Liquid Web vs. Nexcess – selecting the optimal hosting plan for your website

Updated on March 17, 2023 by WPNeon Hosting, Reviews

Things get confusing when a single company offers two different but similar products. For those who didn’t know, Liquid Family of brands includes a ton of technologies and hosting services focused on eCommerce, businesses, and other mission-critical sites. Their family of brands also includes Nexcess. Liquid Web and Nexcess joined forces back in 2013. Both of them are well known for their excellent web hosting service.

Also read: Best WordPress Hosting [2021 Edition]

But the thing is, the web hosting needs of small-scale businesses vastly differ from the requirements of a large company. Web hosting services usually prefer to focus on only one type of consumer, and so in a nutshell, this is the basic difference between Liquid Web and Nexcess. The rest of this article will help you understand which of the two hosting services is the right choice for you.

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What is Liquid Web?

Liquid Web has been around since 1999. The company focuses on cloud-based hosting, dedicated web hosting, VPS, and more. Liquid Web’s primary consumers are big enterprises that required dedicated high-end solutions for their websites. Due to the fact that Liquid Web is a huge company with enough resources to help large-scale businesses with high traffic and uncapped server needs, it is usually not suitable for individuals looking to start an online business or blog. They even provide their services to some of the Fortune 500 companies. There are over 50 thousand different websites that run on services provided by Liquid Web, making it a trusted name for thousands of web professionals.

Liquid Web Family of Brands

Liquid Web’s family of brands includes three different brands that offer varied services that cater to the needs of every type of consumer.

Liquid Web: They focus on delivering high-end, customizable hosting services to enterprises. They offer dedicated serves, VMWare private cloud, HIPAA-compliant hosting services, and more. furthermore, Liquid Web also includes cloud instances, virtual private servers, and provides services to eCommerce and CMS.

Nexcess: They provide optimized, open-source, and affordable web hosting directed towards small-business owners and bloggers. Nexcess offers managed to host for Magento, WooCommerce, and WordPress. Their cloud hosting is flexible and also offers enterprise hosting among other services.

Stellar WP: They offer tools and plugins for WordPress. These tools and plugins include iThemes, Kadence, and more.

What is Nexcess?

Nexcess is a web-hosting and service company founded in the year 2000. Since then, it has been providing splendid web hosting solutions to its consumers. The things that set Nexcess apart from other hosting services are their dedication and emphasis on providing quality services for a fair price. You get premium services like shared hosting, virtual private servers, dedicated servers, and more for an affordable price.

Nexcess provides managed cloud hosting solutions for CMS like WordPress, Magento, and eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce. Unlike Liquid Web, the services that Nexcess offers are focused on growing small businesses, eCommerce, and individuals who plan on starting their online journey on CMS.

Should you choose Liquid Web?

Like I’ve mentioned earlier, Liquid Web focuses on fulfilling the needs of big-scaled companies with their reliable, high-end cloud hosting solutions with VPS and WordPress Hosting among other services. However, they do not provide shared hosting. This makes it difficult for individuals and small businesses as the prices will spike. Liquid Web provides services to companies like Home Depot and Porsche and is regarded as one of the best hosting services provides out there.

Although the price might be high, they do provide managed hosting services that do not lack in any aspects. The security is never compromised, everything is up-to-date, the uptime is magnificent and the customer services will help you with any issues you encounter.

Let’s look at the services they provide and the plans they offer.

VPS Web Hosting

The Virtual Private Server hosting is suitable for those who want substantial power without the hefty price tag. This hosting is agile, powerful, and cheap. The cheapest plan goes for $35 per month for the 12-month plan. It comes with 2 vCPU cores, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB of SSD storage, 10TB bandwidth, and 100GB Acronis Cyber Backup. If you choose the value bundle plan, you get everything the single plan has with the inclusion of a web protection package, premium business email service, and various web tools.

The best plan you can get in VPS web hosting is the 16 GB RAM plan. It comes with 8 cores, 200GB SSD, 10TB bandwidth, and more. This one goes for $145 per month for the 12-month plan. You can choose between both Windows and Linux-based services. However, the Windows-based services cost a bit more and don’t come with a 2GB RAM plan.

Dedicated Web Hosting

If you want all the server’s resources instead of sharing them with another website, then you want to one choose the dedicated web hosting plans. However, such power comes with a price. Liquid Web offers 3 different plans under dedicated web hosting with bundles for each of them. The cheapest one can be yours for $169 per month for the 12-month package. It comes with Intel Xeon 1230v6 which is great for high traffic, multiple websites, and small apps. You get 4 cores running at 3.9 GHz at max, 16 GB RAM, 2 x 240 GB SD, 1TB HDD for backup, 5 TB bandwidth, and more.

The bundled plan includes 32 GB RAM instead of 16 GB, 8 TB bandwidth instead of 5n, and other additional goodies for $219 per month. The most expensive and powerful plan goes for $374.25 and comes with 32 cores, and 64 GB RAM. If you want more, Liquid Web provides custom solutions too.

WordPress Web Hosting

This one is actually through Liquid Web’s Nexcess brand. So, we will cover this later.

