Based greater than 20 years in the past, US-based Liquid Web has grown right into a $100 million web hosting enterprise which now manages 500,000+ websites for 30,000+ clients throughout its 5 world information facilities.

The corporate gives highly effective managed internet hosting merchandise focused squarely at enterprise customers. Meaning no free plans or fundamental shared internet hosting merchandise – Liquid Internet is much extra centered on excessive efficiency, extremely configurable cloud, managed utility and devoted server merchandise.

Costs can appear excessive, at the least initially. Essentially the most fundamental Private Managed WordPress plan prices $69 (£49.29) a month, for example, which will get you 30GB SSD storage, 5TB bandwidth and assist for a single web site. In the meantime GoDaddy’s high-end Developer product gives 50GB storage and assist for 5 websites for £19.99 ($28) a month after a first-year low cost.

Take a look at the plan specs, although, and you may typically discover Liquid Internet is providing loads in your cash. There is a bundled SSL certificates, for example. Computerized every day backups. Excessive-end speedup applied sciences – PHP 7, Nginx, Varnish, clever picture optimizations – are included for everybody. The corporate handles WordPress and plugin updates for you, and if there are nonetheless any points, there’s a superb in-house assist staff accessible 24/7 through cellphone, stay chat and e mail.

It is a comparable story elsewhere within the vary. $59 (£42.14) per 30 days for a starter cloud VPS product and $199 (£142.14) a month for a baseline devoted server can seem costly when in comparison with funds suppliers, however the actuality is just a little completely different.

Liquid Internet costs are larger, however that is largely as a result of the corporate would not provide underpowered merchandise to attempt to hit a headline worth. It would not pressure you to pay in different methods with hidden prices and prices, and it offers you highly effective options and high quality assist as customary.

Among the best examples is Liquid Internet’s service degree settlement (SLA) for its devoted and VPS clients. This ensures 100% community and energy uptime, a 30-minute preliminary response time, and replacements must also occur inside 30 minutes. If that is missed you may be credited for 10 instances the quantity of the size of your outage.

That is considerably higher than you may often see elsewhere, and when you’re operating a business-critical web site, this might justify the price of Liquid Internet all by itself.

Account setup

Liquid Internet hosting could also be geared toward skilled customers, however the service web site goes to uncommon efforts to elucidate its product vary and level you in the fitting path. You are not left to determine the distinction between Devoted and Cloud Devoted plans, for example: a well-written ‘Assist Me Select’ part clearly describes every product kind, explains its most typical purposes and hyperlinks you to a web page with extra particulars.

Choose the kind of product you want and the web site presents you with a transparent and easy comparability of the assorted plans. There’s loads of data on the options you get, and helpful FAQs offer you prompt solutions to questions like ‘How do I transfer my web site?’ and ‘Can I improve my VPS?’

Liquid Internet is not attempting to market its merchandise solely on worth, too, which makes for a refreshing lack of selling trickery. You do not have to enroll in years to get the headline deal, for example – in actual fact, you possibly can’t, as a result of there aren’t any long-term contracts, only a month-to-month invoice.

Whenever you get to the product web page, you would possibly discover internet hosting could be even cheaper than the headline charge. Managed VPS is marketed as ‘from’ $59 (£41) a month, for instance, however when you’re completely satisfied to take care of extra of the server your self, you may get a plan from as little as $49 (£34) per 30 days.

When you’re nonetheless uncertain what you want, the Liquid Website gives stay chat the place you possibly can ask a gross sales agent for extra data. We gave this a attempt to the agent rapidly answered all our product and technical questions.

When you’re prepared, select a plan, hand over your contact particulars (title, e mail and bodily deal with, cellphone quantity) and pay through card or PayPal. It is all very simple, and your account must be activated at velocity.

Making a web site

When your product is prepared, Liquid Internet sends a welcome e mail with all of the core particulars you want.

We signed up for a managed WordPress plan, and the welcome mail contained our login credentials, recommendation on migrating a earlier web site, and hyperlinks for our account, the WordPress console, Liquid Internet’s billing space and assist assets.

Logging in to our Liquid Internet account revealed a well-designed console with quick access to all a very powerful options. Area administration, invoices, assist tickets, contact particulars and extra had been solely a click on or two away.

There’s actual depth to the console’s performance. Clicking Domains within the sidebar shows a panel which lists the domains related along with your account, for example. You’ll be able to register a brand new area from that display, or switch one in from one other supplier. A DNS tab permits viewing or modifying a website’s DNS information, in addition to creating or including a DNS zone. A Cloudflare tab gives a hyperlink to enroll in a free Cloudflare CDN account, and there is assist for utilizing hosted enterprise e mail along with your account.

