Liquid Web Review 2023: Expert Rated 4.3/5

What Are the Pros and Cons of Liquid Web?

Liquid Web has many web hosting options available. Its product portfolio ranges from a partnership with Nexcess for managed WordPress and similar services to completely dedicated, bespoke solutions developed for and with you. The common thread I found was its quick and informative support.

Here are some pros and cons of choosing Liquid Web for your web hosting.

Liquid Web may be the best web host for: Someone just stepping into the world of web hosting. While the plans may cost a bit more, its excellent support will help you avoid lost time and confusion.

Multiple options for control panels

I configured one Linux VPS instance with Liquid Web’s default control panel, InterWorx, and an additional Linux VPS instance with cPanel. Login information was a bit difficult to find at first; it’s located in secure notes under the account drop-down. These secure notes are only viewable once and are automatically deleted when closed (see the screenshot below).

Getting access to my InterWorx server was relatively straightforward. Your username is the case-sensitive email address you used to sign up for Liquid Web, and the password is provided in the secure notes (see above).

I had a bit of difficulty (I didn’t realize the username was case-sensitive), but thankfully, Liquid Web’s support staff includes live chat support. Accessing this was easy; even at 10:30 a.m. on a Saturday, I got quick help and resolved my issue.

Once you’re into InterWorx, you’ll need to create a separate SiteWorx (the site administration tool for InterWorx) account internally for hosting your site, but that’s not different from WHM + cPanel.

By comparison, accessing cPanel and WHM was easy; the username is “root,” and the password is provided in Liquid Web’s secure notes as above. Liquid Web creates the WHM account, but you create the cPanel account. Once this is done, though, cPanel is easily reached via WHM or the credentials you created.

InterWorx option

For InterWorx-based sites (the default option), Softaculous is the main way of installing hosting tools such as WordPress. Walking through this installer was pretty straightforward; after a few clicks through some setup pages, it was done. However, once it was installed, I was unable to access my new WordPress site.

I reached out to support to find out what was wrong and learned this is a common issue with InterWorx.

cPanel option

cPanel is another option (for $10 more than InterWorx) for your site’s control panel, but the cPanel WordPress toolkit worked, for the most part. When attempting to log in to WordPress via the login button, I received a cryptic error.

But through the setup link, I retrieved my WordPress login credentials and URL and accessed the WordPress admin panel.

Hundreds of web hosting tools through Softaculous

Softaculous is a package manager used for installing and managing tools on your website such as WordPress, Joomla, Magento, and many more. There are over 300 different scripts and more than 1,000 Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) classes. Liquid Web’s cPanel and InterWorx hosting options both provide access to Softaculous and include tools for anything you may want to do with your website.

Here are a few that stood out to me:

• Content management platforms
  • WordPress
  • Joomla
• E-commerce platforms
  • Magento
  • Open source point of sale (POS)

Acronis backups

Liquid Web’s hosting choices offer options (selected by default) for backing up your server and website. This is important for a few reasons: backups can be used to recover files that were accidentally deleted or to restore a file (such as a web page) to a previous point in time.

Domain name registration and hosting

You can register your domain with a different provider, but with Liquid Web, there isn’t any need to. Liquid Web provides DNS services integrated into its control panel. Registering a domain is easy, but the listed price when searching for a domain name does not include privacy protection, which is automatically added when checking out.

Free Cloudflare integration

Liquid Web provides Cloudflare integration with your account directly in the control panel. The caveat: this is one of the features provided by the old manage.liquidweb.com instead of the new my.liquidweb.com control panel.

Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) that speeds up your site’s loading by re-hosting copies (caches) of it at locations all around the world. When someone loads your site, they get a page much quicker rather than having to load your site from potentially halfway around the world.

Email hosting

Once you get access to your cPanel or InterWorx control panel, it’s just a few clicks to set up your website and configure custom-domain email hosting. Having a business email like “@yourdomain.com” versus a commonly available provider such as “@gmail.com” adds more professionalism to your small business.

Other managed hosting options through its partnership with Nexcess

Liquid Web partnered with Nexcess in 2019 to add managed (sometimes called “shared”) hosting services to its portfolio. If you’re less interested in purchasing a whole server and instead want to jump straight to a content or commerce app like WordPress, this may be an option.

