Ilijia Miljkovac is a Techopedia writer with seven years of experience covering all things tech. He writes about cybersecurity topics, spanning VPNs, antiviruses, and hosting,…
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Our Verdict
Liquid Web
If you want top-notch performance, customer support, security, and scalable plans, Liquid Web is an ideal choice.
Although Liquid Web’s plans have a higher price tag compared to most of its competitors, and there’s a slight learning curve, we’re confident you’ll hardly find a provider that outperforms it.
From its 99.999% uptime guarantee to the impressive hardware it offers with its managed hosting plans, Liquid Web is one of the most reliable web hosting services you can subscribe to this year.
Liquid Web lets you control your email accounts, websites, domains, security features, and files via cPanel, Plesk, and InterWorx, meaning it has something for beginners and tech-savvy users alike – and it comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
In this Liquid Web review, we’ll explore how the provider excels at delivering managed cloud hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting solutions for demanding applications and websites.
The provider primarily caters to medium-to-large businesses and performance users looking for service with reliable uptime and customer support. We’ll help you compare Liquid Web to the best website hosting services and determine whether it’s suitable for your needs.
Although Liquid Web offers various hosting plans for advanced users seeking robust solutions for complex projects and high-traffic websites, its services aren’t the cheapest available. It prices its managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting plans from $17.50/month.
Besides these, it offers cloud hosting, VPS hosting, enterprise hosting, dedicated server hosting, Magento hosting, and more. Liquid Web doesn’t offer shared hosting, so we’ll look into its managed WordPress plans, which are the most affordable subscriptions the provider offers.
Managed WordPress Plans – from $17.50/month with 12-month plan
Liquid Web’s WordPress Spark plan is the first of its eight tiers of managed WordPress hosting plans. It provides a focused hosting experience with 15GB of storage and 2TB of bandwidth, which is enough for a small-to-medium website.
Each of its managed WordPress hosting plans offers free SSL certificates and unlimited email accounts, enhancing your business communication and ensuring your platform is safe to use for visitors. You also get daily backups and free staging.
The cheapest plan lets you host one website, and all the managed WordPress plans come with two months free with the subscription.
Plans
Price
Number of websites
Free Domain
Free SSL
Storage
Bandwidth
Free email accounts
WordPress Spark
$17.50/mo for 12 months
1
❌
✅
15GB
2TB
Unlimited
WordPress Spark+
$35.83/mo for 12 months
3
❌
✅
25GB
2.5TB
Unlimited
WordPress Maker
$72.50/mo for 12 months
5
❌
✅
40GB
3TB
Unlimited
WordPress Designer
$100/mo for 12 months
10
❌
✅
60GB
4TB
Unlimited
WordPress Builder
$136.67/mo for 12 months
25
❌
✅
100GB
5TB
Unlimited
WordPress Producer
$273.33/mo for 12 months
50
❌
✅
300GB
5TB
Unlimited
WordPress Executive
$501.67/mo for 12 months
100
❌
✅
500GB
10TB
Unlimited
WordPress Enterprise
$912.50/mo for 12 months
250
❌
✅
800GB
10TB
Unlimited
What Hosting Types Does Liquid Web Offer?
Liquid Web Nexcess dashboard
Although Liquid Web doesn’t serve basic-level hosting with shared plans, it nevertheless caters to a diverse audience. In this section of our Liquid Web review, we’ll explain all the types of hosting Liquid Web offers and how you can use its plans.
Managed WordPress Hosting – from $17.50/month with 12-month plan
Liquid Web’s managed WordPress hosting plans are ideal for bloggers, small-to-medium businesses, and WordPress developers. With storage starting at 15GB and bandwidth at 2TB and going up to 800GB and 10TB, respectively, these plans offer scalability and flexibility.
Unlike unmanaged hosting, opting for these Liquid Web plans ensures the service will help you get started with WordPress and will regularly update it and monitor it for suspicious activity.
Managed VPS Hosting – from $20/month with 24-month plan
Essential – $20/month for two years
Advanced – $30/month for two years
Professional – $40/month for two years
Elite – $50/month for two years
Liquid Web is one of the best VPS hosting services and offers a robust and scalable selection of managed VPS hosting plans with free setup, Cloudflare Content Delivery Network (CDN), DDoS protection, built-in backups, and enhanced security.
These features make managed VPS hosting an excellent pick for e-stores and growing businesses.
Opting for its VPS Essential plan gets you access to 2 vCPUs, 2GB of RAM, 40GB of SSD storage, and 10TB of bandwidth – providing great performance at an affordable price. All the managed VPS hosting plans let you use cPanel, InterWorx, and Plesk control panels.
