stuck in a contract. Cancellation and Upgradation are available at any time to fit your needs.
Liquid Web’s costlier performance plans such as the Standard, Plus, Pro, and Enterprise, include Glew.io. This software, which is valued at $199+ per month, is the perfect analytics and reporting solution for ecommerce websites. It allows you to view all analytical data of your site and help you strategize like a giant corporation. Just imagine, being able to divide your customers into groups such as those who spent over $500+ but have been inactive in the past 6 months or Permanent customers who regularly spend over $1,000. All of this at the click of a button.
Stellar Customer Support
One of the best things about Liquid Web is their stellar customer support.
To make sure your needs as a customer always come first, Liquid Web offers the following 59 support guarantees:
- Help Desk Response: Everytime you submit a ticket to mark a problem, using their help desk system, you are to receive a response from their expert technician within the span of 30 minutes. If the Liquid Web technician cannot respond in a span of 59 minutes, you will be given 10 times the amount of time. To clarify, if your ticket is acknowledged after 60 minutes, then you will receive a 10-hour hosting credit (1X10).
- Answer Time Over Phone: A live support agent is required to answer your phone call within 59 seconds from the time of you recording an issue. If that does not happen, you are eligible to get hosting credits that are 10 times the amount of time you have to wait for.
- Live Chat Response: A live chat support representative has to answer your query or message within 59 seconds of you typing in your request. Even in this scenario, if Liquid Web fails to uphold the 59-second guarantee, you are eligible to get 10 times hosting credit added to your account.
Most importantly, Liquid support is always available. You will never have to worry about getting in touch, especially when you need it most!
What’s more, Liquid Web also has a blog, Knowledge Base as well as a WooCommerce Resource Center. They have an exciting content hub where you can search for information according to categories. Their e-commerce podcast, Store Builders, is pretty famous. They host regular webinars where exciting events are constantly present.
And if you ever need more help, you can instantly contact your personal consultant or the Liquid Web account manager!
Power And Uptime Guarantee
Liquid Web is one of the very few web hosting companies that offer a 100% uptime guarantee. All major routing devices that are present within the Liquid Web network can be accessed via the internet at all points of time. However, there are a few exceptions to this guarantee
- They cannot host the website when scheduled maintenance checks are being conducted on the network, hardware, or software
- They cannot host the website when it is under threat from malicious attacks such as a DDoS attack
- They cannot host the website if there are ongoing legal proceedings against you, your website, your company.
- Your website will not be live when there are cPanel issues to take care of
While it is impossible to provide 100% uptime forever, Liquid Web is able to do a near perfect job. It is a commendable deed. If you have any doubts about their guarantee, their assurance of compensating you in credits worth 10 times the amount of downtime should be sufficient.
Free Website Migration
Do you wish to migrate your website within Liquid Web, to a different plan? Or, do you want to bring your website to this platform from another one? Well, Liquid Web takes care of all this and more. All customers are provided this service for free. The team of experts are extremely helpful, and are more than willing to walk you through everything.
A little bit of research will reveal the fact that most web hosting services charge their customers a particular fee for migrating websites. And a lot of these fees are not inexpensive. This is why you should consider yourself if the web hosting service of your choice, provides this premium feature.
If you wish to migrate your WordPress site to the Liquid Web platform all by yourself, you are more than welcome to. All you need to do is to use the Migrate to Liquid Web WordPress plugin. It will automatically take care of all the technicalities, starting from data copying to importing files.
DDoS Protection
Trust me when I tell you this, DDos attacks are not something you would want to be dealing with. This can bring down your entire site, often causing some huge problems such as losing data or crashing sales.
Liquid Web provides its customers with a free Cloudflare CDN subscription which comes with DDos protection. Using the CDN will help you distribute your content easily and with great speed.
The Cloudflare CDN also helps you out in these following areas:
- You will not have to worry about big video and image files slowing your website loading speed
- No need to worry about the amount of bandwidth you require
- You can improve your conversion rates by speeding up your content delivery system
- Avail better load times, and enjoy a larger footfall on your site
Cloudflare will protect your website. It will constantly monitor your website traffic and block malicious content. Cloudflare adds an extra layer of protection. Acting as a sieve, this CDN service ensures that you can entertain legitimitate traffic only.
You can add to your website’s security by purchasing Liquid Web’ DDoS Attack Prevention. It offers the following services.
- All web traffic can be monitor n real-time
- Use the system to identify and neutralise all attacks on the web site
- Separate malicious accounts from legitimate accounts before they can harm the system
Premium DDoS protection services are available from $99 per month.
Free SSL Certificates
Liquid Web offers all customers a free SSL certificate on subscribing. They are known for securing:
- Websites that see financial transactions. These include Banks and credit unions.
- Connections that host web or email servers
- SFTP
- Connections that host all password-protected websites
The SSL certificate encrypts data that is being transferred between the host’s server and the user’s website browser. Due to the encryption, this data cannot be intercepted by someone else. SSL certificates also remove ‘not secure’ flags assigned by web browsers, ensuring that you do not lose out on traffic. The Managed WooCommerce plan and the Managed WordPress plans have a Let’s Encrypt SSL pre-installed on their primary domains.
Hosting
Liquid Web does not offer any shared hosting plans. However, they offer:
- Managed dedicated server hosting
- Managed VPS hosting
- Managed WordPress hosting
- Managed WooCommerce hosting
Let us take a look at these plans before exploring the features one can expect while using Liquid Web.
