Nexcess Review (2024) – Is It Worth The Money?

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About Nexcess Hosting

Nexcess is a premium managed hosting solution offered by its parent company- Liquid Web. It was founded by Chris Wells back in the year 2000. Currently, over 500k+ websites use Nexcess hosting. It is popular for its speed, security, and scalability.

Previously, Liquid Web used to offer all hosting services on its platform. But now they’ve split their services. You can now find VPS hosting, dedicated servers, etc on Liquid Web. Whereas, Managed WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento hosting are offered by Nexcess.

They also have an umbrella brand under them called StellarWP. It offers premium WordPress plugins like iThemes Security Pro, Kadence WP, LearnDash, etc.

Nexcess Hosting Overview

Speed	848 ms (US) 4.3 sec (India)
Uptime (past 94 days)	99.99%
Pricing	Managed WordPress starts from $21/mo
Free Domain	No
Data Centers	5 data centers located in Europe, US, and Asia Pacific
Servers	Nginx servers
Backups	Automated daily backups stored for 30 daysOn-Demand Backups stored locallySelective Restoration available
Migrations	Unlimited
Email Hosting	Unlimited professional email accounts
Support	Email Tickets, Live Chat, Call (only for the US customers)
Payment Options	PayPal, Credit, and Debit Cards
Refund Policy	30-day refund policy
Features	15 GB storage, 2 TB Bandwidth, Visual Comparison, Free Premium Plugins, Object Cache Pro, Auto Scaling, Nexcess Page Cache.
Hosting Plans	Managed WordPress, Managed WooCommerce, Managed Magento, Store Builder, Flexible Cloud.

Nexcess Review Video

If you’re someone who enjoys watching video content more than reading blogs, here’s my video review of Nexcess.

In this video, I have discussed all the major features of Nexcess hosting, like user interface, backups, support, pricing, security, email hosting, and more. I have also discussed the results of the various tests conducted on my WordPress site.

This video is in the Hindi language with English subtitles. Hope you’ll enjoy watching it!

Nexcess User Interface

The user interface of Nexcess hosting is pretty neat and organized. Unlike most other hosting solutions, it does not come with a cPanel. Nexcess offers its own custom control panel that looks pretty friendly and easy to use.

It doesn’t have a lot of settings and options to confuse the user. As you click on your purchased plan, you’ll find the major settings and features on the left panel. To access WordPress, they have a simple and convenient “Enter WordPress” button.

Overall, the user interface is friendly. But they can definitely work on making it more modern and responsive.

Testing Parameters

To test the speed and performance, I’ve purchased Nexcess’s Entry-level Spark plan for $17.50/month. I’ve been using this hosting plan for the last 4 months and my reviews and opinions are based on this experience.

Talking about website configurations, I have used the following settings on my website.

• Ocean WP Theme (Elementor based)
• Gym Template
• US-based servers
• No separate cache plugin

I have conducted various speed and performance tests of Nexcess hosting with these configurations. So, let’s dive in to discuss the results.

Nexcess Server Response Time

I chose the US location for testing the Server Response Time of my website. The results indicated the SRT to be pretty low in the US East (31 ms), US West (63 ms), and Canada (26 ms).

Whereas, it increased if you kept on moving towards Asian countries like Japan (158 ms), Singapore (222 ms), and India (214 ms).

Nexcess Speeds

Speed is the most crucial factor when choosing a web hosting service. To conduct speed tests, I used two popular tools: GTMetrix and KeyCDN. Let’s look at the results.

First, I used GTMetrix to check the speeds of my website from the US location. It loaded in merely 848 ms! These speeds were observed installing no additional cache plugins, which is extremely impressive.

Next, I switched the location to Mumbai (India) and again performed the speed test. This time I was a little disappointed with the fully-loading speeds of 4.3 sec!

Because they have their own Content Delivery Network (CDN) setup, I was hoping for better speeds. If your website receives a considerable amount of traffic, speeds over 3 sec can increase bounce rates!

Just to be sure, I again conducted a speed test from the Bangalore location. This time, I used KeyCDN instead of GTMetrix. However, I received an even worse load time of 4.42 sec.

Overall, you can enjoy swift speeds in the US regions. Whereas, Nexcess hosting doesn’t perform up to the mark for Indian regions. Cloudways and FastComet are suitable choices if your preference is website speed!

Nexcess CDN

For delivering content across different locations, Nexcess Hosting uses its proprietary CDN service called Nexcess CDN. You can configure the CDN service and purge the cache from the CDN settings. But as per the speed tests, it couldn’t deliver content swiftly on Indian servers.

