Liquid Web has long been a host that has valued itself on the reputation it has with users and the myriad of options individuals and businesses have available to them for the purposes of communication. Their 'About Us' page makes it quite clear that they offer around the clock assistance via live chat, email or even over the phone. Alongside high ratings from neutral third-parties, it's little wonder that Liquid Web received a listing here at Hosting Guy.
I've used this company in the past for several projects and think that it's a great idea for us to press forward for the purposes of talking about what they have to offer and whether or not it's suitable to your requirements. So, without further ado, let's take a full tour around Liquid Web and see what they've got to offer. Continue reading to get my full thoughts and feelings on this managed hosting provider.
Liquid Web offers dedicated servers, VPS hosting, cloud services and enterprise solutions. Depending on exactly what it is that you're after, there's a good chance that Liquid Web will have something on the table that's suitable to your requirements. They also have a full suite of add-ons, but we'll talk more about those later, since they have so much to provide to users no matter what level they find themselves at.
In the VPS hosting category, Liquid Web provides gigabit bandwidth, unlimited site additions, cPanel support and DDoS protection as standard across all of their VPS services. Plans in this bracket start at around $59 per month which will give you 40 GB of SSD storage, 10 TB of monthly bandwidth, free backups (100 GB) and 2 vCPUs alongside 2 GB of RAM.
Note that this is on a Linux configuration and while they do offer a Windows alternative, the lowest level package they currently have available is for $129 per month. What's more, if you plan to migrate from an existing host, Liquid Web can manage all of the gory tech stuff for you: they have a migration team that assists in this regard and will get you over to your new VPS in no time at all. It's also possible to seamlessly update your VPS package on the fly if you find yourself needing more storage space or CPU power.
Since a number of folks will be using a service like Liquid Web for WordPress hosting, it seems like a good idea to point out that they do offer WP managed accounts operated via Nexcess. These are incredibly budget friendly and start off at just $19 per month, which provides you with 15 GB of storage, 2 TB of bandwidth, unlimited email accounts and a bunch of other useful tools to ensure that your WordPress experience is the best it can be. Liquid Web also offers a scalable product in this configuration, with the ability to go up to an enterprise-level hosting solution which offers you support for up to 250 sites.
The enterprise solutions for Liquid Web are mainly split into two categories: high performance and high availability. Their entry-level performance environment provides you with two dedicated servers, a database server, load balancer and an 8-port gigabit switch to help with data throughput. Liquid Web currently uses Intel Xeon E3-1230 v5 Quad-Core CPUs in this configuration. Our hope is that they have AMD EPYC processors offered in the not too distant future.
Most of the products that Liquid Web offers are medium to high level setups: if you're just getting started or need a small website for your business, their solutions probably aren't the most budget friendly. Having said that, Liquid Web does make up for the relatively high-tier pricing by providing you with instant support as and when it's required.
Anecdotally, Liquid Web is also highly regarded in the hosting space for having highly technical staff that understand how their systems work and provide speedy solutions to any issue you might come across.
Their knowledge base is expansive and some people will argue that this is one of their best features: it's incredible how much they've put out there completely free of charge!
Liquid Web supports billing with PayPal and credit cards, including American Express and Discover. You can also use pre-paid credit cards if you want. If you're an enterprise-level user, Liquid Web provides check and wire transfer services, although you will need to get in touch with them beforehand in order to verify your details. They recommend calling, although you can also email if that's your preferred method.
Essentially, however you want to pay, Liquid Web is probably going to be there to assist. Their sales team is also available 24/7, so if you've got an issues or questions, don't hesitate to open up the chat window and quiz away. Again: this is one of the main elements of Liquid Web. Sure, it's not extremely budget-friendly, but like many things in life, you do get what you pay for (and then some).
In May of 2020, Liquid Web confirmed that their uptime throughout the entirety of 2019 was 99.9992%, which amounts to around 4 minutes of downtime in the entirety of the year. That's a pretty decent figure if you ask me, and it suggests that Liquid Web is far ahead of the competition in this respect.
Part of the justification for their higher price tag is that you're pretty much guaranteed to have 24/7/365 accessibility to your system. In fact, Liquid Web has one of the highest levels of reliability in the industry, with most hosts having quite a bit more downtime than Liquid Web.
If accessibility to your website around the clock is of utmost importance, you might struggle to find a service as competitive as Liquid Web in this regard. They've shown time and time again in the reliability realm that they know what's what and will continue to provide quality solutions to their customers wherever it's required.
Suffice to say that Hosting Guy has to commend the reliability and uptime of Liquid Web here: they've certainly got a keen understanding of what their clients want.