Managed WordPress Hosting
Proficient managed WordPress hosting services are hard to find. Liquid Web luckily offers a pretty good service.Customers are not burdened with overage fee, traffic limits, or limited page views. This basically ensures that you can grow your website without having to worry about limited resources.
Check out the following features that are a part of managed WordPress hosting:
- Offers the latest PHP support. In this case, it is PHP 7
- Allocates 10 PHP workers to provide faster speed
- Nginx support
- Access to a built-in image optimization tool
- Get free website migrations
- Plugin updates are tested remotely every night
- Complete access to servers
- Backups are run daily. Data is stored for 30 days..
- Access to a free SSL certificate
- Great Staging environments for trial and test runs
- Access to developer tools such as GIT and WP CLI
Managed WooCommerce Hosting
Liquid Web offers business owners the opportunity to work with great managed WooCommerce hosting services. It is not difficult to foreshadow that businesses running on a managed WordPress plan, rarely manage e-commerce stores well. Which is why they try to ensure that there is an advanced system in place to provide maximum performance and great user experience.
Liquid Web provides WooCommerce shop owners with:
- Heavily reduced query loads. This is achieved by providing tables to compile order data
- Access to Jilt abandoned cart services
- More than 20 tests to check and prepare for traffic influx
- Total support to help with physical, digital, and dropshipping shops
- Access to their in-house Beaver-Builder, a tool to help with website creation
- Help with optimizing website for mobile viewing
- Hassle-free and regular plugin updates
- Save more than $150 a month by availing free software and tools
Dedicated Server Hosting
Liquid Web uses a single-tenant server to store website data in its managed dedicated server hosting plans. This makes sure that you never have to share resources or server space with anyone else. You will also have the ability to customize your own hosting environment by using either Linux or Windows.
Take a look at a couple of features they have to offer:
- Monitor your website in real-time
- Enjoy a 100% guarantee on power and network uptime
- Get standard DDos protection
- Use the free subscription of Cloudflare CDN
- Enjoy root access
- Sport a dedicated IP address
- Get the highest level of performance by using high-grade SSD storage
Managed VPS Hosting
Liquid Web’s managed VPS hosting claims to provide services faster than that of AWS or Rackspace. This is a very tall claim to substantiate, considering that AWS and Rackspace are leaders in the cloud hosting fame. Liquid Web provides customers with reliable features and advanced security mechanisms.
VPS hosting sports a dedicated server and the features of cloud hosting. It is a great choice for customers who want to have access to a dedicated server without hiking their own budget.
Take a look at some of their features:
- Access to Gigabit Ethernet that provides a raw data bandwidth of 1000 mbps
- Manage and host unlimited sites
- Freely enjoy the services of Cloudflare CDN
- Get a dedicated IP address
- Backups are conducted daily and are locally stored
- Tweak away with the root access
- Enjoy DDoS protection
- Easily scale your website up
- Enjoy the power and accessibility of cPAnel and Interworx
- Rest easy with a guarantee on power and network uptime
The Pros And Cons Of Liquid Web
I have listed the pros and cons of Liquid Web’s specific services, as well as a list of the web hosting company’s overall advantages or disadvantages.
Managed WordPress Hosting Pros
- Excellent Performance thanks to PHP Workers, SSD storage, PHP7 and HTTP/2 support, and Nginx compatibility
- No surcharges or caps on website traffic
- Access to in-house image optimization tool
- No restrictions on themes and plugins compatible with WordPress
- A robust 100% guarantee on uptime
- Great compensation for website being down
- Stellar customer support staff
Managed WooCommerce Hosting Pros
- Speed and Performance increased thanks to the availability of SSD Storage, PHP7 and HTTP/2 support, Nginx compatibility, Redis Caching, and free SSL certificate
- Dedicated PHP workers numbering from 30 to 300
- Free bundle includes –
- Beaver Builder plugin
- All WP plugins
- Jilt abandoned cart
- Glew analytics
- Affordable plans for beginners starting at $19 a month
- Free Paypal integration
- Free Stripe Integration
- Free White Glove website transfer
WordPress and WooCommerce Cons:
- Quite expensive plan structure
- No access to free email hosting services
- No data centers present in the Asia Pacific region, thus clearly focusing on US and Europe
- Absence of a money back guarantee. Although contracts can be cancelled whenever you want to.
- Beginner WooCommerce packages come with caps on products and orders
Summary
| PROS | CONS |
|
● Enjoy access to a fully managed hosting infrastructure (WordPress, WooCommerce, VPS, and Dedicated Server hosting) ● Fast & secure tech stack (compatibility with PHP7, HTTP/2, NGINX protocols) ● Daily backups are scheduled and plugins are updated every night ● 100% uptime guarantee ● Free SSL, CDN, and DDoS protection. ● Premium tools available for free ( Jilt, Glew.io, iThemes sync, iThemes Security Pro, and BeaverBuilder) |
● Not for those on a tight budget since it is not shared hosting
● Email is a paid addon ● No data centers in Asia-Pacific (as of now!) |
Conclusion
Liquid Web is an amazing web host which guarantees reliability, performance and uptime (all the time). It is the perfect choice for website owners whose websites are growing at an exponential rate. Unfortunately, it is on the expensive side as it does not provide shared hosting. However, in a market saturated by similar products, their premium quality service makes them stand out and makes spending a little more, worth it!