Liquid Web Review: The Best Fully Managed Web Hosting Provider
We’ve all been there. Having an incompetent or below average hosting provider that did not perform up to par which led to our website’s malfunctioning or an intense slow down in page speed – both detrimental to SEO and your business website’s growth. Every minute that a website is down due to server problems, you lose traffic, you lose rankings, and you lose profit.
When looking for a hosting provider, there is a vast choice of companies that offer and promise the same thing – 100% uptime and 24/7 support. Until all sorts of problems come up and it takes days before you even get an initial response.
For this post, I’ll be reviewing the hands-down best hosting provider that I’ve ever had – Liquid Web. I’ve tried multiple hosting services in my decade of experience and thus far I had the best experience with Liquid Web. I’ve been a long time user of Liquid Web. In fact, I’ve used it for both my websites and my clients’ websites. Liquid Web offers fully managed web hosting and they are the best at it.
Before going into this review, I highly recommend that you give Liquid Web a visit and see what they offer. They have solutions that will fit your needs whether you are a freelancer, agency, or business owner.
Liquid Web: Fully Managed Hosting Provider
Liquid Web provides fully managed web hosting services and has been in business since 1997. They have more than 25,000 servers hosting more than 30,000 customers worldwide. They own three private core data centers; US-Central in Michigan, US-West in Arizona, and EU-Central in Amsterdam. Each data center has on-site security and highly trained technicians.
What is Fully Managed Hosting?
Fully managed hosting means the hosting company sets up everything for the customer; from the operating system, network infrastructure, hardware management, security scanning, plus 24/7 customer support and other additional services.
Fully Managed Hosting vs Unmanaged Hosting
Unmanaged hosting is like a DIY option. You just pay for the server and everything else is done manually by you. So if you don’t have any experience with IT, you’ll have to hire someone else to do it for you.
However, for fully managed hosting, you don’t have to go through all of that. To simply put it, you pay for the services and the company takes care of everything for you so you can spend your precious time doing something else for your business.
What Makes Liquid Web Special?
When it comes to hosting services, I always look for companies that I could trust. As an SEO agency with multiple clients and hundreds of tasks each every day, we have to trust that our hosting provider will take care of everything for us to save us time. And that’s what Liquid Web has been doing for us for a long time already.
High Performance and 100% Uptime
Liquid Web promises high-performance managed web hosting and 100% uptime. Currently, we are using Liquid Web’s dedicated server plan and we are hosting 50+ high-traffic websites on it. Everything is running smoothly and I could easily say we are getting what we paid for.
24/7/365 Customer Support
One of the things that I absolutely love about Liquid Web is their 24/7/365 live chat support. They brand their customer support team as the “Most Helpful Humans in Hosting” and I couldn’t agree any less.
Liquid Web has a team of more than 250 highly-trained, knowledgeable, and friendly people who are ready to assist should you encounter any problems. They are Windows, Cisco, and Red Hat Linux certified so you are guaranteed to talk with someone who knows their stuff.
They have 3 options for support; phone call, live chat, and their ticketing system through email. For live chat, I usually get a response in less than 5 minutes at any time of the day. And for tickets, I get a response within 30 minutes after I send a request. This is REALLY good and an industry best.
For scale, most hosting companies outsource their support. I have experienced talking to people that have inadequate knowledge and would give generic, scripted answers.
Free Migration
I initially hosted just SEO-Hacker.com on Liquid Web to test the waters. And when we decided to transfer all of our sites here, their team assisted us all the way to migrate our sites from our old host. The best part of it is it’s free.
Website Security
Prior to Liquid Web, our websites regularly get cyber attacked and rather than focusing on developing and improving the websites, our team would spend hours cleaning malware. Liquid Web guarantees protection from any cyber threats and regularly scans for vulnerabilities. This is crucial because I have seen websites get penalized due to hacked content and that is an SEO’s nightmare.
Managed WordPress and WooCommerce
If you are building your website on WordPress or setting up an e-commerce site on WooCommerce, Liquid Web offers complete solutions for that.
Liquid Web’s Managed WordPress plan offers no traffic limits so you don’t have to worry about people slowing down your website, an automatic SSL, and daily backups. They also provide full server access that allows you full control of your website.
For WooCommerce solutions, Liquid Web gives you access to thousands of themes and flexibility to make your site look great plus its mobile optimized. Liquid Web also makes it easier to customize product categories and pages so you don’t waste that precious crawl budget. And since WooCommerce is built on WordPress, everything is SEO-friendly.
The best thing here, in my opinion, is speed. Liquid Web’s platform is built on PHP7, SSL, and Nginx that optimizes WordPress speed in its full potential. Website speed is one of the most important ranking factors for SEO and it keeps users from exiting the website even before the website loads.
Liquid Web’s Products
Unlike other hosting companies, Liquid Web does not offer shared hosting plans and only offers advanced plans. They also run their servers on SSDs (Solid State Drives). They are more expensive HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) but SSDs run faster and delivers better performance. Liquid Web offers:
- Dedicated Servers
- Virtual Private Servers
- Cloud Dedicated Servers
- Managed WordPress
- Managed WooCommerce
Each product has pricing options depending on your needs and you save more with annual plans than monthly plans. To get more information about the products they offer and find what suits your needs, take a look at Liquid Web’s Hosting Plans.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to hosting services, I would never settle for less and I would always want the best. As an SEO, I highly depend on my web hosting company to make sure that our clients’ websites are up at all times. Liquid Web has been the most reliable hosting company that I have tried. If you’re hosting company is giving you headaches with server problems and unresponsive customer support, I highly recommend that you check out Liquid Web and let the folks there do the work for you.