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The story of Liquid Web began in 1997 with one man by the name of Jim Geiger and his dream to create “the most loved hosting provider in the world”. Nowadays, it employs more than 500 on-site hosting professionals and serves over 500,000 customers in more than 150 countries across the world.
As its founder likes to emphasize, Liquid Web puts its focus on meeting the needs of small and mid-size businesses while keeping the customer at the center of its strategy. Liquid Web use a cloud-based infrastructure and specialize in fully managed cloud VPS and dedicated server solutions. There’s no shared hosting or all-in-one website builder packages as Liquid Web don’t aim their services at beginners.
Liquid Web’s head office is located in Lansing (Michigan, the USA) and their data centers can be found in Lansing (Michigan, the USA), Phoenix (Arizona, the USA), and Amsterdam (the Netherlands). If this doesn’t cover you or your intended users, worry not since Liquid Web also provides a global CDN (content delivery network) with server locations in more than 120 countries.
Liquid Web’s official site features something we haven’t seen in a while, and that is pictures of people laughing out loud at jokes they haven’t shared with us (or they may just be happy working at Liquid Web). Besides this, the site is everything you would expect from a veteran web hosting provider, professional-looking and well-polished. It also features a blog and a pretty good one to boot.
In 2024 Liquid Web underwent a rebranding and changed their logo and got a much more professional look. They also added self managed bare metal servers, managed metal, cloud VPS, and cloud metal servers to their product list
Plans and pricing
Given that Liquid Web is specialized in providing powerful managed hosting solutions aimed at professionals and businesses, it’s no wonder that simple shared hosting is not an option. One of the best things about the plans and pricing is that they don’t try and bait and switch you with low introductory prices and then high renewal fees. Plus, when there is an introductory offer, they still make it clear what the price for hosting is each month usually.
The smallest WordPress plan called “Spark” will supply you with the ability to host a single site, use 15GB of storage space, and 2TB of bandwidth for $21 a month.
The VPS plans are low-price but the marked price doesn’t include a panel or management which can significantly increase the cost. For example the $5/mo VPS plan with a panel and full management can rise over $90/mo.
As it usually is with similar premium providers, Liquid Web offers no risk-free trials for its products but it does offer a “no-hassle” money-back guarantee for the first 30 days of use for cloud, cloud dedicated, and VPS packages. They also add that if you happen to discover that their solutions are not right for you within a few days, you can get in touch with their support staff and get your monthly investment refunded. On the other hand, if you’ve subscribed for an annual plan, you’re out of luck.
The methods of payment which Liquid Web accepts include credit cards (VISA, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover), PayPal, check and wire transfers.
Ease of use
When you’re ready, pick out a plan, a billing cycle and prepare to surrender your email address, come up with a strong password and prove to them that you’re not a robot. After this, you’ll be asked to wrap up your account with Liquid Web by providing your personal information, a phone number, and a physical address.
If there is an introductory discount for the product you are purchasing, make sure to copy the code and paste it into the appropriate field before making a buy, since it can get up to 50% off the original price for a couple of months.
There’s no domain included in Liquid Web plans so this is something that you’ll need to take care of yourself. Buying a domain name from one of the best domain registrars is not complicated but it can still be a little daunting for new users.
Liquid Web’s dashboard design is clean and simple, and everything you’ll need for monitoring and managing all aspects of your website (or websites) is laid out in the main menu on the left tab. If you already have a site elsewhere, Liquid Web’s technical team will transfer it for you at no additional cost (you just need to ask), and this is true even if you’ve purchased their cheapest hosting package.
As we write, Liquid Web provides a selection of easy-to-use control panels including InterWorx Unlimited, Plesk, cPanel, and WHM/cPanel, together with enough information about each of them. The panel you’re interested in will already be covered by the pricing, but only if you went with an annual or a biennial plan. However, if you want to put your technical expertise to the test, you can even choose a server with no control panel and/or choose to install your own.
Liquid Web doesn’t offer a website builder, therefore, if you want to use one you’ll have to install it on your own or use an online service such as Weebly, Wix, or Squarespace.
Speed and experience
When Liquid Web described its solution as “lightning-fast”, it wasn’t exaggerating by any means. Before putting the speed of Liquid Web’s official site to the test (via GTmetrix) we did have high hopes, however, we didn’t expect to get thunderstruck with a perfect speed performance crowned with an A (100%) as a final score. Although the time the page took to fully load was 6.8 seconds (which is slightly above the average), all other vital web metrics were well ahead of the curve, resulting in a perfectly presentable performance.
As for uptime, Liquid Web provides an SLA-backed guarantee of 100% across the board, which means that all major routing devices within Liquid Web’s network will be available from the global internet 100% of the time. To test this out we employed UptimeRobot, a tool with which we monitored and measured the availability and responsiveness of Liquid Web’s official site for two weeks. Unsurprisingly, our report showed no traces of downtime.
The report also reveals a few major spikes in response time, but since the average one was around 107 milliseconds, these spikes can be safely ignored.
Support
If you find yourself needing a helping hand, Liquid Web’s stellar support staff can be reached 24/7 via telephone, live chat, and e-mail. Liquid Web provides a 59-second support response guarantee (for phone, chat, and helpdesk) with all of its plans, which means you’re not going to waste virtually any time waiting for help. Even Liquid Web describes its in-house support team as “the most helpful humans on hosting”, with which we can’t argue.
If for some reason you want to search for solutions on your own, Liquid Web has several options on offer. The most obvious one is the knowledgebase, to which we can’t do enough justice by describing it as merely comprehensive. It comprises over 1700 in-depth guides covering everything from the most common to more complex issues, all of them described in detail and backed by suitable screenshots.
The competition
For managed cloud VPS, a fair competitor to Liquid Web would be ScalaHosting which comes out just cheaper per month but is not as flexible when it comes to plan specifications. For example, if we take a plan with 2 vCPUs and 4 GB of memory, it will cost you just under $50 at ScalaHosting a month but just over $60 with Liquid web. If you wanted to drop the RAM to only 2 GB, ScalaHosting wouldn’t allow that, Liquid Web will.
Final verdict
Liquid Web are an ultra professional web hosting provider that have a lot of experience in the game. Their services have a really good reputation and you’ll be hard pressed to find a winder managed product range.
Any web professional looking for managed hosting should definitely check out Liquid Web but also take a look at other providers on the market like ScalaHosting that might just beat them on price.
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