While Liquid Web is mostly known for their award winning dedicated hosting, they include a wide range of hosting options to fit any level of service. Their plans range to fit massive scale companies (Motorola, MTV, The Home Depot and National Geographic to name a few) all the way down to the single blog owner.
The company was founded in 1997 by Matthew Hill. While relatively small, the company hosts 20,000+ clients in 120 different countries.
They have 3 privately owned data centers in Lansing, Michigan with a 4th location in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Before I get into this Liquid Web hosting review, I’m going to get straight to the point. They’re a bit more expensive, especially with their shared hosting options. If you’re looking for a cheap shared hosting plan with no concern for quality or support, Liquid Web is probably not for you.
However, they offer some of the best support within the hosting industry and don’t skimp when it comes to quality. For anyone wanting peace of mind knowing their websites are fully managed, monitored with support available 24/7/365, I would suggest Liquid Web is the way to go.
Services
Liquid Web offers the highest quality fully managed shared hosting options fitting the needs of a single blog owner to a web professional who owns several domains. They even offer semi-dedicated hosting, which is a great in between option that is much more budget friendly than a fully dedicated server.
Their fully dedicated server options are great for larger scale websites and businesses who have traffic volumes much too large for shared hosting or for those that require special programming that needs root server access.
They even offer VPS (virtual private server), storm cloud and hybrid hosting.
Their servers are watched 24/7 with sonar monitoring, and if any issues are identified the team will work to fix them immediately. Often times issues are resolved before the customer is even aware of the problem.
Customers get CPanel access with the ability to run their website on a wide range of scripts. Anything from WordPress, Drupal, Joomla.. you name it, you can probably use it.
All services are offered with a 30 day money back guarantee and 24/7 support.
Pricing
Pricing varies dramatically depending on your hosting needs.
Shared hosting
Standard – $14.95 per month and includes 2 free domain names. This is good for hosting one or two smaller websites.
Webmaster – $19.95 per month and includes 3 free domain names. This is good for the average user that hosts multiple small scale websites.
Professional – $24.95 per month and includes 5 free domain names. This is good for hosting several websites (which can be as many as you want as long as the space allows). This is a good fit for professional business/website owners who have multiple sites of decent size but aren’t quite at the level needed for semi or fully dedicated servers.
Semi-dedicated – $40 per month and includes 5 free domains. This is a great in between budget friendly option for people who aren’t quite in need of a fully dedicated server but have outgrown traditional shared hosting. This type of hosting is still technically shared, but your websites are put on very powerful servers with a select few other sites, much fewer than the above mentioned shared plans. This gives way more power to your site since it doesn’t have to share as many resources.
Dedicated hosting
This is what Liquid Web is mostly famous for. Their plans start at $179/month that range all the way up to $799/month.
All of their dedicated hosting options are entirely customizable and you can even choose between Windows and Linux. They guarantee 100% uptime or you’ll get credits for every minute your website is down.
These come with 3 levels of support – self-managed, core managed and fully managed. With many companies, if you need a dedicated server you have to manage it on your own. With Liquid Web, you can opt for them to take care of your hardware and web-server and you even get CPanel or Plesk access.
VPS Hosting
Virtual Private Server plans are fully managed and start at $50 per month and range all the way up to a rather costly $2,500/month. With VPS, you have CPanel access, daily billing (so you pay for only what you actually use) plus the ability to easily upgrade or downgrade your plan.
Their 100% uptime guarantee is also offered to their VPS customers.
Their hosting is also offered with their storm cloud servers.
Heroic Support
Their support is what sets Liquid Web apart from the competition and wins the hearts of many loyal customers. They have industry breaking record response times, are available every singe day, 24 hours per day and 365 days of the year. They offer live chat, phone AND support ticket (email) options for getting your questions answered and issues resolved.
They have a 59 second response time guarantee for phone and live chat support, and a 30 minute help desk response time guarantee. However, the company keeps their stats up to date and publishes their monthly average response times. In the time of writing this review (July 2015) they’ve broken each and every guarantee with an 8.5 second average phone response time, 39.5 second average live chat response and an astounding help desk response average of just over 10 minutes.
Also, as of July 2015 their customer satisfaction rating was at 99%.
Another way the support stands out from other hosting companies is that it isn’t outsourced. Not only are you supporting local jobs (they’re one of the leading tech employers of my hometown of Lansing), you get people who understand you, people you can relate to, and people who will do anything they can to resolve your issue even if it means transferring you to senior support staff.
My personal experience with Liquid Web support
I have some of my own websites hosted with Liquid Web and I have been nothing but amazed at the level of support that is offered – they really go above and beyond any expectations you may have.
The first website I set up with them was a major pain in the behind and I ran into all sorts of issues trying to get it set up. I initially sent a PM to live chat and was connected with a staff member within a few seconds. She was very friendly and was doing everything she could to help. Of course halfway through our conversation my internet disconnected and I was extremely frustrated.
I decided to submit a ticket through their help desk, but before I was done writing it I received an extremely detailed email from the girl I originally contacted through live chat. She apologized for the disconnect (even though it was on my end) but explained she was nearing the end of her shift, but she connected me to another guy that took over my case.
After several emails back and forth it finally was resolved, and the response time for each email was more than sufficient (no more than 15 minutes between responses) and he always sent the most detailed, helpful replies.
He emailed me back the next day just to ask if everything was still okay and if I needed additional help.
That was just my first experience. Each and every time I’ve contacted their support since it has always been amazing. In fact, their support is even known as “Heroic” because it’s just that good. If you look up any other reviews on Liquid Web, you’ll see time and time again customers raving on their level of support.
You can rest assured they won’t just blow you off. They really won’t stop helping until the problem is resolved and you are 100% satisfied.
Best Dedicated Hosting Award – 2014
The company actually won the 2014 award for best dedicated hosting, according to buy-hosting.net. You can see below their review and rating of Liquid Web compared to the other top dedicated hosting companies:
Would I recommend Liquid Web?
Absolutely. Liquid Web is an awesome company that offers the highest quality web hosting. Since they happen to be one of the leading technical employers of my hometown, I know many people that work there. With that, I can confidently say the company has a great culture, positive vibe and treats their employees very well.
When it comes down to it, Liquid Web is a great hosting option for anybody. Its dedicated hosting and VPS plans are state of the art, fully customizable and backed with a 100% uptime and heroic support guarantee. While their shared hosting is a bit on a higher end as far as pricing, the quality of their services and level of support are virtually unmatched within the industry and are worth every extra penny.
For those looking for quality hosting, stability and peace of mind – Liquid Web is your best bet.
What did you think about some Drupal/Wordpress cloud hosting. I tried drupal cloud hosting once but cant create quality website to test it really. And these AWS cloud for high load web portals is good but there is much more easy peasy variants with robust new webservers and nonrelational databases. Dedicated hosting – is it good enough for 50k visitors a day portal at these provider. Do they have workload and multiple site on domain/subdomains support?
Sorry to bother with questions – wanna know where to go after shared private services like WA. And I need a mirror at Moscow in Russian Federation – will Liquid Web provide Russian/Spanish/Chineese (multilanguage) support. Did you use their server once – what is the ping and responce time on video/data archives or is it better to use Youtube as provider – I dont like them for certain content and for their ads. Does Vimeo is better?
I would visit liquidweb.com and talk to a support specialist via private chat. They’re incredibly helpful and can answer all your questions way better than I could. 🙂