Liquid Web Review

What is Liquid Web?

Based in Michigan, USA, Liquid Web is a veteran in the hosting industry. The company started in 1998 by offering cheap shared services and has grown to provide a wide variety of hosting plans.

Liquid Web stays up-to-date with the industry’s fast pace, as it was early to adopt emerging technologies like cloud servers and global CDN networks. All plans are fully-managed and offer DDoS protection, daily backups, and highly scalable servers.

The company currently provides hosting services to 30,000+ enterprises globally, including American Airlines, FedEx, and GM. The HIPAA/PCI-compliant data centers and enterprise firewalls are perfect for organizations that handle sensitive data.

Liquid Web Infrastructure/Network

Liquid Web Inc. has 25,000+ servers located across Europe, Australia, and the United States. They are connected through a web of 8,500+ premium uplink/downlink ports.

The company depends on multiple power backup systems to ensure 100% uptime, including batteries that work alongside mains supply lines from renewable energy sources.

Verizon, Comcast, and Cogent provide Liquid Web with fast internet connectivity to ensure customers receive top-notch services.

Liquid Web Features

Liquid Web comes with some fantastic features. Here are the best ones based on our experience and other user-written Liquid Web reviews.

Website Builder

Liquid Web hosting includes Beaver Builder, an easy drag-drop website creator. Users can build professional-looking websites without any hassle.

The many pre-built templates are suitable for a wide variety of website categories.

Unlimited Bandwidth

Unlike many other hosting platforms, Liquid Web provides you with unlimited bandwidth. This allows you to welcome millions of visitors without restrictions. Do keep in mind that fair usage policies are in place.

Enterprise Security

This top-rated hosting service gives its users numerous solutions to ensure website and application security. You’ll receive a free SSL certificate, which encrypts data between your server and visitors. An SSL certificate also helps to increase your search engine rankings.

A Website Application Firewall (WAF) is included, filtering out DDoS attacks, malware injections, and bot traffic. Apart from that, this tool blocks hackers from scanning your website/app for vulnerabilities.

Real-time monitoring allows you to whitelist/blacklist trackers, IPs, and specific countries. It also helps to stops users hiding behind proxies from accessing your site/app.

WordPress users get the iThemes Pro plugin, adding an extra security layer to your site. It supports brute force detection, secret admin login URL, and database backups.

The company also provides a ServerSecurePlus premium add-on at a $45.00/month price point, including antivirus, malware cleaner, and hardening against common exploits.

Plesk/cPanel/InterWorx Control Panels

Liquid Web hosting offers the option of three control panels. The first and most popular one is cPanel, which is easy-to-use due to its detailed and straightforward user interface. 

cPanel includes a file manager, a database organizer, and an easy way for configuring domains and emails. You can install apps such as WordPress and PHP packages with the applications installer.

Secondly, there is Plesk. Despite having a dashboard aimed towards intermediate users, its best tools include server manager and webmail organizer. It also allows you to add more administrators to manage services.

Lastly, Liquid Web offers an InterWorx control panel that’s perfect for resellers. It has advanced features for webmasters to manage hundreds of customers at once. This includes server monitoring, root access configuration, and a network firewall.

Free Content Delivery Network (CDN)

The Liquid Web CDN is perfect for running resource-hungry websites/apps. During traffic spikes, all requests are routed to a nearby data center that’s less busy. Doing this eliminates packet loss and high ping of distant network facilities while maintaining your website’s speed.

Unfortunately, Liquid Web offers this service on Cloud hosting only. Other plans can enjoy CloudFlare for free.

Scalable

Liquid Web hosting plans grow with your website when you start scaling. Upgrading helps to accelerate its performance and provides a smooth experience to your visitors.

Server Virtualization

Liquid Web Inc. supports virtualization for dedicated servers. This way, each section will carry its own applications, operating system, and drivers.

Unlike shared hosting, this configuration enables the effective management of your websites/apps. It gives each user different resources to use. This way, overloading on one virtual server won’t affect the rest of the machine. 

This feature is perfect for resellers, as it allows you to pay for dedicated server plans.

Load Balancing Servers

The Liquid Web data centers let users connect to multiple servers to balance the load for more extensive websites. They work simultaneously to handle 100,000+ concurrent connections. This service comes as a separate add-on at $250/month.

Automatic Daily Backups

Liquid hosting creates automatic daily backups for its users. You can store websites/applications of up to 100GB.

That concludes some of the best available Liquid Web features, but there is more to discover. Let’s now take a look at some more details.

Liquid Web Uptime

An unreliable host can make you lose visitors and potential customers. That’s why Liquid hosting guarantees 100% uptime. The company relies on a global network of connected servers as a backup. 

Unfortunately, this feature is limited according to the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Incidents such as planned maintenance, hacking, and cPanel issues are left out. 

Despite an impressive 99.99% uptime score in 2019, some user-written Liquid Web reviews complained about server downtimes that lasted hours.

Liquid Web Speed

When it comes to performance, this full-service web hosting company passes with flying colors. Because Liquid Web doesn’t provide information about server speeds, we tested it and were very pleased with the results.

When testing on our free trial account, we obtained an average of 200ms of ping. The outcome of our Time To First Byte test was an impressive 50ms. Our site managed to load in less than 500ms, and videos played with no buffering.

