Over 15 Years in Website Hosting

The Liquid Web – well, the company itself – has been around since 1997. At first, it provided shared hosting, and its major feature was the professional, always-available support. As time passed, the Liquid Web increased its portfolio, and nowadays it offers one of the best VPS and Dedicated hosting solutions. Starting from 2009, the Liquid Web offers cloud hosting via its own “Storm” platform. After some changes in the higher levels, the Liquid Web always thrived: nowadays, it’s one of the best providers of VPS and dedicated hosting, and for really nice prices. As for the support, it’s got even better and if you are looking for a place where you can get all the help you need, then Liquid Web and its Heroic™ support team is just perfect for you. Of course, the high-quality support is a must: after all, we are talking about a high-quality hosting here!

Types of Hosting Products

The entry level at Liquid Web is a bit high than other cheap hosting providers: you won’t find here shared hosting, the most basic service you could get – if you are on a budget – is the VPS hosting. If you are looking for shared hosting for a few bucks a month, this provider isn’t for you; however, for high-performance and quite cheap VPS hosting, the Liquid Web is a perfect choice! Let’s take a look at these plans – for prices, you’ll have to jump to the next section of our review!

VPS

So, when the VPS is the entry-level at a website hosting provider, you can imagine who should choose this company’s services: those who know that they will need the scalability. At Liquid Web, you will find four pre-set plans for VPS, but you can call the support team if you have specific requirements and you know what you are going to need. All VPS services are managed hosting services. The two basic VPS plans offer you a virtual private server box with 2GB RAM, one 2-core processor, and 5 TB inbound traffic. The difference between the two is in the storage space: you get 40 GB for the small, and 100 GB for the bigger – also, the bigger plan offers the option to choose your operating system. The next two levels are much better: 4 or 8 GB RAM, 4 or 8 core processor, 150 or 300 GB of SSD storage, 5 TB inbound transfer. And, you can select the OS. If this isn’t enough for you, you should consider getting in touch with the support agents: you can go up to 20 processor cores and 256 GB RAM. You can build up a real power-server if you want!

Storm – Cloud Hosting

With the simple cloud hosting, you can benefit from the high scalability granted by the cloud technology. The Liquid Web has one cloud hosting offer, which works like a shared hosting. But, without all the problems with the shared service: you can run unlimited sites, install any app you like, and you could also benefit from the top-ranking support. This plan includes 50 GB SSD, 1 TB bandwidth and an unlimited number of visitors. It’s a lightning fast solution, and it’s really a great choice if you want to ensure that there is room to grow.

WordPress Hosting

Quite surprisingly, the Liquid Web offers a nice range of managed WordPress hosting services. There is a decision you have to make first: you want advanced access to your site with cPanel, or you are fine with the WordPress Dashboard, and let the Liquid Web handle the details. If you go with the cPanel solution, you can choose from four, with the WordPress dashboard from three plans. The Personal, Professional and Agency plans have some great features, and you can launch up to 40 sites (with the Agency plan). These plans include auto-backup, automatic WordPress Updates, iThemes Sync, and even free SSL certification. If you go with the cPanel solution, your WordPress plan will be an actual VPS plan, with unlimited inbound and 5 TB outbound traffic. The different cPanel plans offer different storage and RAM sizes.

Dedicated Servers

The Dedicated hosting is always the top of the mountain, it’s the fastest, most stable, and usually the priciest solution. However, for the price you pay, you get superior quality though, especially at the Liquid Web. We must say, the Liquid Web has the widest range of dedicated server plans we’ve ever seen, and to be honest, these are some really exciting offers. The most “basic” dedicated server runs on Intel Xeon E5-1230 processor with 4 cores, running at 3.4 GHz, and it features 16 GB RAM, 2×250 GB storage (SSD primary), and a terabyte backup drive and 5 TB bandwidths. Naturally, the better plans you choose, the better machine you get, and you can improve performance by opting-in for dual processor plans.

It would take a while to discuss all these crazy dedicated servers, but if you are interested in it, we advise you to check out what the Liquid Web can offer to you. In case you are looking for something dedicated, yet somewhat cheaper, then the cloud dedicated solutions might the best ones for you. There are three cloud dedicated server types: they are all based on Intel Xeon processors, and they offer you a great build – 4 cores (16 cores for the largest plan), 8 GB RAM (16 and 32 GB for the advanced plans), and 250 GB storage (SSD, Raid 1; 500 GB Raid 1 for the mid, and 500 GB Raid 10 for the big plan); all plans include 5 TB outbound and unlimited inbound data transfers.

Included Services

The Liquid Web offers “hosting essentials” with every plan. These are: performance optimization, backup and recovery, DDoS protection and top-notch security. The performance is optimized by taking advantage of the CloudFlare CDN: you will have your site cached throughout the world, on 79 data centers, and your visitors can enjoy the amazing loading times, as your site loads from the nearest server’s cache. As part of the network services, the Liquid Web hosting solutions also benefit from load balancing and low-latency Content Delivery Networks. The security level provided by this website hosting provider is amazing, and we are going to go into details shortly, under the Reliability section. As far as the software services are concerned, there are some really good options for you. You can practically take advantage of the numerous industry-standard methods and even some better things.

cPanel – and WHM

The Linux cPanel access is included with all of the packages (not the basic ones, though), and it’s the best tool for most website owners. It has a user-friendly interface, and it allows the installment of all major CMS systems. You can take advantage of the hot features like email management, FTP access or shopping cart software. With the cPanel at Liquid Web, you can fully customize your site, and with the Webhost Manager service, they even spare you the administration. The WHM monitors the quotas, security checks, statistics, and restarts, and it’s always kept up to date, just like the cPanel updates when new version comes out. With the WHM you can further automate your cPanel server. Another popular control panel is the Plesk, which also gives you a full access– but it’s still managed hosting, and root access isn’t granted in most cases – and it enables you to install what you need. This ensures a good level of flexibility, and if you prefer Plesk, you can use it with an easy mind.

