I’ve talked a fair bit before about LiquidWeb as well as their Managed WooCommerce Hosting.
In this article, I’ll be talking about LiquidWeb and its Nexcess.
They’re both amazing services with superior customer service. But most people will generally only require one or the other.
My hope is that this article will help you decide which one is right for you and your business’ needs.
What’s the main difference?
I use LiquidWeb mainly for high performance hosting.
Nexcess on the other hand is mainly for the Digital Commerce cloud including Managed WordPress, Managed Magento and Managed Woocommerce. As the word “managed” implies, Nexcess will manage everything for you. This is great in that it allows you to focus on your business and not on all of the hosting details which can end up being very time consuming with making sure that you’re not getting hacked, running virus checks, patching, hardware management, monitoring of the server, and just making sure that everything is up to date and so on.
Which One Is For Me?
If you need full control with a dedicated server which can include custom environments, then LiquidWeb’s solution is most likely for you.
The great thing is that they provide you with a great hosting experience (this website is hosted on LiquidWeb), delivering 99.999% uptime & customer service is literally 24/7 in case anything goes wrong, they’re there to help on demand.
They have dedicated servers that comes with Cloudflare CDN , you can chopose between cPanel, Plesk and Interworx for managing your server. You get root access of course.
On the other hand, if you just want a blog or an online ecommerce shop for example, then Nexcess is definitely the obvious choice.
They have a starter plan that starts at just $9.50 a month and offers unlimited traffic.
It’s essentially a 1-click set up and if you have an existing site, they can take care of migration for you as well as maintaining everything from updates, staging and security including SSL certificates, to very fast speeds, themes security, daily back ups, and so on.
I’ve chosen LiquidWeb for this WordPress Blog before Nexcess became available and now I spend a lot of time doing things like WordPress Image Optimization with a plugin called ShortPixel because this loads up the page load speed and Google will generally rank faster loading pages higher so making sure load speed is fast is very important for search engine optimization.
This is something that Nexcess actually does for you!
Now just because it’s managed doesn’t mean you can’t get access. As a matter of fact, most hosting providers limit the kind of access that their customers can get to the server. Instead, Liquidweb and Nexcess will give you full access to both the database and the server.
If you’re so inclined, you also get access to SSH, Git, and WP-CLI. While you may not need it, it’s good to have the option available in case you decide to hire someone on Upwork for instance, and they need access. Though in such cases, I would be very careful on who gets such access and to make sure to vet these people very carefully before giving such access.
Conclusion
For me personally, if I was looking to host just a WordPress blog or for a WooCommerce store, then Nexcess is the clear choice so that I can focus on writing content or making sales.