Storage options go up to 200GB with Elite, and memory scales to 12GB of RAM. This means you can rely on LiquidWeb for database or high-traffic website hosting. There are also memory-optimized and CPU-optimized plans, taking you up to 16GB of RAM and 16 vCPUs, respectively.
Cloud Hosting – from $115/month with monthly plan
CPU
Cores
Memory
Storage
Monthly Cost
E-2334 @ 3.4GHz
4
16GB
2x 480GB SSD (RAID-1)
$115
E-2336 @ 2.9GHz
6
32GB
2x 480GB SSD (RAID-1)
$140
6226R (Single) @ 2.9GHz
16
48GB
1.5TB SSD (RAID-10)
$375
6226R (Dual) @ 2.9GHz
32
128GB
3TB SSD (RAID-10)
$475
Liquid Web offers Cloud Metal plans as a go-to pick for users creating a self-managed hosting environment. It includes fast server provisioning for a quick setup, hassle-free server resizing, and a friendly API for custom integrations. This type of hosting is ideal for resellers and businesses with fluctuating needs.
These plans combine the advantages of cloud hosting, such as scalability and redundancy, with the benefits of bare metal hardware, so your server’s resources will always be available, and you won’t share resources with other users. In addition, it offers add-on services like cPanel licenses, cloud backups, and more.
Dedicated Server Hosting – starts at $199/month with monthly plan
Intel E-2356G – $199/month
Intel Xeon E-2334 – $174/month
Intel Xeon Gold 6226R – $299/month
Liquid Web’s Dedicated Server Hosting offers several advanced features large businesses need for high-traffic sites to ensure high performance and security. Key features include CloudFlare CDN, protection from DDoS attacks, a backup drive for data protection, root access, a dedicated IP address, and more.
In addition, you can pick between InterWorx, Plesk, or cPanel control panels. The starter plan offers 16GB of RAM, two 480GB SSD storage disks, a 2TB backup SSD disk, 8TB of bandwidth, and a 6-core, 3.2 GHz processor.
Opting for its more expensive plans can increase these specs to 64GB of RAM, two 960GB SSD storage disks, a 4TB SATA backup disk, 10TB of bandwidth, and a 16-core, 2.9 GHz processor.
Liquid Web Features
Liquid Web is one of the most feature-rich web hosting providers we’ve reviewed, which justifies its pricing. Its customer support teams set industry standards, it offers HIPAA compliance, and finding better high-performance hosting is nearly impossible.
High-Performance Hosting
Liquid Web’s high-performance hosting setup
Besides its exceptional hosting solutions with industry-leading hardware specifications, Liquid Web lets you combine the power of multiple machines to help even the busiest websites handle high traffic volumes.
Having more than one server and a load balancer allows your traffic to be distributed across multiple machines, resulting in a smooth visitor experience with minimal latency and unbroken uptime. It’s also highly scalable, and you can continue adding servers as you need.
Unlike providers like DreamHost, Liquid Web takes additional steps with its servers to protect clients from the risk of losing health information. That’s because Liquid Web ensures technical controls, backup management, and data encryption are in place. These plans have the following pricing:
Standalone HIPAA Server from $229/month
HIPAA Server & Firewall Package from $428/month
HIPAA Multi-Server Package from $657/month
Customer Support
In our testing methodology, we always contact the customer support of the service we’re testing, and Liquid Web’s responsiveness impressed us. Support is available 24/7/365 and ensures that clients have continuous access to professional assistance.
So, what is Liquid Web doing better than others? Liquid Web guarantees that one of its 250+ Red Hat Linux, Juniper, Cisco, and Microsoft-certified technicians will answer your tickets and work with you.
In addition, it has one of the fastest response times out of all the website hosting services for small businesses we’ve tested, without needing to bypass lengthy exchanges with chatbots.
In addition, Liquid Web offers fully managed hosting, meaning a team of experts will proactively monitor your servers, tune their performance, troubleshoot issues, and perform security updates. This is ideal for small-to-medium-sized businesses seeking web hosting that doesn’t require constant maintenance to function.
How to Set Up Liquid Web Hosting
While some of its plans are more complicated to use than others, getting started with Liquid Web is extremely easy. We’ll use its WordPress Spark plan to show you step-by-step how to install and use a CMS on Liquid Web.
Create a Liquid Web Account
You can create a Liquid Web account in a few minutes by clicking “Login” on the top right of your screen when you visit the Liquid Web homepage. Once there, click “Create Account,” fill out the fields with your information, and log in.
Log in
Once you log in, head to the “Manage My Account” section to add your preferred payment method to the account for the next step.
Choose a Hosting Type and Plan
With your account and payment method ready, head to the Liquid Web hosting plans page and pick a plan that suits your needs and budget. In addition, you should register a domain name for your website. Once you select a plan, head to the checkout and follow the on-screen guide.
