Nexcess & Liquid Web Review: Affordable Fully-Managed WordPress Hosting

Finding the best web hosting provider for your website can be a tricky task. While using cheap hosting usually leads to regret, paying the highest price doesn’t always mean you get a better quality of service either.

The key is to find a balance between the two factors. And that’s where Nexcess comes in.

Nexcess is a fully-managed WordPress hosting platform that offers high-quality web hosting at a reasonable price. Today, we explore how Nexcess differs from the rest of the web hosting companies. And why it’s a great platform to build a WordPress website.

We also did some performance tests to figure out how fast Nexcess servers are. Keep reading to find out the results.

Why Use Fully-Managed WordPress Hosting?

Before we dive into the review, we wanted to highlight the importance of using fully-managed hosting and how it’s beneficial to WordPress websites.

  • Better Performance: Managed WordPress servers are specially optimized for WordPress software using the latest PHP, Nginx, and compression technologies to ensure best performance for the CMS.
  • Easy Management: With automated WordPress and plugin updates, you don’t have to worry about the health and security of your website.
  • Responsive Support: Managed hosting providers also offer faster and more responsive customer support services.
  • Improved Security: Your website will also be protected from malware and DDoS attacks when using managed hosting. As well as keep your website backed up daily for extra protection.

Nexcess managed WordPress hosting plans come with all these benefits and more.

What Makes Nexcess Different?

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Nexcess is a reputable web hosting provider that’s been around since 1997. The company serves over 1.5 million websites with 15 data centers around the world.

After partnering with Nexess, a hosting provider specializes in eCommerce and CMS, Nexcess now provides super-charged managed hosting plans specially dedicated to WordPress software.

How is it different from other hosting providers? Let’s find out.

Automatically Test Plugins Before Updates

One of the most unique features of Nexcess managed WordPress hosting is its automatic plugin updates system. This system automatically checks for updates for plugins installed on your website. And then creates a copy of your website and tests the plugin updates before rolling out the update to your active website.

This ensures that you get the latest and most stable plugin updates automatically. As well as the safety of knowing those updates won’t break your website.

59-Second Customer Support Response

The fast customer support services offered by industry experts is one of the key selling points of Nexcess. The company claims to respond to both phone and live chat customer support inquiries within 60 seconds. And boasts a response time of under one hour for help desk support tickets.

Gives You Full Server Access

Unlike most other managed hosting providers, Nexcess doesn’t limit your access to the server. The platform gives complete access to the servers and databases.

This makes Nexcess developer-friendly. You’ll have full access to your hosting account with SSH, Git, and WP-CLI. As well as tools for staging WordPress websites.

Fully-Optimized Servers

Nexcess managed WordPress hosting servers are equipped with the latest PHP and Nginx software. On top of that, the platform also provides compression systems to make your websites load faster and perform better.

In addition, you get free SSL with every website hosted on Nexcess. As well as free daily automatic backups of your website.

No Page View Limitations

It’s common for websites to receive traffic spikes. You’ll never know when one of your blog posts goes viral on Twitter and drive thousands of visitors to your website.

Most hosting providers have monthly page view limitations and charge overage fees when you go over that limit. Thankfully, Nexcess doesn’t have such page view counts, traffic limitations, or overage fees.

Nexcess Performance Test

We wanted to see if Nexcess hosting is just as good as it claims to be. So we registered an account and setup a WordPress website to do a simple performance test.

We only used a fresh WordPress installation that uses the default WordPress theme with no content. Needless to say, we started the tests with high expectations. And Nexcess didn’t disappoint.

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For the first test, we used Pingdom Speed Test Tool. We performed the test using a UK test server and it showed a loading time of 686 ms with a 90 performance grade.

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We also wanted to see how the Nexcess servers would perform under a stress test. We used Load Impact to test the server by sending a load of traffic. Here’s how it performed.

During the test, a load of 50 virtual users (blue) got sent to the website within 3 minutes. Nexcess servers managed to stay very stable while keeping the website load time under 330 ms (green).

Nexcess WordPress Hosting Pricing Plans

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Nexcess’s managed WordPress hosting comes in several different pricing plans. Each plan offers benefits that cater to different types of professionals.

  • Spark: At $19 per month, this plan lets you host 1 website with 15GB of storage space. It’s perfect for beginners.
  • Maker: At $79 per month, this plan lets you host 5 websites with 40GB of space. It’s most suitable for niche bloggers.
  • Designer: At $109 per month, you can build 10 websites using this plan with 60GB storage space. It’s great for web designers.
  • Builder: At $149 per month, this plan gives you 100GB of space to build up to 25 websites. It’s best for developers and freelancers.
  • Producer: At $299 per month, this plan is perfect for web development agencies as it lets you host 50 websites with 300GB of storage.

In addition to WordPress hosting, Nexcess also offers many other hosting plans for cloud hosting, dedicated servers, VPS, and more.

Should You Use Nexcess Hosting?

Compared to most other managed WordPress hosting providers, Nexcess offers resoably-priced plans for every type of user.

Whether you’re a blogger, freelance web designer, or an agency, Nexcess offers some impressive features and benefits to make its hosting plans a worthy investment.

Each plan comes with a 14-day free trial so that you can test drive the service before making any payments. From our experience, Nexcess is a platform that’s worth checking out for all your hosting needs.