Rocket.net Review (April 2024) – CloudFlare Enterprise Benefits in Budget

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About Rocket.net

Rocket.net is a fully managed WordPress hosting platform recently founded in 2020. Ben Gabler, the CEO of Rocket.net, has worked with big names in the tech industry, like StackPath, Hostgator, GoDaddy, Help.com, etc, which makes his company trustworthy and reliable. 

Rocket.net has also recently received a funding of $1.1 million from HostPapa! I’m curious to know what they do with it in the future. 

The one thing that sets Rocket.net apart from other web hosting providers is the use of Cloudflare Enterprise CDN! What is it and how is it beneficial for you? Let’s find that out. 

What is Cloudflare Enterprise CDN?

Cloudflare Enterprise CDN is an enterprise-level Content Delivery Network offered by Cloudflare. It guarantees 100% uptime, lightning-fast loading speeds, and advanced security. Its pricing starts from $6000/month. 

On Rocket.net, this premium CDN service is divided among multiple users, which lowers its costs significantly. Thus, it allows its users to enjoy some exceptional benefits at super-low prices!

But what benefits does the Cloudflare Enterprise CDN have over other competition? Let’s find out. 

1. Google Font Optimization: It caches Google font files for up to 36 hours. Thus, text-based content on your website loads super swiftly! 

2. Brotli Compression: It is a modern compression format that ensures better page load speeds. 

3. WAF (Web Application Firewall) Protection: It helps secure your website from online threats like bots and similar attacks.

4. Automatic WebP Conversion: It optimizes images on your website by converting them into WebP format, which reduces the size of images without compromising on their quality.

5. Full Page Caching: It helps your web pages load at lightning speeds and offers a better user experience!

So, Cloudflare Enterprise CDN provides advanced security, faster speeds, and better performance to your website. 

Rocket.net Overview

Speed	2.1 sec (US) 1.7 sec (India)
Uptime	100% (last 936 days)
Data Centers	Cloud Servers placed at 21 locations  Asian data center located in Tokyo (Japan)
Backups and Restoration	Automated daily backups stored for 14 days. Create manual backups and restore with a single click
Migration	Free migrations for unlimited websites
Customer Support	24/7 support through email tickets, live chat, and phone, limited knowledge base
Features	Free Cloudflare CDN, Website Staging, Litespeed servers, Sub-account control, built-in cache plugin, Rocket.net Reporting, Affiliate Program.
Security	Cloudflare Enterprise WAF, Imunify 360, 2FA, Free Digicert SSL Certificate, SSH Access.
Payment Methods	International Credit and Debit Cards, PayPal
Refund Policy	30-day refund policy
Pricing (Billed Annually)	$25/month

Rocket.net Review Video

If you are a video person, you can watch my video review of Rocket.net here. (It’s in Hindi with English subtitles)

Testing Parameters

In order to test Rocket.net hosting, I have purchased their Starter Managed WordPress Hosting plan that comes for $25/month when billed annually. 

I have used the following configurations with it:

• OceanWP Theme (Elementor based)
• Gym Template (Elementor based)
• US based Servers
• Default cache settings 

Rocket.net User Interface

The interface of Rocket.net looks quite attractive with a modern design and colors. As you log in, the Dashboard shows metrics about your disk usage, bandwidth usage and number of monthly visitors.

You can also create and manage websites, billing, affiliate, and support tickets from the same dashboard. A helpful Live chat button is always available at the bottom of the page. 

An interesting thing to note here is that Rocket.net does not provide a cPanel like other web hosts. It has its own intuitive and easy-to-use control panel, which is especially beneficial for beginners!

Because Rocket.net is a fully managed WordPress hosting service, ease of use is enhanced to a large extent. You don’t need to worry about the website’s security, optimization, or CDN installations. Everything is managed by their system itself!

Rocket.net Server Response Time

Server Response Time refers to the time interval between a user making a request and the server responding to it. According to Google’s Page Speed Insights, your server response time should ideally remain under 200ms. 

Rocket.net justifies its name in this case because when I tested the Server Response Time of Rocket.net, it came out to be under 10 ms in all locations!

