LiquidWeb Review
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Ah, LiquidWeb—they are literally one of our favorite hosts around (at the time of writing, this site is hosted with LiquidWeb if you don’t believe us!). We’ll get into why LiquidWeb is so interesting, and what we think makes them so good, but first let us get a few things out of the way.
First of all, this site is created to provide real, honest reviews about web hosts. We’re truly sick and tired of crappy affiliate sites just sucking people in and providing bad reviews that aren’t honest or unbiased in any way. That’s not what you’ll find here at WebHostingBuddy. We’ve spent over 15 years working with the Internet and making a living building websites and working online, so we truly know a LOT about hosting, both the good and the bad. You may have seen sites with fake LiquidWeb reviews out there just to suck hosting commissions from people, but this is NOT one of those sites.
You may see affiliate links here which help to keep the lights on so to speak, but this site doesn’t provide crappy reviews just to get commissions; if that were the case, we wouldn’t be talking about this…there would just be a big green arrow pointing to a sign up button, or something obnoxious like that. Also, if we don’t like a host, we will tell you, regardless of commission or anything like that. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s get on to the review!
As we stated above, LiquidWeb is one of our absolute favorite hosts. We’ve honestly never used their shared hosting plans (which are defunct now), or bought their dedicated servers, but we imagine that they are just as good. We’ve typically always purchased their VPS servers, which are awesome. Let’s take a look at some of the pros of LiquidWeb, and learn a little bit more about them.
Why LiquidWeb is Awesome (Pros)
In our opinion, there are tons of things that make LiquidWeb a great host. But for the sake of writing a review that makes sense and isn’t just us rambling, we’re going to break this down into a few different categories.
Their Support Rocks
Almost everybody knows that the two most important things for a web host to be good at are reliability and support, and honestly they are awesome at both.
LiquidWeb is one of the few hosts that actually has fours ways to get support: email, a ticket system, live chat, and phone. It’s actually pretty rare to find that among hosts, but again, this is a situation where you ultimately get value that is proportional to the amount of money you spend.
Because they are located in Michigan, you can actually take your phone, call their support line, and talk to a network engineer. They don’t outsource their phone support to foreign countries, and you won’t have trouble understanding the person you’re talking to. On top of they, they are super knowledgeable and we’ve never encountered someone who was rude or not willing to go the extra mile to help solve a problem, even if it was caused by our own stupidity.
Sometimes though, we don’t want to talk to a person, maybe we’re having a bad day, in a rush, or our problem doesn’t warrant getting on the phone. In that case, it’s nice to have the option of live chat where you can jump on and talk to someone in real time, without opening a ticket. They are usually pretty good about solving problems during chat, but sometimes if it’s something more involved they might have to open a ticket because they have a queue of other people to help in the chat. We’ve never, even at peak times, had to wait more than about 5-10 minutes to get helped, and during that time we usually just work on something else in another window; if you need help during off-peak hours, it’s typically only a minute or two you need to wait (from our experience).
We will say though, that as an update to this review, that it appears Liquidweb does now outsource their chat to foreign countries, and this is a bit disappointing. Their support is still good, especially at the ticket level where you’re getting stateside help, but the chat support isn’t as good as it used to be, at least not the first line techs.
In addition to all of the above, they are typically always willing to help you troubleshoot all sorts of problems, and as we mentioned before, fix problems that we stupidly cause ourselves. Most techs have always been willing to help us make small changes that aren’t related to the server (such as something with WordPress), etc. We’ve had other hosting companies be really rude about giving us any extra advice, but LiquidWeb always seems to go the extra mile to help.
Their uptime & performance is awesome
Now, we honestly don’t have any hard numbers to back this up, although you can probably find them somewhere else online; all we have is our anecdotal account of this. But we can truly say that in 5+ years of using LiquidWeb, we think we’ve only had downtime issues once or twice.
Let us put it this way: anything we have that is an awesome site, or super important, goes on LiquidWeb because we know we can count on them. Any scripts we have running as a Cron job, email, or anything else that we need to KNOW we can count on, goes on LiquidWeb. And we’ve never had a problem with these things with them. There are some other, niche hosts that seem to have a good sized chunk of the VPS market that aren’t nearly as reliable in our opinion. Really, our LiquidWeb VPS servers are the only thing that we haven’t had any trouble with in terms of hosting and servers. This might sound like a load of garbage, but it’s true.