One reason for that might be the fact that they’re currently shifting from their built-in CDN service to the Cloudflare CDN. My plan has not been switched to it yet. Therefore, I might be experiencing these slow speeds in the Indian locations.

At the time of testing, my experience was pretty disappointing. But I hope the speeds and CDN service improve in the future. I will update the latest features on this blog whenever they are implemented.

Nexcess Uptime

I have been checking the uptime of my Nexcess website for the last 94 days using the Better Uptime tool. It monitors and updates my website’s uptime every 30 sec.

Nexcess Uptime Status Report

Here’s the uptime status report for the Nexcess Managed Hosting Spark plan (US servers) for the last 240 days.

April 2024	99.83%
March 2024	100%
February 2024	99.99%
January 2024	100%
December 2023	99.99%
November 2023	99.99%
October 2023	99.99%
September 2023	100%
August 2023	99.89%
July 2023	99.97%
June 2023	100%
May 2023	100%
April 2023	100%

In the last 240 days, I’ve witnessed a commendable uptime of 99.98% on my website. It has been 99.99% in the last 30 days. The overall downtime was 55 minutes in the last 8 months.

Note: I have an active plan of Nexcess Managed Hosting. Every month, the uptime will be updated here.

Nexcess also provides an uptime guarantee of 99.99% with its hosting plans. Overall, if you’re planning to build an eCommerce store or a business site with a preference for high uptime, you can go with Nexcess hosting.

Alternatively, you can also check out Cloudways and Rocket.net for an exceptional uptime!

Nexcess Load Test

To test the load management capabilities of Nexcess, I sent 50 virtual users over to my website hosted on Nexcess. They made 9076 requests out of which no requests failed! 

The peak requests reach 47 req/sec and the peak response time was 76 ms. The response time was stable for the most part. However, it experienced a spike in the end. Overall, Nexcess handled the load incredibly well.

Nexcess Data Centers

Nexcess has its data centers established in the following 5 locations.

• Amsterdam and London (Europe)
• Southfield and Lansing (US)
• Sydney (Asia Pacific)

I personally have their US (Southfield) servers. They don’t have any data centers in Asian regions, like Singapore or India. I hope they introduce them soon, so we could experience faster speeds.

Nexcess Domains

Unlike ChemiCloud or Hostinger, Nexcess Hosting doesn’t provide a free domain with its hosting plans. But you can get a temporary domain to test how your website appears to visitors before going live with it.

For separate domain registrations, Nexcess offers domain registration services. Following are the yearly prices of popular domain name extensions.

TLD	Annual Pricing
.com	$15
.in	$15
.net	$20
.org	$16
.info	$20
.biz	$26
.asia	$15

Nexcess Backup and Restoration

Taking backups with Nexcess is a breeze! It creates daily automatic backups and stores them on an off-site server for 30 days. This ensures that even if your website undergoes any accidents or breakdowns, the backup would remain secure on a separate server.

If you wish to create on-demand backups, that is possible too. However, manual backups are created locally and consume storage on your hosting plan. Therefore, they recommend deleting those backups once their purpose is fulfilled.

Talking about restorations, you can easily restore your backups with a single click. Nexcess lets you restore your files, databases, or both. If you wish to perform selective restoration of specific files or folders, you can contact their customer support team. They will restore them for you.

Overall, I really liked their backup and restoration service. It is extremely easy to use, which is a big advantage for beginners.

Nexcess Security

With new threats and vulnerabilities emerging in the digital world every day, it is essential to choose a hosting that provides all-around protection. Let’s look at the security features of Nexcess.

• SSL Certificate: You get automated and free SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt for your Nexcess websites.

• 2FA: Two Factor Authentication can be performed using applications like Google Authenticator, Authy, etc.

• DDoS Protection: With DDoS Protection, any kind of suspicious or malicious traffic is prevented from getting access to your website.

• iThemes Security Pro: With this advanced security plugin, you can ensure 360° protection of your WordPress website. It monitors your website round the clock and prevents any attempts at data compromise or hacking.

• Visual Comparison: This is a unique feature of Nexcess that compares the before and after versions of your website during plugin updates. First, the plugin is installed on a staging site. Then, if both before and after versions have no visual changes, it pushes the update on the live site.

Overall, the security features of Nexcess hosting are pretty impressive. But the Visual Comparison testing is the most exceptional feature that I’ve seen on any hosting.

You don’t need to constantly keep on checking if your website is breaking after the updates. All you need to do is enable automatic updates and it’ll report when your website is successfully updated with the latest version of a plugin.

This feature is not even provided by premium hosting services like Kinsta or WP Engine. Thus, the security features of Nexcess make it stand apart!