As mentioned previously, the major feature of Liquid Web that's going to separate it from the competition is the constant access to technical support that you're going to have. Their team is some of the most knowledgeable in the industry and for both experienced professionals and first-time website builders, this is going to be incredibly beneficial.
Their technical support team receives around 300 hours of training during their first year on the job, which shows they're deadly serious when it comes to having the right people on board. Other benefits of this commitment to technical knowledge are that they're far less likely to have database breaches, successful malicious attacks and so on. Hosting Guy believes that Liquid Web goes above and beyond to ensure the integrity of their server spaces, billing and staff.
Liquid Web has three main data centers: US-Central, US-West and EU-Central, located in Lansing, Phoenix and Amsterdam respectively. Their Lansing capacity is at just over 33,000 servers, meaning that if you plan to serve your data to folks in North America, this is a great solution for you.
Note, however, that Liquid Web also has cloud hosting solutions – as well as root-level access if you really know what you're doing.
For many people, it can be a daunting task to migrate their current hosting setup over to a new provider. Thankfully, Liquid Web has a white-glove approach where specialists who literally do nothing but migrate are called in to assist with the process.
In most cases, this is completely free, with charges only imposed for extremely complex or large jobs. Hosting Guy always loves to give credit where it's due: providing the convenience and safety of migration free of charge is really quite impressive.
Support for Liquid Web is some of the best I've seen in the industry, which is why it's receiving such a high rating from Hosting Guy. In my experience, it benefits both new players and veterans to be able to talk to hosting services that are savvy themselves.
For newbies, it's great to have some help when you're really stuck and totally unsure of what to do, whereas for experts, it's nice to be able to talk to someone who'll get to the bottom of your very specific issue as quickly as possible. Being able to talk to someone on the other end of a phone who's familiar with the terms and phrases you're using goes a long way to ensuring that you get exactly what you want and when you want it.
Liquid Web's support is also available 24/7/365, so no matter where you are in the world, or when it is you need help, Liquid Web is there to assist. For most people, contact with support won't be an ongoing concern, but in situations where you absolutely must talk to someone as quickly as possible, it's nice to have them on-hand and ready to go. Hell, you can even chat to a sales representative from the homepage without being logged in!
Liquid Web really wants to make the ease of reaching out to them a priority. Remember that you've also got the ability to connect with a technical support guru via email or phone if you want the slower or faster solution. Regardless of how you want to interface with the friendly assistance provided by Liquid Web, there's an option for you!
In mid-2018, Cloud Spectator did a report on website performance at several hosts. They found that the vCPU performance of Liquid Web outpaced that of Amazon, Digital Ocean and Rackspace. Liquid Web also had substantially better random read and write performance compared to other providers. Software functionality has direct reliance upon these factors, with PHPBench and a MySQL mixed workload test both giving the win to Liquid Web.
While it's nice to have companies tell you that they use the best to provide you with what you want, it's nice to have independent third-party auditors that actually go out there and put the products through their paces. The fact that Liquid Web wins out in these performance categories – as well as maintains extremely high levels of uptime – suggests that on the hardware end of things, they're very much ahead of the pack.
The only real problem with Liquid Web is that out of the box, their response times aren't the greatest. It's far from being the worst though, so don't go thinking that it's going to take you several minutes to load up a web page. Liquid Web doesn't seem incredibly well optimized out of the box, but with a little bit of tuning up and a CDN solution, it shouldn't be that difficult for you to reach a position where you're loading stuff to visitors in a fraction of a second.
It should be noted that the consistency of response times is something we can give Liquid Web credit for – their deviations from the mean were incredibly tight, which suggests that over time, you will get consistent performance with whatever package you pick from Liquid Web.
So then: will Hosting Guy recommend Liquid Web? If you're on an extreme budget and you don't need your website to be excessively functional, it might be an idea to look elsewhere. However, for most use cases where you do want speed, instant support assistance, great consistency and decent hardware, Liquid Web is a top-tier solution that ticks all of the boxes.
In the hosting game, you get what you pay for, and while a bargain solution can assist some people when they're getting started, Liquid Web is an ideal option for folks who want to pay a little extra to get a whole lot in return.
Thank you for reading my exclusive analysis of Liquid Web. Be sure to explore the rest of my reviews to see what other great hosts I can recommend!
BlueHost
WPEngine
GreenGeeks
iPage
A2Hosting
WPXHosting
TMDHosting
Cloudways
HostMonster
SiteGround
DreamHost
FastComet
JustHost
HostGator
Interserver