Liquid Web Hosting Review & Ratings 2024

Liquid Web is one of the biggest web hosting companies in the industry. And as businesses turn to web hosting to cut IT costs and increase operational efficiency, Liquid Web says it’s the best solution for your business.

In this Liquid Web hosting review, we’ll look at the services offered by this hosting provider to determine if they’re worth your time and money.

What Is Liquid Web Hosting?

Liquid Web is an American web hosting company with several data centers in the US and one in Europe. The company is well known for its managed cloud, VPS, and dedicated server hosting services and is also praised for its excellent customer support.

With Liquid Web, you get a lot of options for configuring your server and customizing your plan with add-ons. You can also choose to manage all your servers yourself, get the core service managed for you, or go for a fully-managed web hosting service.

Liquid Web Dedicated Hosting

The first product we’ll look at in this Liquid Web review is dedicated hosting.

Liquid Web’s dedicated hosting is intended for businesses looking for high performance for their web applications or websites. The servers come in different hardware configurations and can run Windows or Linux OS.

Each Liquid Web dedicated server comes with a built-in backup system, root access, dedicated IP address, and remote access. For server management, you can choose between cPanel, InterWorx, and Plesk.

You also get DDoS protection and a 100% uptime guarantee to ensure your servers are always up.

Liquid Web is so committed to this uptime guarantee that it promises to credit you up to ten times the time you lose during downtime.

Dedicated hosting comes in three packages: self-managed, core-managed, and fully-managed plans, with the fully-managed option including ServerSecure Advanced Security.

Liquid Web VPS Hosting

When you need flexibility without the costs associated with dedicated hosting, choose Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting. With VPS hosting, you get a portion of a server’s hardware resources and decide how to utilize them according to your needs.

Unlike the best shared web hosting services, managed VPS hosting is at the entry level of Liquid Web’s hosting solutions. If you don’t need control over server resources but want the high-quality managed services of Liquid Web, then check out our Nexcess review. Nexcess is a subsidiary of Liquid Web and focuses on managed hosting for WordPress.

One of the most fascinating features of Liquid Web’s VPS hosting solution is its Private VPS Parent service. This solution mimics dedicated server hosting by giving you a virtual server that you can use to create virtual servers within it.

When you set up a Private VPS Parent server, you can do all the basic things a dedicated server allows you to do. You can create virtual instances, move, clone, and destroy them, and even allocate RAM, disk space, and processing power to different apps as needed.

Furthermore, you can move the virtual instances between your Private VPS Parent servers, and if necessary, move them to the public cloud.

Whatever your needs are, Liquid Web has managed VPS hosting solutions that can meet the needs of anyone from agencies and resellers to enterprise customers.

Liquid Web Cloud Hosting

Liquid Web’s cloud hosting is a hybrid solution that combines aspects of traditional dedicated hosting and the flexibility of a cloud platform. While the dedicated servers give you the power you need, the cloud part of it gives you instant provisioning for all your resource needs.

This cloud hosting solution can serve you well if you’re already using traditional hosting but want faster deployment of resources. And if you’re using both hosted and on-premise infrastructure, Liquid Web’s cloud hosting will help you centralize resource management and reduce your IT costs.

Liquid Web also lets you set up a private cloud powered by VMware. VMware ranks highly among the best virtual machine software you can use when creating server instances.

Getting started with Liquid Web’s VMware Private Cloud is easy. Since this is a managed hosting solution, you don’t need any technical knowledge to use it.

The VMware Private Cloud is equipped with automatic failover to prevent downtime as well as a firewall and DDoS protection to secure your data.

To help you determine whether you need to move your operations to its VMware Private Cloud, Liquid Web offers you a free infrastructure assessment. This assessment also checks the technical aspects of your current infrastructure to identify ways of improving your IT performance.

Performance and Security

A web host’s performance and security are important factors to consider before making a buying decision. With the ever-evolving cyber threat landscape, the security of your website and web apps is one you cannot compromise on.

Whether you’re planning to host a single website or run your entire business from the cloud, performance and security determines your business success.