Nexcess Customer Support

Nexcess offers customer support via email tickets, live chat, knowledge base, and calls. However, phone support is limited to US audiences only.

My experience with their live chat support was satisfactory. They responded to initial requests quickly. But they took some time to actually resolve my queries. Overall, the gap between taking up users’ queries and resolving them was slightly higher than normal.

One thing I liked little was the practice of forwarding knowledge-base links for most queries. I would have preferred that they first provided a clear and direct answer to my query and then provided me with knowledge base links as additional material.

Their knowledge base is quite rich and equipped with lots of articles spanning all the major topics. You can find solutions to a lot of technical issues on it.

However, they still have old images featuring their previous UI in most of their articles. They could’ve updated all of their articles with new screenshots.

Nexcess Pricing

Nexcess offers various types of hosting services, including Managed WordPress, Managed Magento, Managed WooCommerce, Store Builder, and Flexible Cloud.

If we talk about the Nexcess Managed WordPress hosting plans, they start from a pricing of $21/month. On these plans, you can also host a WooCommerce store. Following is a comparison of their Managed WordPress hosting plans.

The Spark plan can be purchased for $21/month. If you opt for an annual subscription, the pricing would be reduced to $17.50/month and you’ll also get 2 months of free hosting. I have purchased this plan for testing as well.

The Spark plan lets you host 1 site and get 15 GB of storage with a bandwidth limit of 2 TB. It also provides 10 PHP workers per site, which is quite surprising. Even industry leaders like Kinsta come with 2 or 3 PHP workers. More PHP workers ensure your website can handle large amounts of load.

So if you have a high-traffic eCommerce site, Nexcess could be a great option. It could manage extensive loads and offer smooth performance.

Payment Methods

Nexcess supports payments made through Paypal, Credit, and Debit cards.

Refund Policy

You get a 30-day money-back guarantee with Nexcess. So, if you’re not satisfied with your purchased plan, you can cancel it within 30 days of purchase and receive a 100% refund of your money.

Nexcess Coupon Code

Are you planning to get Nexcess hosting, but the pricing seems a little too expensive? Well, if that’s the case, then I have a special coupon code for you, where you can get up to 64% off Nexcess hosting for the first 4 months.

All you have to do is visit the official website of Nexcess using my link. The coupon code will be auto-applied and you can get the monthly Spark Monthly plan for just $13.23/month for the first 4 months.

The best part is that you get 10 PHP workers with the Spark plan. You can also autoscale to 20 PHP workers in situations of high demand. This is awesome if you need to host an online store with moderate to heavy traffic!

But wait, that’s not all! With my link and coupon code, you will get 4 months of additional free hosting on the annual subscription. Along with that, you’ll also get the following premium plugins for free with your hosting plan.

• iThemes Security Pro
• iThemes Sync
• WPMerge
• Image Compression & Lazy Loading
• Sales & Plugin Performance Monitor
• Astra Pro theme

Usually, getting these plugins will cost hundreds of dollars if purchased separately. But with Nexcess, you can get them completely free of cost. So, what are you waiting for? Grab this exciting deal right away!

Nexcess Staging

A staging website helps you test out changes on a different version of your website before publishing them on your live site. With Nexcess, creating and managing a staging website is easy.

However, if you want to push your site to live, you need to install plugins like Migrate to Liquid Web & Nexcess, BlogVault, etc. All of this is quite technical and complex for beginners.

Apart from that, you only get to create 1 free staging environment per domain under your Managed WordPress and Managed WooCommerce hosting plans. This is quite limited as compared to other web hosts. You need to pay extra amounts for creating more staging sites. 

Overall, you can create a one-click staging site, but pushing it to the live website is complicated. Because Nexcess is a managed hosting service, I was expecting them to provide an easy way to push my staging site to live in one click!

Nexcess Additional Features

Some additional features offered on Nexcess are:

1) Auto Scaling

Auto Scaling helps you instantly scale your website upon receiving unexpected high traffic. This ensures you can accommodate the sudden surge in visitors smoothly suffering no downtime.

However, Automatic Scaling only applies for the first 24 hours. During this time, you can upgrade your services to a higher plan. But if you don’t upgrade in the first 24 hours, you’ll be billed at $6/hour for the scaled servers.

2) Migrations

There’s no restriction on the number of websites you can transfer to Nexcess from other providers. You get unlimited migrations according to your hosting plan.

3) Servers

Nexcess makes use of Nginx servers on its hosting platform. They ensure faster speeds and improved performances. However, Litespeed servers are considered to be even faster! Popular web hosts like Rocket.net, ChemiCloud, A2 Hosting, etc use Litespeed servers. 