Install Your CMS
Finalizing your purchase will immediately bring you to your dashboard. In this case, that’s the WordPress portal. Liquid Web will automatically install your first WordPress website once ready, and all that’s left is to connect your domain name and SSL certificate. You can do that by following the on-screen instructions.
Liquid Web lets you pick between three control panel types with most of its plans – a refreshing feature in the web hosting industry. These include cPanel, Plesk, and InterWorx.
Each of these three control panels has its strength, so we’ll provide a quick breakdown:
cPanel – This widely-used control panel is known for its user-friendly interface and is ideal for beginners. It provides intuitive ways to manage your files, email accounts, servers, and websites.
Plesk – Plesk is an ideal control panel for Windows Server hosting, as it’s easy to use and offers a Windows-friendly environment. It also supports Linux servers, though, so it’s a versatile solution. It offers similar capabilities to cPanel, such as one-click installations, website management, and security features.
InterWorx – Although it doesn’t enjoy as much popularity as cPanel, InterWorx is a scalable control panel known for its cluster management capabilities. This makes it suitable for high-traffic, large-scale websites and owners managing multiple servers.
Liquid Web Website Migration
If you’re a new Liquid Web customer looking to migrate to Liquid Web’s hosting, then you’re in luck. Liquid Web has a team of specialists to help you migrate your website, meaning there’s minimal work. In addition, most migrations are entirely free of charge.
The company’s migration specialists will guide you through the process as soon as you contact them, following a fully documented approach to the migration and keeping you updated during the process. They’ll need information about the site you want to move, and you’ll need to make a few updates.
While you can expect them to do most of the work, you’ll need to:
Confirm the scope of the project upfront
Ensure your Liquid Web plan has enough room to accommodate your site
Identify outside providers who will need to be informed, including domain and DNS providers
Updating your OS, CMS, database, and plugins before migrating
Providing root or user-level SSH to your migration specialist
Clean out outdated backups and change passwords
Liquid Web Performance
Although no service is invulnerable to outages, malicious attacks, or hardware failure, Liquid Web has an impressive 99.999% uptime guarantee. It also offers a generous compensation system if its servers disrupt your website’s delivery.
Liquid Web will compensate you with credit for ten times the actual amount of downtime. For example, if your website goes down for one hour, you’ll receive credit for 10 hours.
During testing, we’ve seen no signs of slowdowns, downtime, or increased latency. The provider offers SSD storage and generous amounts of RAM with most of its plans, meaning your audience will enjoy fast loading and rapid website response times.
In addition, we stress-tested our test site’s performance with high traffic volumes and data-intensive operations and noticed little to no changes in its performance. Although none of its plans offer unlimited high-speed bandwidth, your websites should easily accommodate a large audience.
Is Liquid Web Secure?
Liquid Web will safeguard your sites from malicious traffic and data loss with its free security features. Users do need to add several security measures manually, while you can purchase others as add-ons.
Here are the security features Liquid Web users can expect to have installed automatically:
Standard DDoS Protection — Liquid Web will monitor your website’s traffic and protect it from sudden spikes of potentially malicious traffic aiming to slow it down.
Firewall Protection — This invaluable security feature acts as a shield against unauthorized access.
Server Secure Plus — This enhances your security settings and automatically configures them to protect your websites from malware.
Besides these, you can pay for advanced DDoS protection, which will keep your websites safe from large-scale attacks that the standard DDoS protection wouldn’t prevent. In addition, it offers Vulnerability Assessment and Scanning to identify vulnerabilities in your hosting environment, delivering monthly reports by email.
It’s worth mentioning that while Liquid Web offers free SSL certificates, you’ll need to install them manually. They’re available from your control panel and are a breeze to install by following the on-screen instructions from Let’s Encrypt – so you can let your audience know their data is safe with you.
Liquid Web Reviews From Customers
Assessing third-party Liquid Web reviews from long-term users can help provide insights into its performance, the quality of its customer support, and other factors that typically can’t be tested in the short term.
We visited Liquid Web’s Trustpilot page to see what users liked and disliked about its service. Liquid Web enjoys a positive rating on Trustpilot, with 4.5 out of 5 stars and more than 1,000 reviews, and with 88% of reviews at 4 or 5 stars.
Liquid Web Trustpilot user reviews
Liquid Web hosting users praise the service for its customer support teams, who are noted for providing timely responses and professional assistance. A number of small business owners said they’d gladly pay a higher price for this, as other services may be cheaper, but paying for IT assistance costs more in the long run.
Users praise Liquid Web on Trustpilot
Many Liquid Web reviews also mention the company’s superb uptime and performance, and users confirm that Liquid Web delivers on its promise of providing quick and hassle-free website migration at no extra charge.