Whenever we’ve cloned a site and done a website speed test or a ping test, it always seems that our LiquidWeb VPS is the fastest. And this is typically when the other service has slightly higher specs. We honestly don’t know how they seem to get so much out of lower-spec’d VPS, but they do.
You can add IPs without going through a huge process or ordeal
They don’t have shared plans anymore, but when you have a LiquidWeb VPS you can just log into your admin panel (not cPanel, but your LiquidWeb admin panel) and add IPs. They are often non-sequential, and cost about a few dollars per month (it used to be $1/month, but the price has gone up in the past few years).
This is awesome if you want to do an SSL, or need a dedicated IP for another reason. Lots of other hosts seem to make you fill out a giant form, or they question you as if you’re being interrogated as to why you want/need an IP address, and even then sometimes they will say no. This sucks and generally irritates us, which is one reason why we like LiquidWeb so much.
It’s easy to add more servers
Again, this is similar to the IP thing, but it’s just as easy to add another VPS. You don’t have to open a ticket and wait days, or go through some stupid process; all you have to do is log into your your LiquidWeb management panel and follow the steps to add another server. It’s really easy, and their interface is good to work with. They also have a variety of offerings, including dedicated hosting, although like we said we’ve just used their VPS setups (which have been amazing).
They are great about stopping resource hogs from affecting you
It seems like even with VPS hosting, you can get some idiot on the server who gets hit with a DDOS attack, or is doing some stupid spamming and ends up slowing the server down for everyone. This is common in shared hosting, but can also happen in a dedicated environment.
We’ve had other “supposed” top tier VPS hosts just let people run wild, hog resources, and drag the server down for everyone. It’s sometimes been so bad that we can’t even access a simple WordPress database because the resources are so clogged up. We can honestly say we’ve never had this problem with LiquidWeb; they seem to keep people in check really well, and don’t allow fools to mess up the servers.
What is Not so Good About LiquidWeb (Cons)
They are a little on the pricey side (but you do get what you pay for)
There really isn’t much to say here in terms of cons, but if we had to pick one thing it would be the price. At the time of writing, you’ll pay about $80-$100 per month for a decently-equipped VPS. Now, we can honestly say though that this is a situation where if you want to be cheap, you’re going to get cheap results.
Sure, you might be able to find a VPS that’s cheaper, maybe even half the price, but what are you getting? You’re probably on a box that is oversold, and maybe the company located in some crazy place…who knows. Honestly, we’ve got some great stories about issues that we’ve had with bargain VPS servers and hosting, but those are for another section on this site!
And as we mentioned above, the first line chat support isn’t what it used to be, but ticket support and escalated chats can still be good, but it used to be better.
With that said, LiquidWeb is literally the ONE hosting bill that we don’t mind paying for every month, and don’t feel like we’re being ripped off. We think that says a lot.
It’s tough to find coupons
Because they aren’t one of the “bait and switch” hosts that draw people in on a super cheap coupon and then charge them 1000% more later on without telling them, LiquidWeb coupons can be hard to find. Some LiquidWeb reviews might try to pretend like there are coupons in order to get you to click though and buy, but that isn’t the case here, and honestly, LiquidWeb coupons are extremely rare.
We think they realize that they have a great, solid product and don’t feel the need to push coupons and sales all the time in order to get customers; they know their stuff is good and don’t have to discount it like crazy just to get people to sign up.
That doesn’t mean they don’t have sales though—typically around holidays you can find LiquidWeb coupons or sales, but usually not all the time. Sometimes they do have ongoing coupons, but it’s often only for the first month, and this isn’t all the time. Like we said before though, we really don’t care because they are rock solid, and we think they know that they don’t need to discount their service like crazy to get customers.
Conclusion: LiquidWeb is one of the Few Hosts We Would Strongly Recommend
We can honestly say that LiquidWeb is the best host that we have used, even with the slight decline in chat support, and that’s why we currently used them (again, WHB is hosted with LiquidWeb right now at the time of writing).
They might be a little bit more expensive, but they are just rock solid, have good support, and very rarely if ever have hiccups. They no longer offer shared hosting so if you don’t need all of the power of a VPS you’re kind of stuck with one, but if you’re looking for a VPS or dedicated, in our 15 years of experience, we believe that there honestly isn’t a better company around.
