The company has built a strong following and user base, and over the past two decades has fine-tuned its offerings to provide a top-of-the-line hosting solution for a variety of needs. This extensive experience has let Liquid Web hosting create a platform that delivers a wide range of useful features along with a service that is both reliable and consistently fast enough to provide a great user experience.
Although the company doesn’t offer shared hosting, it does present an excellent array of hosting options that include cloud, managed WordPress, server clusters, and more. With a near 100% uptime and tools that are ideal for ecommerce sites as well as those with more complex needs, the company is definitely near the head of the pack. Learn more in our expert breakdown and read Liquid Web reviews by our users to see if the company is worth your dollars.
Liquid Web Pros and Cons:
Pros
It’s surprisingly reliable
During our extensive tests, we found that Liquid Web hosting consistently delivered uptimes well above the industry average, and rarely dropped service.
It offers flexible pricing
Although its prices start slightly higher than average, the company offers a wide variety of pricing options to fit a range of needs and unique circumstances.
It’s user-friendly
The company’s managed hosting makes it easy to focus on the important parts of your website, and its feature-rich ecosystem helps you get started quickly and effectively.
It offers outstanding support
One of our favorite aspects of Liquid Web is its 24/7 support, which is fast, efficient, and friendly. You can reach the company through a variety of channels.
Cons
There is no shared hosting
This is a factor if you’re just getting started, as shared hosting can keep your costs and usage at more affordable rates until you’re ready to scale.
The knowledge base is geared towards experts
Although the support staff is excellent, the knowledge base may be slightly more difficult to navigate and comprehend for web beginners.
Liquid Web Prices and Payment Methods
One of the biggest benefits of Liquid Web pricing is that the company offers a broad range of options to suit a variety of user needs. The company’s most affordable plans, VPS hosting and managed WordPress, start at $29 a month. Each of them can be set up within five minutes and include 1-click scaling should you need to expand your resources to keep up with demand. They also include access to the company’s drag-and-drop Beaver Builder website creation tool. WordPress hosting also includes staging sites, automated 30-day backups and 5 terabytes of bandwidth. Moreover, you can use a Liquid Web coupon code to take an additional 25% off your introductory price.
The base VPS hosting plan gives you your choice of administration dashboard (including Interworx, Plesk Web Pro, and cPanel Pro), along with 10 terabytes of bandwidth and 100 gigabytes’ worth of backups. You’ll also receive access to Cloudflare’s CDN, as well as a 100% uptime guarantee in your service level agreement.
If you’re seeking an ecommerce hosting solution, Liquid Web offers dedicated WooCommerce hosting starting at $39 a month. This plan includes a great deal of excellent features directly from your Liquid Web login page, including thousands of available templates to build your website, mobile optimization and responsive website design, SEO tools to help you improve your visibility, and even separate accounts for your staff to simplify web administration.
The company also offers higher tier plans, though they start at $109 per month for a dedicated cloud server. If you’re just getting started with your small business or web store, these plans may be slightly out of your reach until you’re prepared to scale.
Liquid Web User Experience
On the whole, we found Liquid Web to be a reliable service for beginners, even if many of their tools are aimed more toward experts. The Liquid Web managed WordPress plan, for instance, is fully managed so you don’t have to root around in the settings to get it configured properly. It even includes automated updates and patching to keep you secure and protected against the most recent threats. Additionally, we found that the drag-and-drop website builder Liquid Web hosting includes with its plans to be incredibly easy to use and surprisingly deep, with hundreds of existing templates and responsive design.
Even when you’re taking advantage of the company’s more advanced features such as developer tools and specialized dashboards, Liquid Web’s SaaS-like design makes it easy to manage and keep track of everything from any web-enabled computer you have available. Although Liquid Web makes great efforts to appeal to experts and pros, it’s still quite beginner friendly.
Liquid Web Load Times and Reliability
The first thing that stood out to us, even before we tested Liquid Web hosting, is that the company goes the extra mile and includes a 100% uptime guarantee in its SLA. This means that if you receive anything less than that for more than a few hours, you can get refunded for that time. Especially for ecommerce and smaller businesses, the ability to be always available is essential. The Guarantee extends to Liquid Web Managed WordPress and Liquid Web VPS plans as well. On the whole, we were quite impressed with how reliable the company’s hosting solutions are.
In terms of speed, Liquid Web doesn’t disappoint either. The company’s loading times are consistently better than the industry average, averaging 500 milliseconds per page, and dipping as low as 400 milliseconds at times. Part of this has to do with the Liquid Web data centers, which are fully owned and managed by the company, as well as the many tools for optimization Liquid Web supports. No matter if you’re using Liquid Web cPanel or any of the other dashboards the company offers, you can access these caching, CDN, and optimization tools to ensure your website always delivers a smooth and fast user experience.
Liquid Web Main Features
No matter which plan you end up choosing, Liquid Web delivers impressive value with its extensive set of features and web tools. This starts with its Beaver Builder drag-and-drop designer, which includes hundreds of premade templates, mobile optimization, and responsive design. We were also happy to see the company provides extensive security tools, including a CSF firewall active on all its servers, as well as SSL certificates for your WordPress websites.
Though the company no longer offers Liquid Web shared hosting, it still provides much of the same value elsewhere. Accordingly, you can exert more control over your resource usage, and Liquid Web’s multiple plans include either automated scaling based on your activity, or one-click scalability to let you decide the best moment to expand. More advanced tools include SSH access, integrated Git repositories for easier communication and pull requests, and WP-CLI. Additionally, you gain a gateway to the newest version of PHP and Nginx to help optimize your WordPress speeds.
Liquid Web Customer Support
After reading hundreds of Liquid Web reviews from our users, we were pleased to see that the company’s customer support is consistently one of its top-rated features. Liquid Web offers support via live chat, phone, and email, and it makes a bold 59-second initial response time (59 minutes for their service desk) guarantee that it lives up to. When we called the Liquid Web phone number, we were pleased to find a team of highly trained and friendly professionals who were able to answer most of our questions and set us on the right track.
The company’s knowledge base is also handy, although we found that it’s slightly more useful and valuable if you already have some background knowledge on the topics you’re researching. Even so, you can find handy guides and tutorials, as well as a useful FAQ section that can help you resolve minor issues.
Liquid Web Hosting for Free
Although it doesn’t offer a free trial, the company does offer a friendly refund policy for its monthly subscribers. However, you can lower your initial expenses and save on a trial period by using a Liquid Web coupon code that gives you a 25% discount for your first three months.
Our Final Thoughts on Liquid Web
Overall, Liquid Web provides a top-end service at an affordable rate. The company’s multiple specialized plans let you choose an option that works best for your small business and website needs, and its excellent features make it easy to set up and get started. With one-click scaling, you can also determine the right time to grow while avoiding locking yourself into a plan you don’t need and can’t afford. Overall, Liquid Web hosting is a great solution regardless of your skill level, and with a service that’s been fine-tuned over two decades, it offers reliability, speed, and great support.