6) Email Hosting

You get the ability to host unlimited business emails for free on Nexcess. You can also enable unlimited storage for your mailboxes. This is helpful if you have a large team of co-workers or employees working under your brand.

4) Cache Service

Nexcess comes with a built-in advanced caching service known as Nexcess Page Cache. This service can be found under the WordPress dashboard. It lets you customize the cache status, cache behavior, specify cache exclusions, etc.

They also provide the Object Cache Pro plugin, which comes with free automatic integration with Redis. This is superb for WooCommerce and eCommerce stores.

5) Developer Tools

Nexcess offers compatibility with PHP 7 and 8 versions. It offers PHP 8.2 for PHP developers that include a ton of feature improvements along with better performance, syntax, and safety.

Nexcess Pros

1) Exceptional Load Handling

Nexcess hosting handles load exceptionally well, with no request failures and a stable response time. It even has 10 PHP workers, which can handle large amounts of traffic with ease. Thus, Nexcess is best suited for heavy websites.

2) Impressive Speeds

The speeds exhibited by Nexcess hosting in the US regions were excellent! Whereas, it can be improved in Asian regions by implementing additional servers or CDNs.

3) Excellent Uptime

The overall uptime noted in the last 240 days was 99.98%. This is superb if you have a high-traffic website that cannot afford any downtime.

4) Feature-Rich Hosting

Overall, Nexcess hosting provides a range of interesting features. These include Visual Comparison, Auto Scaling, Free Premium Plugins, Unlimited Emails, Migrations, etc.

Nexcess Cons

1) Bad CDN

The CDN service of Nexcess is not up to the mark as of now. We may get to see dramatic improvements once they completely switch to the Cloudflare CDN.

2) No File Manager

Sadly, Nexcess hosting does not offer a file manager. Thus, you cannot create, modify, or manage the files present on your website in an easy manner.

3) Slow Support

Their customer support team is quite slow in resolving queries after the initial response. They usually forward knowledge base links which I don’t appreciate a lot.

4) Inconvenient Staging

You can easily create a staging website. However, you need to install separate plugins to push your staging site to live.

Nexcess Alternatives

1) Cloudways

Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting that’s built on top of 3 unmanaged web hosts – AWS, Linode, DigitalOcean, and Google Cloud. Their data centers are spread across 65+ locations around the world.

Similar to Nexcess, Cloudways promises lightning-fast speeds along with unbeatable uptime, advanced backups and security, and excellent load management capabilities. However, it lacks the email hosting feature, and charges higher fees on opting for a larger server! 

The managed Hosting plans start from $11/month (DigitalOcean Servers). You can use my link and enter coupon code KRIPESH to get 20% off on your favorite hosting plan for the first 3 months!

3) Rocket.net

Rocket.net is another fully managed WordPress host that provides swift speeds along with excellent uptime and load management. Just like Nexcess, it also features good security, backups, unlimited migrations, a 30-day refund policy, and expensive pricing plans starting from $25/month.

But you can get additional discounts using my link. Just enter the coupon code LAUNCH at checkout, and get your hosting plan for $1 for the first month! In case that doesn’t work, you can use the coupon code KRIPESH to get 30% off your plan for the first 3 months. 

Why Should You Trust Me?

I have been working full-time in the digital industry since 2015. In all these years, I have used, tested, and reviewed dozens of popular web hosts. Some of the renowned names include Cloudways, Hostinger, ChemiCloud, FastComet, A2 Hosting, etc.

Testing different hosting services in the last few years has given me enough experience and expertise to compare and recommend you the best one for your requirements.

Conclusion

Nexcess is one of the best and value-for-money premium managed hosts. At an affordable price point, it offers superior performance than other players like WP Engine, Kinsta, or Cloudways. In my experience, Nexcess handled load much better than the $12 Digital Ocean servers of Cloudways.

You also get free email hosting and lots of premium plugins like Astra Pro and iThemes Pro for free with your hosting plan! This makes Nexcess hosting a desirable option for eCommerce owners and large-traffic websites. If you want to handle high traffic at low costs, Nexcess is the perfect host!

The only downside is its average CDN services at the moment. If your target audience comes from all over the globe, you’ll need a separate CDN service. Overall, with my special discount coupon code, Nexcess hosting becomes quite an affordable option for business and eCommerce owners.

I hope this Nexcess Hosting Review helps you decide if this hosting is the right choice for your next blog, business, or eCommerce store. If you’re planning to start your online journey, you can check out our curated list of the Best Web Hosting for 2023.

Anyway, have you used Nexcess hosting before? How was your experience with it? Which web hosting do you currently use and how does Nexcess compare to it? Let me know in the comments box. This is Kripesh signing off! Cheers, and keep learning. 🙂