Through this partnership, the following solutions are offered:

• Managed WordPress
• Managed WooCommerce
• Magento Cloud

Uptime and reliability

As a technologist, I’m immediately suspicious of any service that offers “100% uptime,” as this is often more marketing than anything else. From a technical perspective, offering any service that is meant to be up “100% of the time” is practically impossible to achieve without some big caveats. In Liquid Web’s case, the main caveats are that any planned maintenance or malicious attacks (such as a denial of service attack) are not counted.

The exclusions given mean the only time you’d reasonably be expected to be compensated for downtime is if there was some unplanned maintenance issue or network-level error preventing you from getting to your server.

And the data somewhat proves it. This is hrank.com’s uptime report for Liquid Web:

Site response times

How quickly (or slowly) a website loads often has more to do with the webpage than the servers hosting the site. However, in my testing, Liquid Web’s server response times are quite fast.

Liquid Web also offers optional Cloudflare integration, which can help your sites load even faster.

My testing shows that Liquid Web has an average first-byte time of 292 ms, which is how long it takes to start receiving data after you navigate to a webpage. In general, for a fast website, the first byte times should be less than 300 ms, which in most locales, Liquid Web meets. Utilizing a CDN such as Cloudflare would also speed this up.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and passwords

I was pleased that most generated passwords and logins for my Liquid Web were decently secure: randomly generated passwords including upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols. Liquid Web also provides SSL certificates for purchase, but if you dig into SiteWorx, there is also an option to use Let’s Encrypt to set up a free SSL certificate. But I couldn’t get this feature to work.

Firewall and antivirus

Every option I tested came with firewall (for web hosting) and antivirus (for email hosting) features available, and the default configurations were secure.

Liquid Web Support

(5.0)

Liquid Web’s “24/7/365 Human” support was stellar. While I may have had a few issues getting my servers set up, every time I reached out to live chat, I got a quick response from a real person, and my issue was resolved.

Every time I needed some help, it absolutely delivered, even at odd times and on the weekend. The live chat tool is excellent, though I had some issues getting the tool to work in Firefox (Chrome, Safari, and other browsers work better). But the live chat itself was excellent and Liquid Web’s support technicians provided a quick resolution every time.

The following are just some of the recent product improvements rolled out by Liquid Web:

• Control panel updates: Liquid Web’s control panel is currently split between a legacy panel (manage.liquidweb.com) and a more modern one (my.liquidweb.com). Some offerings, such as Cloudflare integration, are missing from my.liquidweb.com, but you get redirected to manage.liquidweb.com automatically.
• Partnership with Nexcess: It added managed hosting options to its product portfolio by partnering with Nexcess in 2019. Managed hosting options are great if you just want the hosting software (for example, WordPress) without the responsibility of managing an entire server.

Compare Liquid Web Alternatives

I ranked Liquid Web pretty well, but alternatives like SiteGround, Bluehost, and HostGator may be a better fit for your needs. We’ve used these hosting companies’ services and spent hours researching their tools and performance. Our research provides objective information about each company so you can find the best one for you.

See how Liquid Web compares to other top-tier hosting companies the team here at Digital.com recommends:

How I Rated Liquid Web

I took a comprehensive approach to rate Liquid Web’s services. It offers many choices, and I picked what I felt would be the most representative sample from these to review.

As an IT consultant, I’m often tasked with putting together technical solutions for customers or myself. Many times during this review, I found myself asking: “Why would I choose Liquid Web over a more hands-off solution such as AWS?” The answer is Liquid Web’s incredible support.

If you’re looking for a website builder, Liquid Web has tools to do this, but it mainly focuses on custom hosting, VPS options, and various other tools.

While several hosting providers are cheaper, all of Liquid Web’s hosting options I tested were excellent. I wanted to rank it a full 5 out of 5, but some lack of price transparency and initial technical issues with a few of the hosting packages brought that down a bit. On a positive note, if I could rank its support higher than 5 out of 5 I would, as the team was always knowledgeable and fast at responding.