Cloud Web Hosting

Liquid Web also offers cloud hosting. If you choose one of the clouds hosting plans, the server resources will get shared across multiple servers. There are multiple tiers under this hosting and the cheapest one goes for $149 per month. It comes with 4 cores running on 8 threads, 16 GB RAM, 452 GB SSD running on RAID1, 5TB bandwidth, and more. If you want more, you can go up to 6 cores with 12 threads, 32 GB RAM, 917 GB SSD on RAID10 for $219 per month.

These are, however, standard cloud dedicated plans. If you want high performance, then you need to spend a bit more. The cheapest high-performance cloud dedicated plan comes for $579 per month and comes with 6 cores, 16GB RAM, 3.8 TB NVMe U.2 SSB on RAID1, and more. The specification can go up to 64 GB RAM and 7.6 TB NVMe U.2 SSB on RAID1; if you’re willing to pay the price of $699 per month.

Reseller Web Hosting

If you’re planning on getting into the web hosting business yourself but do not want to experience the hassle of managing services and other infrastructures, then the reseller hosting plan is for you. The plan starts at $139 per month and comes with a WHMCS license and plugin, standard SSL protection, and 24/7 dedicated support. The plans come with both Windows and Linux variants.

Should You Choose Nexcess?

Nexcess focuses on small-business owners, bloggers, and individuals who want reliable, secure, and powerful hosting without the hefty price tag that usually comes with it. Nexcess specializes in WordPress, Magento, and WooCommerce hosting with good servers, features, and support. The services that Nexcess provides are high quality but comes at an affordable price.

There are other hosting services that provide cheaper plans, but unlike those that compromise their performance trying to be extremely pocket friendly, Nexcess strive to provide excellent high-performance service with high security, reliability, and best value for money. And, all hosting plans they provide are managed. Let’s look at what they got to offer.

Magento Hosting

This hosting plan is specially optimized for Magento and comes with flawless security, and high speed. Each plan under this category is fully managed and scalable. You get a dedicated IP address, instant auto-scaling, on-demand performance testing, and 24/7 support. The fact that Nexcess CDN offers 22 locations ensures your traffic doesn’t slow down no matter what. The Magento hosting plan comes with 6 variants.

The cheapest plan costs you $49 per month and comes with 50GB storage, 10 domains, and 1 TB bandwidth. The most expensive plan can be yours for $849 per month and comes with 800GB of storage, 10TB bandwidth, 32 GB RAM, 50 domains, and 32 vCPU.

WooCommerce Hosting

Nexcess also provides a fully managed WooCommerce hosting service with various price plans to suit your requirement. If you’re planning on starting an eCommerce store on WooCommerce, this plan will best suit you as it is dedicated and optimized solely for WooCommerce. Apart from the usual 22 CDN locations and on-demand performance testing, you also get eCommerce-specific services like cart abandonment technology, sales performance monitor, affiliate WP, advanced analytics, and more.

WooCommerce Hosting from Nexcess provides custom order tables that are designed to decrease query loads by 95%. The plans start from $19 per month for 1 store, 30 GB storage, and 500 orders per hour. If you want more stores, more storage, more orders, and other additional goodies, then there are 6 different plans to choose from.

WordPress Hosting

The pricing plan for WooCommerce hosting and WordPress hosting are similar with differences in features. If you choose any of the Nexcess WordPress Hosting plans, you will get no traffic limits or metered page views, image compression, and tons of premium WordPress tools like iThemes and TinyPNG. The price starts from $19 for 1 website, 15 GB storage, and 2TB bandwidth. the price goes up to $499.50 for 250 websites, 800GB storage, and 10 TB bandwidth.

Flexible Cloud Hosting

The flexible cloud hosting plan lets you decide what you want. You can choose from 7 different platforms including Magento, WooCommerce, and WordPress. The wide range of development tools, high scalability service, flexibility, and PCI compliance make this a perfect platform to ensure you don’t get any hosting hiccups as your business grows. It doesn’t matter if what scale your business is, Nexcess can cater to your needs perfectly.

And since this is a managed hosting, you can keep your eye on your business and not worry about the hosting. The pricing plans start from $40 per month and comes with 20 concurrent users, 50 GB space, 10 domains, and 1TB bandwidth. If you want more, the specifications can increase up to 120 concurrent users, 800 GB storage, 50 domains, 32 cores, and 32 GB RAM.

Final Thoughts – Liquid Web vs. Nexcess

The below infographic nicely summarizes the differences between Liquid Web and Nexcess.

Both of the hosting services are great in their own way and both of them guarantees 100% uptime and delivers it. Liquid Web is a good choice for those who do not want to worry when their traffic grows exponentially. Liquid Web can handle huge spikes in traffic without any sweat. Even some of the Fortune 500 companies use Liquid Web’s service so you know they are true to their word.

Nexcess on the other hand does offer excellent services but is suitable for small to medium businesses who do not hope to get a huge spike in traffic. But that doesn’t mean it cannot cater to the needs of big businesses. The features and plans that come with can be customized accordingly. The support is excellent, and they put the requirement of their clients on top priority.

So, in a nutshell, if you run a blogging or eCommerce website that gets decent traffic, then Nexcess is the way to go. It gives you great performance and security at an affordable price. However, if you run a huge website with immense traffic, then Liquid Web should be your top choice. Plus, they have numerous plans that satisfy your requirements.

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