However, some users also left negative reviews. Most of these reviews complain about the provider’s high prices and lack of shared hosting – meaning it’s not the best choice if you’re looking for a budget-friendly service.
What is Liquid Web Good For?
Although Liquid Web doesn’t boast the lowest prices, it offers several benefits that make it a better pick than many other services. One of its standout features is its 99.999% uptime guarantee, which you won’t find with providers like Hostinger or GoDaddy.
Finding a more trained and responsive customer support team is nearly impossible, and its website migration services are second to none. Moreover, their support policy is all-encompassing, as the provider is ready to assist its users in areas outside of traditional services.
Its greatest advantage over other providers is its excellent dedicated hosting service. Liquid Web owns all of its hardware and offers a powerful network infrastructure across three data centers, and it’d be hard to find a solution with more security features.
Here, we’ll place Liquid Web alongside three top competitors to help you compare them. Each provider has its own unique strengths and caters to different web hosting needs, as you can see from our table.
Liquid Web and HostGator cater to different audiences, given the significant differences in their pricing structure and hosting services.
While Liquid Web excels at fully managed VPS and dedicated server hosting and is one of the best WordPress hosting services, HostGator’s shared hosting solutions and ecommerce plans offer more value for money for small businesses and startups looking to launch their first online store or WordPress website.
Large businesses will likely opt for Liquid Web, though, because of its advanced features, such as high-performance hosting and cutting-edge hardware.
Like HostGator, Bluehost is a more affordable and intuitive pick for smaller businesses, individuals, and startups. It offers competitively priced shared and WordPress hosting plans that offer an array of benefits for individuals looking to start a blog.
From a free domain and SSL certificate to data centers in India, China, and the U.S., Bluehost can help you reach a global audience for a smaller fee than Liquid Web.
However, its customer support can’t match the quality of Liquid Web’s specialists. While this may not be a drastic issue for smaller businesses, large businesses will have an easier time getting help from Liquid Web when it comes to optimizing their servers, troubleshooting, and more.
In addition, Liquid Web offers impressive scalability and flexibility with its managed hosting solutions, including a combination of cloud and bare metal hosting.
Although more expensive than Bluehost and HostGator, GoDaddy’s starting plans are still considerably cheaper than Liquid Web. Out of the three competitors we compared, GoDaddy is the only solution that can surpass Liquid Web’s VPS hosting, given its affordability for small-to-medium-sized businesses.
We also found its domain registration services to be cheaper and easier to use, which is another plus for GoDaddy.
If your business can afford a more expensive service, though, Liquid Web offers far better hardware, security, and support with its dedicated server hosting. In addition, you’ll find specialized services, such as database hosting and HIPAA-compliant hosting, which GoDaddy lacks.
Liquid Web is a web hosting company that specializes in managed hosting services. It offers VPS, dedicated, cloud, and specialized WordPress and WooCommerce hosting, as well as database and HIPAA-compliant hosting for niche businesses. It is praised for its excellent customer support and reliable, high-performance service.
What is Liquid Web used for?
Liquid Web lets you host websites, applications, and databases that require technical management and consistent, reliable service for high-traffic volumes. It’s ideal for businesses seeking a professional, fully managed hosting service, as well as for ecommerce platforms and high-traffic websites.
Who owns Liquid Web?
Liquid Web was acquired by One Equity Partners in 2023 and sits within its CloudOne Digital portfolio. Since then, Liquid Web has continued to grow and improve its hosting services and products in the web hosting market.
Is Liquid Web legit?
Yes, Liquid Web is a legitimate and well-established web hosting provider with a very positive reputation. It’s known for its privately owned hosting infrastructure, robust security, and great customer support. Over the years, it has gained a loyal customer base of more than 187,000 users in 150+ countries.
Techopedia’s editorial policy is centered on delivering thoroughly researched, accurate, and unbiased content. We uphold strict sourcing standards, and each page undergoes diligent review by our team of top technology experts and seasoned editors. This process ensures the integrity, relevance, and value of our content for our readers.
Ilijia Miljkovac is a Techopedia writer with seven years of experience covering all things tech. He writes about cybersecurity topics, spanning VPNs, antiviruses, and hosting, helping to inform B2B and B2C audiences about the latest products and services. He's written for publications such as Business2Community, TheTechReport, Comparitech, and more. When he's not working, Ilijia spends his time hiking in nature or holed up in his apartment gaming.
We uphold a strict editorial policy that focuses on factual accuracy, relevance, and impartiality. Our content, created by leading industry experts, is reviewed by a team of seasoned editors to ensure compliance with the highest standards in reporting and publishing.
Disclosure
When you buy through affiliate links in our content, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn how our funding model works. By using this website you agree to our terms and conditions and privacy policy.
When you buy through affiliate links in our content, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn 