Here are five things that stand out for Liquid Web’s performance and security:

Liquid Web Server Location

Liquid Web owns four data centers—three in the US and one in Europe (Netherlands). Every data center is equipped with UPS systems, redundant batteries, and standby emergency generators.

Also, Liquid Web makes it easy to achieve fast page loads using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). You can choose between Cloudflare and Akamai CDNs and configure them according to your needs. Keep in mind that these are paid add-ons.

If you’re hosting a website, then check out our guide to SEO to learn how to effectively use content marketing to grow your business.

Data Backups

You can store your data backups off-server but within Liquid Web’s data centers or completely off-site on the Acronis Backup Cloud. Whichever option you choose, the backup management interface is the same and both options offer encrypted backups.

Firewall

Liquid Web uses hardware firewalls to protect your servers from malicious attacks. Attacks on your servers can cause data breaches that lead to business costs resulting from loss of data and customer trust.

To ensure maximum security, the firewalls run on their own OS and are detached from the main liquid web servers. This setup increases the security of your data while ensuring that your servers’ resources are not impacted by the firewalls.

Virtual Private Network (VPN)

Liquid Web provides a VPN for enhanced security. The VPN can be helpful especially if you or some of your staff are connecting to your servers from different geographical locations.

The VPN service is fully managed and only available for dedicated and cloud servers.

Compliance

This service is a paid add-on that is fully managed. Depending on your specific needs, compliance can include designing your hosting environment and periodic scans to ensure continued compliance.

If a compliance scan detects issues, Liquid Web’s team immediately gets to work to resolve them.

Liquid Web Pricing Plans

Focusing on the three hosting services we’ve highlighted, the details of Liquid Web’s prices are as shown below. We’ve also included some tips on how to choose the right plan.

Liquid Web Dedicated Hosting Pricing

Which one of these dedicated hosting packages should you choose for your web project?

Intel Xeon 1230V6 plan is the right choice if you’re hosting high-traffic websites like news and popular blogs. You can also choose this plan if your business is managing different brands and all of them have their own websites.

Intel Xeon Gold 6226R Single plan should be your choice if you’re hosting apps that process a lot of data. This plan is also good for resellers whose businesses are growing since it gives them more resources to accommodate more customers.

Intel Xeon Gold 6226R Dual plan is best for big companies that need to allocate server resources to different teams working on different projects.

Liquid Web VPS Pricing

Which one of these VPS hosting plans should you choose?

Essential plan can handle simple tasks very well and so it’s best for running small office apps that don’t require a lot of storage space.

Advanced plan is best for a small team that wants to use online collaboration tools to improve productivity.

Professional plan is best for running everyday web apps and hosting emails for a mid-sized company.

Elite plan should be your choice if you want to run specialized apps that require a lot of processor and memory resources.

Each one of these plans comes with DDoS protection and up to 50 GB Acronis Cyber Backups.

Liquid Web Cloud Hosting

The differences between these cloud hosting options are in the processor, memory size, and storage. So, which plan should you choose?

Choose the first option if you’re hosting the usual apps or websites and are comfortable with standard disk mirroring.

Choose the second option if you’ll be running more apps from your server or a few that require a lot of RAM. Also, since this option comes with a RAID-10 disk configuration, it’s better than the first option if you’re extra keen on disk fault tolerance.

Choose the third option if you simply need more than what option two provides, especially in terms of raw processing power. And if you need even more power, you can create a custom server configuration.

Ease of Use

Functionality aside, it’s important to also gauge the usability of Liquid Web’s hosting solutions. This comes down to the user interface and experience.

Fortunately, Liquid Web’s interface is designed to be easy to navigate. Here is what the account creation page looks like:

And when you get to the page where you choose the operating system and control panel of your choice, this is what you get:

Unless you’re comfortable using the command line and managing everything yourself, you should choose one of the fully managed server/control panel combinations.

For the control panel, you can choose the Liquid Web control panel or any of the other three options i.e. cPanel, InterWorx, and Plesk.

Whichever control panel you choose, you get a well-designed graphical interface that is easy to understand and use.