Installing Add-Ons

It’s really easy to launch and manage a new site if you know what you are doing. If you opt-in for one of the plans at Liquid Web, you get access to Softaculous, which is a popular auto-installer. It grants you the option to easily install e-commerce tools, CMS, create and manage polls, and write blogs. Via Softaculous you can on-click install Magento for example, along with WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or osCommerce.

Email

Most of the Liquid Web’s plans include unlimited, and highly advanced email solutions. It’s available both for Linux and Windows hosting and they offer some really awesome features. For example, you can install autoresponders, and you can set up as many aliases you want. The email hosting service includes virus and spam protection, along with regular back-up services. Since it supports all major mail clients, you can set up your mailing options quickly, without making a fuss about it.

Since the Liquid Web doesn’t offer you any shared plans, the starting prices are rather high. At this provider, the VPS plans are the cheapest actually, while everything else is for professional users who expect high volumes to their sites. The VPS plans are varied, and apart from the pre-set offers, you have the option to “build” your own VPS server.

The most basic VPS server at Liquid Web starts at $59 per month, and it offers a virtual server with 2 GB RAM, a 2 Core processor, 5 TB data transfer (traffic), and 40 GB SDD storage. The next plan – probably the real entry level, as you can choose the OS for your virtual server – starts at $79 per month. Though these prices might seem too high at first, keep in mind that you get a virtual server, not shared hosting, and the granted security is awesome, and this company provides you with security that really worth it.

The cloud sites service starts at $150 per month, and you can cut it down for three months with the Liquid Web’s own discount coupon. It offers a nice solution between VPS and Dedicated hosting, though we would rather go with one of those solutions for this price.The managed WordPress hosting is pretty great too, and the prices are surprisingly good – especially if you consider that you can actually grab a VPS server for your WordPress site.

In case you choose the “smallest” WordPress hosting with cPanel, you get access to a VPS starting at $89 per month, and it will give you all the necessary goods you need. In case you would like to go with the other solution, the WordPress dashboard option, you won’t have root access, but instead, you can focus on your websites.As for the dedicated servers, the physical dedicated servers start from $199 per month, while the Storm dedicated cloud servers could be yours for a starting price of $159 a month.Add-on prices vary from server type and on what you need exactly: you can buy more storage for example, and later you can easily go for better VPS or dedicated servers as your site grows. We recommend you to check the prices yourself. Actually, the cheapest VPS package is only $1.92 per day.

Reliability is a field the Liquid Web truly excels in! Due to the simple fact that it’s aiming for the higher-level customers, this hosting provider offers great support, uptime guarantee and dedication to security. Now, when a website hosting service boasts about 100% uptime guaranteed, we usually have our expectations set a bit lower. However, in the case of the Liquid Web, this uptime is real, which is due to the cloud solution, the datacenters, and the overall great security. If you pick a plan from the Liquid Web, you can rest assured that your site will be online all the time.

The server speed and the page loading times are fantastic. There are only milliseconds difference between continents, and even this can be a bridge over if you go for the cloud server offers: the cloud caching decreases loading times significantly, and this will increase your site’s, and your business’s performance in the long run.

Security

The Liquid Web has industry-leading security. The first line of defense is at the datacenter locations: the servers are supervised 24/7, and access is restricted to the establishments. The company has a dedicated team, the Sonar Monitoring team, which oversees the different traffic and event statistics, and they remove the threats before they could even reach your site. Apart from these, the servers are protected with high-quality firewalls, they are protected against DDoS and brute force attacks. Every plan includes this great security, and the backup and restore services are the best. Liquid Web doesn’t trust the decision about security to you: they want you to be safe, so the packages include services which are quite expensive at other providers. You can also rest assured that your clients’, and your info are secure, and everything complies with the highest industry standards.

The Hero Support

Liquid Web’s most famous offer is the amazing support. There are only highly trained experts on the other end of the phone and the chat window. And they are also very fast: you get to a support agent in 59 seconds, and you can have your problems resolved as fast as lightning. The Liquid Web support is available 24/7/365, and you can reach them via phone, chat or email. The Liquid Web support is so great, that the company choose a “super hero support agent” as its mascot. We couldn’t find any unsatisfied comments or posts about the Liquid Web support.

Bottom Line

Our final verdict about the Liquid Web is positive: you can choose from a large range of products and services. Even though these hosting plans are not for everyday users (e.g. bloggers, marketers), the Liquid Web is probably the best choice for bigger business, entrepreneurs launching sites, and to large enterprises which seek affordable, yet trustworthy hosting. Setup your account when you feel like – you won’t regret it!