Creating a brand new WordPress web site was so simple as coming into our Liquid Internet username and e mail deal with. There was a short delay of a minute or in order our web site was provisioned, after which it was added to our My Websites web page. In case your account helps it, you possibly can add additional websites as required and the console will show a thumbnail of every one.

When you’re able to get began, there are buttons to launch the common WP-ADMIN console, or leap on to the Posts, Pages, Appearances, Plugins and Settings screens. You’ll be able to then discover templates, set up plugins and construct your WordPress web site within the regular manner.

A Staging characteristic allows copying your stay web site to a separate space the place you may make modifications and check the outcomes. When you’re completely satisfied you possibly can replace your manufacturing web site with the revamped model.

A Backups characteristic gives a second layer of safety. The service mechanically makes one backup a day and you’ll add others on-demand, then revert your web site to a earlier model in a few clicks.

An fascinating set of settings gave us extra low-level management over our web site and the way it labored. We might briefly pause WordPress or WordPress plugin updates; set our present web site as a ‘stencil’, successfully a template for implementing future websites; obtain the web site entry and error logs; allow or disable Varnish caching. We might additionally set our PHP model to five.6 or 7.zero, and launch phpMyAdmin for low-level database inspections.

Consultants can entry much more performance with just a bit extra work. To take a single instance, a customized NGINX configuration can allow creating easy redirects, block entry to particular directories, modify browser cache settings and extra (a assist article fills within the details.)

Whereas we’ve evaluated Liquid Internet’s Managed WordPress account right here, different plans have comparable interfaces: a mixture of customary merchandise corresponding to WHM and cPanel, and Liquid Internet’s personal extremely skilled panels and consoles. We discovered the service to be a smartly-designed mixture of energy and ease of use, and a big enchancment on the administration instruments you may often discover elsewhere.

Efficiency

Trying out the assist an online host gives can inform you a large number concerning the firm, so it is sensible to take a better look before you purchase.

Liquid Internet’s support website impressed us instantly with its depth and vary. The opening pages clearly defined what was on provide, listed the assist accessible with numerous ranges of plans, offered a searchable knowledgebase full of tutorials and guides, and even pointed us to some helpful customized instruments (an SSL certificates checker, a DNS document viewer and extra).

The knowledgebase organizes its articles into 15 classes, which sadly have largely been assigned very obscure and non-specific names. In case you have a DNS subject, for example, would you browse the class Widespread Fixes, or Getting Began, or Technical Help, or Tutorials, and even Different? Nope, we do not know, both.

Having a look at one in all these classes might not aid you a lot, both. We clicked Widespread Fixes and the primary web page had articles like ‘Setting customized associated merchandise in WooCommerce’, ‘Accessing man pages on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS’ and ‘What’s a Canonical tag?’ None of those sound like a typical repair to us.

For some purpose the knowledgebase shows lots of of phrases of a few of these articles, too, forcing you to scroll right down to search for something that could be helpful. It could make way more sense to restrict the abstract to a few strains, enabling customers to see extra articles at a look.

There are smarter methods to attempt to discover the articles you want, together with a search field and a blog-like tag cloud, however these additionally had their points. Searches aren’t notably clever, outcomes not often have essentially the most helpful articles on the prime of the listing, and once more they’re displayed in prolonged blocks quite than being summarized.

Whereas these points could be annoying, they are not deadly. It might take a search or two greater than regular, however the knowledgebase does have loads of well-written content material protecting all the things from the setup fundamentals to useful recommendation on subjects from ‘Easy methods to use Distant Desktop to switch recordsdata to your Home windows Server’ to ‘Utilizing Stripe as a cost gateway in WooCommerce’.

If you cannot discover what you want, Liquid Internet’s assist staff is accessible 24/7 through stay chat, phone and e mail. There isn’t any outsourcing assist to the bottom bidder, both: the corporate has greater than 250 Home windows, Cisco and Crimson Hat Linux-certified technicians readily available that will help you out.

It isn’t sensible to reliably assess this degree assist in a short-term assessment, however in our expertise the Liquid Internet staff performs very effectively. We posed some comparatively technical queries through stay chat and the agent dealt with all of them with out issue, displaying a depth of information which fits far past what you’ll see with funds internet hosting suppliers.

We accomplished our assessment with some easy assessments on web site efficiency, they usually had been spectacular, too, with our US-hosted web site delivering top-rated obtain speeds from Europe and the US, and above-average outcomes elsewhere. If efficiency is prime of your precedence listing then Liquid Internet should be in your shortlist.

Closing verdict

Liquid Internet hosting prices greater than most, however you get extra, too – highly effective options, high-speed servers and wonderful assist accessible 24/7.