Here is the cPanel interface:

As for the InterWorx control panel, you’ll be using two different management areas depending on the task at hand. When handling server-related tasks, you’ll use the NodeWorx interface as seen below:

And when working on your websites, you’ll switch to the SiteWorx interface:

Plesk is also a good choice and has a straightforward interface as you can see below:

Generally, the three control panels are easy to use. However, considering that these are tools used by web host admins, you’ll need some knowledge to be comfortable using them.

Customer Support

Liquid Web’s customer support receives a lot of praise from customers. Branding themselves as the most helpful humans in hosting, the customer support reps respond fast and ensure the issue is sorted quickly.

Here is what you need to know about Liquid Web’s customer support:

• It’s available 24/7/365: Do you struggle to troubleshoot server issues at night? With Liquid Web, you’ll never have such experiences. Just head over to the chat and you’ll get the assistance you need regardless of your geographical location and time zone differences.
• Responds in less than one minute: Whether you prefer chat or phone support, with Liquid Web, you’re not going to wait ten minutes for a response. In less than a minute, someone will be there to assist you. And if you create a support ticket, you can expect a response within one hour.
• Consists of level 3 technicians: When you need technical support, you’ll get it. Not only does the level 3 tech support inspire confidence, but the technicians will even help you design custom solutions.
• Vast knowledge base: If you love resolving issues yourself, then Liquid Web has you covered. The company’s knowledge base provides answers and detailed guides to help you learn and troubleshoot any issues you may have.

Liquid Web Pros and Cons

Having discussed the main features of Liquid Web hosting services, here’s a summary of what it’s good and not-so-good at:

Liquid Web Pros

• Powerful server infrastructure: Liquid Web invests in the latest and best solutions to help it keep its promises to customers. From the latest server infrastructure to connecting to the top ISPs, Liquid Web ensures that its cloud hosting solutions are the best you can get.
• Includes managed hosting services: To help you cut operational costs and focus on the business, Liquid Web can handle all your cloud hosting management tasks. From designing your cloud environment to migrating your site for you, Liquid Web ensures that your hosting experience is worth telling your friends about.
• Excellent customer support: Liquid Web’s customer support staff have a very good reputation. Not only do they resolve customer issues well but they’re also fast in responding to queries. They’re available 24/7/365 and can be reached from anywhere in the world. Also, Liquid Web has a comprehensive library of detailed knowledge base articles that you can read to get answers to your questions.
• 100% uptime guarantee: Other web hosts guarantee 99.99% uptime but Liquid Web gives you a 100% uptime guarantee. This guarantee is communicated in the service level agreement and is made possible by Liquid Web’s redundant power and network setup. Furthermore, if you suffer downtime, Liquid Web will compensate you up to ten times the amount of time your systems were down.

Liquid Web Cons

• Liquid Web is not beginner-friendly: Liquid Web is not for beginners. Although you can choose your preferred control panel, you still need to know what the different settings are.
• It’s expensive: Liquid Web is not for those looking for a bargain. The company targets businesses that are willing to pay high fees for its premium web hosting service.
• No free trials or demos: If you like using free trials and live demos to test online services before committing, then Liquid Web will disappoint you. To test these hosting services, you’ll need to buy a plan. If you’re not satisfied with the service, you can ask for a refund within 30 days.

FAQ

Liquid Web Hosting Review Bottom Line

Liquid Web is a strong contender for the top position in our best dedicated web hosting services category. The company has invested heavily to ensure it can power its customers’ mission-critical sites without any issues.

Liquid Web offers dedicated servers, VPS hosting, and cloud hosting services. It also offers unique hosting solutions such as Private VPS Parent servers and VMware Private Cloud, as well as custom server configurations.

Considering its superb server performance and highly-motivated expert customer support staff, Liquid Web is a web host worth checking out.

Explore Further

• How Much Does It Cost to Host a Website?
• Best Web Hosting Services
• Best Cheap Cloud Hosting Services
• What Is a Virtual Machine and How Does It Work?

Was This Article Helpful?