This is incredibly fast, thanks to their use of Litespeed Servers and Cloudflare Enterprise on their plans! A low SRT ensures that your audience doesn’t have to wait for longer intervals to access a web page. This, in turn, leads to better engagements. 

Rocket.net Speed

Page Load Speed refers to the time taken by a website to load completely on your browser. To evaluate the speed exhibited by my Rocket.net website, I conducted speed tests from two different locations – the US and India. For this, I used the GTmetrix tool.

First, I tested its speeds from San Antonio (USA). The fully loaded time was 2.1 sec and the Largest Contentful Paint was 656 ms. Overall, GTmtetrix assigned it an A grade, along with 100% in performance and 99% for structure.

Next, when I tested the speeds from Mumbai, India, the fully loaded time was 1.7 sec and the Largest Contentful Paint was 591 ms. Overall, GTMetrix again assigned it an A grade with 100% for performance and 98% for structure.

So, overall, I found the speeds offered by Rocket.net to be really fast in all the locations. You can also check out Cloudways or FastComet if your priority is speed!

Rocket.net Uptime

I have been checking the uptime of my website for the last 936 days, and have experienced a flawless uptime performance!

Rocket.net Uptime Status Report

Here’s the uptime status report for the Rocket.net Starter plan (US servers) for the last 365 days.

March 2024	99.94%
February 2024	100%
January 2024	100%
December 2023	100%
November 2023	100%
October 2023	100%
September 2023	100%
August 2023	100%
July 2023	100%
June 2023	100%
May 2023	100%
April 2023	100%
March 2023	100%
February 2023	100%
January 2023	100%

In the last 365 days, the uptime of my website hosted on Rocket.net has been a flawless 100%. Similarly, it has again been 100% in the last 30 days. There have been no incidents of downtime yet! This is truly commendable.

Note: I have an active Rocket.net Starter plan with an annual subscription. Every month, the uptime will be updated here.

Overall, Rocket.net offers an unbeatable uptime of 100%. You can also look at WPX, Cloudways, or Nexcess if your priority is uptime.

Rocket.net Load Handling

Load Handling refers to exposing a website to real-life traffic conditions and analyzing its performance under high pressure. To evaluate the load-handling capabilities of Rocket.net, I sent 50 virtual users over to my website.

The virtual users made a total of 9804 requests, where none of the requests failed. The peak response time reached 49.67 req/sec, whereas the P95 response time stood at 30 ms. This meant that 95% of the requests were executed under 30 ms, which is really fast!

Spikes and fluctuations were seen in the response time. However, overall, Rocket.net handled the load very well. You can also take a look at Cloudways, ChemiCloud, and FastComet for better load management capacities!

Rocket.net Cache 

Rocket.net has a built-in cache system that runs in the background by default. It provides 250+ caching locations to ensure that your data loads quickly for your users around the globe. 

However, you can only make limited changes to the cache settings. For example, you can either deactivate the plugin or clear the cache. They provide no other settings with it. 

In case you want an additional caching plugin for your WordPress website, they highly recommend using the W3 Total Cache plugin or the WP Rocket plugin. 

They also offer automatic image optimization to guarantee faster load speeds! However, you cannot find out which images have been converted. Most optimizations happen behind the scenes and cannot be controlled by the users. 

If you need more control over your optimizations, you can get the WP Rocket plugin!

Rocket.net Data Centers

They have their data centers spread across the globe in 21 different locations, with most of them in the North American regions.

Continent	Data Center Location
North America	New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Miami, Montreal, Seattle, San Jose, Phoenix, Orlando, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Atlanta, Austin, Dallas
Europe	London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt
Australia	Sydney
Asia	Tokyo

Talking about Asia, the servers are only available in Tokyo. I hope they establish their data centers in India or Singapore for Indian users.

Rocket.net Domains

Unlike many other shared hosting solutions, Rocket.net does not function as a domain name registrar. This means that you cannot purchase new domain names on this platform.

So, naturally, it does not provide any free domains either! (If you’re struggling with finding the right name for your business, do try out domain name generators!)

However, it does provide a temporary domain or a preview URL to help you test how your website would appear without connecting your domain with your hosting account!