Considering our website wasn’t optimized, this outcome shows us it’s among the best in the game.

Hosting Services

Liquid Web offers a wide variety of hosting plans, including:

Managed WordPress

Liquid Web for WordPress is the most basic plan available. It includes a free SSL certificate, site staging, and automatic daily backups. In addition to that, developer tools such as GIT and root access are available for expert users. You also get a website builder and iThemes security.

All plans in this category are fully-managed, handing over any maintenance and security issues to Liquid Web’s technical team. A simple dashboard allows users to monitor server usage. This way, you can put all your attention into creating content.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is your best bet when it comes to running an ecommerce store. It offers productivity tools such as DokanPro’s MarketPlace and ShopMaster’s Dropshipping. 

This top domain hosting provider includes a payment processor, handling up to 3,000+ orders per hour. You will also receive 500+ free templates, and Beaver Builder lets you customize them easily. Customs fields are present for tweaking content and product lists.

Everything is SEO optimized. Liquid Web reviews noted their products appeared on Google search results quickly, bringing in tons of additional traffic.

Liquid Web VPS

The VPS provides extra resources for running high-performance websites. Users can choose between Linux and Windows. Even though the services are fully managed, full root server access is available. It allows you to install custom software/apps other than the ones offered by the host.

Liquid Web also gives you cPanel, Plesk, or Interworx for free. All of them support reseller features, allowing you to add new customers and provide them with user logins to their dashboard.

Users get up to 100GB of free daily backup, DDoS protection, and real-time monitoring. Not to forget, Cloudflare CDN and a dedicated IP come with this package for free.

Dedicated Servers

The dedicated plans give you an entire server to yourself, letting you customize it to your liking. Its standout features include root-level access, 16GB+ RAM, and 250GB free backup space.

You can access additional servers in Amsterdam, Atlanta, and Michigan for load balancing. Daily backups, an enterprise firewall, and real-time monitoring provide you with extra security.

Cloud Dedicated Servers

This top-rated hosting provider has premium-priced Cloud Dedicated plans for demanding apps/websites. It’s easy to scale and configure, but priority support is available around the clock if you get stuck.

Users on this plan benefit from data encryption, fast connectivity, load-balancing, and 960GB+ of SSD storage. Many Liquid Web reviews praise the rich features and the simple-to-use dashboard that lets you create/manage projects, resize resources, and handle billing.

HIPAA/PCI Compliant Hosting

Liquid Web has special servers for businesses that handle sensitive data. It helps you comply with regulations, like the USA’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance.

Users benefit from hardened security measures. These include 24/7 server monitoring, administrative safeguards, and CISCO firewall. 

Advanced user permission is required before access to any data is granted. The company maintains customer records in the most secure environment.

VMware Private Cloud

This service offers high-tier servers fitted with VMware software, making it easy for users to upscale resources on the go.

Users can group servers at once, depending on needs. This approach gives you flexible prices as there’s an analytics tool that forecasts pricing based on usage.

Advanced security tools help to keep your website/app safe throughout. It includes a free backup service, data encryption, and 24/7 monitoring. What’s more? Hosting engineers are also available to provide technical advice for improving performance.

Customer Support

Liquid Web offers multiple support channels, including a live chat, ticket support, tutorials, and a knowledge base.

The knowledge base categorized its many topics to help users find answers quickly. Liquid hosting also provides useful tutorials, but most of them cater to advanced users.

Should you require instant help, support is available 24/7 via live chat. When testing the team’s level of expertise, we found them welcoming, helpful, and fast.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case for everybody. A large number of Liquid Web reviews complained about long wait times. Additionally, users stated that they were advised to open support tickets for technical issues.

Liquid Web Pricing

Liquid Web offers a wide variety of plans to match your exact needs. You can find all of them on its official website. Here are the available subscriptions:

• WordPress – from $19/month: Includes unlimited visitors, daily backups, and free SSL.

• WooCommerce – from $19/month: Includes custom ecommerce templates, payment processor, and product manager.

• Liquid Web VPS – from $35/month: Includes multilevel DDoS protection, SSD storage, and proactive monitoring. 

• Dedicated Servers – from $169/month: Includes root-level access, 500GB+ backup, and up to 32+ CPU cores.  

• Cloud Dedicated – from $169/month: Includes powerful firewall, fast deployment, and data encryption.  

• HIPPA/PCI Compliant Hosting – from $343/month: Includes enterprise multilevel security fit for banking and financial industry. 

• VMware Private Cloud – from $510/month: Includes virtualization, custom applications, and fast network speeds.

This host doesn’t give refunds, but it offers a 14-day free trial on each plan.

Verdict

Liquid Web has a wide range of hosting plans suitable for businesses of any size. Considering it’s fully-managed, novice users will find it easy to jump on board. Some of the best features include free backups, CDN, and priority support.

Enterprises will appreciate using this host as it offers HIPAA/PCI compliant servers with robust security. Some of them include administrator privileges and 24/7 data center monitoring.

Custom WooCommerce plans have productivity tools for processing customer orders and handling payments, perfect for any ecommerce business.

We agree with other Liquid Web reviews that the pricing is relatively high. But considering the quality of service, every penny is worth it.