Businesses require robust web hosting services to maintain their online presences, and Liquid Web is one that many large brands trust. The company has a range of cloud, dedicated, reseller, virtual private server (VPS), and WordPress server packages with enough flexibility and muscle to power popular online destinations such as Eddie Bauer, Home Depot, National Geographic, Porsche, and Symantec. Liquid Web excels in managed hosting, handling all your site's administrative duties and support tasks, regardless of complexity and scale. While it commands a hefty premium, this excellent, enterprise-class service is well worth the price of admission and earns our Editors' Choice award for managed web hosting.
If you want a server with significant power but without the high price tag of a dedicated server, check out Liquid Web's VPS plans. VPS hosting is a higher form of shared hosting, except that you deal with far more powerful (and guaranteed) system resources.
The entry-level plans start at a reasonable $5 per month. It includes 1GB of RAM, 30GB of solid-state drive storage, and 1TB of monthly data transfers. On the other end of the spectrum, Liquid Web's high-end option (starting at $154 per month) ups the ante by including 32GB of RAM and 960GB of SSD storage. In a nice touch, the VPS plans have feature and price parity across the linux and Windows server operating systems, which isn't always the case with other web hosts. Contact Liquid Web if you want to spec out a more powerful server.
Liquid Web's RAM and storage totals are some of the best we've seen for their price point. That's a big qualifier, however, given Liquid Web's prices. Hostwinds is our top pick for VPS services that cater to SMBs (our main audience), but Liquid Web is worth considering if you're shopping for enterprise-level hosting. Unlike many other VPS services we've reviewed, Liquid Web only charges for the number of days you use the service per month, which comes in handy if you decide to cancel your account.
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The host has many add-on features for your VPS plan. For example, you can add Acronis Cyber Backup for data protection (different from Acronis Cyber Protect, which includes anti-malware tools). Acronis starts at a base price of $11 per month for 250GB of data, and goes as high as $493 per month for 10TB of data. Other extras include cybersecurity monitoring through ThreatDown, firewall services through Cisco, and server protection through Imunify and Server Secure.
If you want to build a website on the strongest possible foundation, look into Liquid Web's dedicated server plans. With dedicated hosting, your site taps a server's full system resources instead of sharing them with other sites. This is one of Liquid Web's primary hosting offerings.
Liquid Web's dedicated servers come in a variety of configurations, ranging from a server with a single quad-core processor, two 480GB solid-state drives (with a 1TB backup drive), 10TB of monthly data transfers, and 16GB of RAM (starting at $44 per month) to a server with high-end, 32-core processors with two 960GB NVMe drives (and a 1TB SATA backup drive), 15TB of monthly data transfers, and 128GB of RAM (starting at $647 per month).
Like its VPS plans, Liquid Web has add-on services for dedicated servers. For example, you can add Threat Stack Oversight monitoring (starting at $17 per server per month) or DDoS protection via Corero (for $111 per month). Clearly, Liquid Web's dedicated servers are aimed at businesses that want sharp website performance and that have the money to spend on it.
If you need pure computational power, Liquid Web offers Nvidia-powered GPU hosting, which is a relatively new category. These plans are for people who want to train large AI models and tackle complex workloads.
This form of dedicated hosting starts at $0.95 per hour, and has 32 cores, 1.92TB NVMe Raid-1 storage, and 128GB of DDR5 RAM. At the highest end, you'll get what Liquid Web describes as the pinnacle of high-performance GPUs: 48 cores, 7.68TB NVMe RAID-1 storage, and 758GB of DDR5 RAM. The cost? $6.94 per hour.
Liquid Web offers four tiers of managed WordPress web hosting through its Nexcess brand. Starting with the Spark tier ($24 per month), you get a single domain, 2TB of monthly data transfers, and a free SSL certificate. As with other managed WordPress hosts, Liquid Web has one-click installs, automatic updates, and access to hundreds of apps and WordPress plug-ins.
With cloud hosting, the resources your site needs to operate are shared across multiple servers. As a result, there's a lot of flexibility should you need to expand server resources.
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Liquid Web offers cloud VPS hosting with eight tiers. The entry-level plan ($5 per month) has 1GB of memory, 30GB of storage, and 1TB of bandwidth. On the high end, you can spec a hosting package with a six-core Intel 2356G CPU, two 960GB SSDs, and 32GB of storage for $87 per month. The Windows version has the same specs as the linux version, but costs $94 per month due to the Microsoft license.
Liquid Web lacks shared web hosting, which is generally used by individuals and the smallest of businesses. The category is hosting's "roommate" tier that sees your site literally sharing a server and server resources with other websites. It's not the most powerful web hosting, but it's cheap web hosting.
If you want shared hosting, HostGator is an excellent place to start. It has linux- or Windows-based shared servers that give small- and medium-sized businesses room to grow (starting at $12.95 per month, and going as low as $3.75 per month with a three-year plan).
If you're looking to get into the web hosting business for yourself but don't want to manage servers, bandwidth, and other infrastructure matters, check out Liquid Web's excellent reseller web hosting packages. Liquid Web's plans, starting at $99 per month, come with an exclusive WebHost Manager Complete Solution (or WHMCS) plug-in and instant provisioning.
The dedicated and VPS reseller packages are of both the linux and Windows variety, and they have the same RAM, monthly data transfers, and storage amounts as those that Liquid Web supplies directly. There are, again, no shared reseller hosting plans. Liquid Web also lets you apply your own branding to the servers you rent, and it supplies 24/7 tech support.
We quickly crafted a website using a Liquid Web WordPress package. The managed hosting environment is specifically designed for WordPress and its associated plug-ins. In fact, you don't have to install the CMS at all, as it comes preinstalled. Once logged into WordPress, we created posts, pages, and galleries as we would with any other self-hosted WordPress site.
The WordPress installation's back end contained several themes. We found an attractive one and applied it to our site to give it a snazzy look. Of course, you can also use a WordPress theme purchased elsewhere.
Liquid Web has you covered on the security front. The company offers many tools, including firewalls, Secure Socket Layer (SSL), virtual private networks (VPN), and malware scanning and removal. It also has free nightly backups, which will safeguard you should your site suffer massive damage.
Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. If your site is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services. You do not want that. Liquid Web has a stated 99.9% uptime promise, so you can expect your site to be accessible the vast majority of the time.
Liquid Web has an excellent Heroic Support customer service team, a squad of knowledgeable people who assist you in under a minute if you reach out by phone or chat, or in under 30 minutes if you submit a help desk ticket. We fired up the web chat on a weekday afternoon to ask a representative about the difference between dedicated and VPS hosting. A rep came to our aid seconds later and gave us a friendly, thorough explanation. We were impressed with the speed and thoroughness of the response.
Since Liquid Web is pricey, it's unfortunate that the service lacks the standard 30-day money-back guarantee, which is typical in the web hosting industry. The company only offers prorated refunds on monthly cloud servers, and most of its other services are non-refundable. Considering the amount of money that a company is likely to spend on Liquid Web hosting, it would be nice to see more refund options. Liquid Web contends that it's not possible because most services are custom-tailored to the user.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Liquid Web)
Liquid Web Hosting
- 5.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.
Liquid Web is one of the most powerful web hosts we have reviewed and easily earns an Editors' Choice winner for managed web hosting. It may not have shared hosting packages, but the company's excellent dedicated and VPS hosting are enough to place it at the very top of the pack. If your business requires high-powered managed web hosting and is able to pay a premium for it, Liquid Web will do the job very well.
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