Rocket.net Backups and Restoration

Rocket.net stands out in terms of Backups! You get to see daily automatic backups taken for free. These are essentially offsite backups, meaning they are stored on a different server than your original website for enhanced security.

You can also generate manual backups whenever you want. On all plans, your backups are stored for 14 days. Unlike other web hosts offering a 30-day standard backup retention, 14 days seems too low for the price point.

Talking about restoration, it’s an effortless process. You can easily restore your backups with a single click. It even lets you choose if you wish to restore your plugins, themes, files, or databases. You can select the ones you need and hit the Restore button.

Rocket.net Support

They offer 24/7 customer service through email tickets, live chat, and phone. Even though their knowledge base is quite limited at the moment, they are developing at a good pace!

I personally found their ticket system and their live chat representatives to be quick at replying. However, their technical experience was pretty average.

I hope to see their support team improve with time. If customer support is your priority while choosing web hosting, I’d recommend you go with Kinsta hosting. It has one of the most delightful support teams.

Rocket.net Inode Count

Generally, all hosting providers restrict the number of inodes available on your plan. It’s interesting to see that Rocket.net does not impose any restrictions on the inode count. This means you can store unlimited files on your account, irrespective of your plan. 

Rocket.net Emails

The ability to create and manage email accounts is important for a hosting platform. Sadly, Rocket.net does not support email hosting, just like Cloudways. So, if you want email support, you can go with other web hosts like Hostinger, ChemiCloud, A2 Hosting etc.

Rocket.net Security

Security is one of the strongest points of Rocket.net hosting. You get to experience powerful and advanced protection from online intrusions with services like:

• Cloudflare Enterprise WAF: It is a global firewall that filters all bots and online attackers coming to your website. 

• Imunify 360 WAF: It is their local in-house firewall that provides ultimate protection against malware, SQL injection, malicious file uploads, spam comments, etc. 

In case of migrations, it automatically cleans your WordPress site and removes any malicious code.

• SSL: You get free DigiCert SSL Certificates for your websites on all plans that are renewed automatically and never expire.

• Linked Accounts: It lets you connect your Google account with Rocket.net to simplify the sign-in process.

• 2FA: You can enable two-factor authentication on your account with 2FA apps like Authy, Google Authenticator, etc to enhance your account’s security. 

• Reports: Check detailed reports and analytics for CDN and WAF from the Reports tab. 

• SSH Access: It lets you edit and customize your server settings and also shares files securely over the Internet. 

I love the security features that they offer. However, you cannot manually control any of the security settings. They all work on their own in the backend. It would’ve been much more convenient if they had provided manual control options too. 

Rocket.net Pricing

Rocket.net does not offer a range of hosting packages. Because it is a managed WordPress hosting company, you only get to see 4 different pricing plans. 

	Starter Plan	Pro Plan	Business Plan	Expert Plan
Annual Pricing	$25/month	$50/month	$83/month	$166/month
WordPress Installations	1	3	10	25
SSD Storage	10 GB	20 GB	40 GB	50 GB
Bandwidth	50 GB	100 GB	300 GB	500 GB
Monthly Traffic	2.5 lakh	10 lakh	25 lakh	50 lakh
Inode Count	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited

On all the plans, you get Domain Validated Digicert SSL certificates, built-in CDN support, and WAF support for free. Talking about traffic, unlike other web hosts, Rocket.net only counts unique visitors on your website. 

This means that if the same person views your website 15 times within 24 hours, it would still be counted as 1 view and not 15 views. Thus, 250k unique visitors on the Starter plan is appreciable!

If you opt for annual billing on their Starter plan which is priced at $30/month, the price goes down to $25/month and you get 2 months off on top of that! They also have custom pricing plans that can be designed according to your requirements.  

I agree their plans are quite expensive. You can go with Nexcess or Nestify if your priority is cost-effective hosting. But if you want a special discounted offer on Rocket.net, I have got it all covered in detail below!

Payment Options

They accept payments through Paypal and International credit and debit cards. I hope they introduce Indian Payment options like UPI, just like Hostinger or Bluehost. 

Rocket.net Refund Policy

You get a standard 30-day money-back guarantee on all Rocket.net plans. So, you can test out all the salient features of your hosting plan for a month. If you’re not happy with your purchase, you can return it within 30 days of purchase and get a complete refund.

Rocket.net Coupon Code

If you purchase a hosting plan through my link, you can get it at the best-discounted prices. All you have to do is use my link and go to the pricing page of Rocket.net. You’ll see that it offers the first month for just $1 on its monthly plans.

Select your preferred monthly plan and hit the Get Started button. Then, sign up for an account and make the payment. This is how you can easily avail the first month of the Rocket.net hosting plan for merely $1!

Rocket.net Migrations

You can enjoy free migrations for unlimited websites on all the plans of Rocket.net. So, if you have multiple websites hosted on different platforms, you can transfer them all to your Rocket.net dashboard for more convenient and easy site management.

Rocket.net Website Staging

Website Staging is helpful if you want to test out some codes and plugins locally before they go live on your website. Rocket.net lets you create a staging environment with ease.

So, you get two options in your control panel: – Production and Staging. Production refers to your live website. We won’t be making any modifications to that. 

You can implement staging by clicking on the Staging button right under your website URL. This would create a local copy of your website.

Now, you can go to your WordPress dashboard and test changes on this local version. Once you are happy with your edits, you can hit the ‘Publish’ button. This will push the changes to the original site. 

Overall, it looks quite straightforward. But I find the staging process of Cloudways to be much smoother!

Rocket.net Reporting

In case of security threats to your website, Rocket.net also has a reporting feature in place. It shows you real-time analytics produced by their Cloudflare Enterprise CDN and Web Application Firewall as colorful, easy-to-understand graphs. 

Thus, you can stay updated on the number of attacks blocked by the firewall and get detailed insights into it as well. You can also view important analytics for your web content like:

• Countries it is viewed in
• Devices it is viewed on
• Content that is consumed more, etc. 

Rocket.net Site Builder

Just like other managed hosting companies, Rocket.net does not offer a website-building feature at the moment. You can use Elementor Site Builder to edit and design your WordPress-based website.  

Rocket.net Team Management

You get the ability to manage your team on Rocket.net. It lets you add team members and even specify access permissions through the Sub-accounts option. 

You can enable permissions like viewing and managing:

• Contacts
• Products and services
• Domain Settings
• Affiliate Accounts
• Invoices

Rocket.net Feature Request

If you want to request a new feature on Rocket.net, you can head over to the Feature Requests page and submit your request along with details.

Here, you can also have a glimpse of the latest features to be implemented on Rocket.net. 

At the moment, their Email SMTP solution is in progress and the External Backups feature is under review. They’ve also planned to implement features like Blueprint Sites, Enable/Disable Redis Caching, etc! 

Rocket.net Pros

1. Cloudflare Enterprise 

Rocket.net provides powerful Cloudflare Enterprise services on all its plans, including DNS, Security, and CDN services. Its 250+ cache locations make your web content available to everyone in no time!

2. Blazing Speeds 

You get to experience lightning-fast speeds on Rocket.net mainly because they support the Cloudflare Enterprise CDN.

3. Unbeatable Uptime

With their optimized cloud servers placed on 20+ locations around the world, you get a 100% uptime every single day! In the last 2.5 years of my testing, the uptime of Rocket.net has been an unbelievable 100%!

4. Image Optimization 

The images on your website are automatically converted to WebP format, which is a more optimized format for search engines. It serves the same image quality, occupying less storage space!

5. Easy Backup and Restoration

Along with automatic daily backups for free, you can also create manual backups of your files and databases and restore them whenever you want with a single click!

6. Advanced Security

Rocket.net uses two powerful web application firewalls – Global Cloudflare WAF and Local Imunify 360 WAF to provide you with all-around protection from any online threats. 

7. Unlimited Migrations

You get unlimited free website migrations on all of their plans, which is really impressive!

Rocket.net Cons

1. 14-Day Backup Retention

Rocket.net only keeps your backups stored for 14 days, which is far lower than the standard 30-day backups offered by most hosting companies.

2. No Email Hosting

They do not offer email hosting on Rocket.net, so you need to implement this functionality via some other platforms. 

3. Cannot Create Sub-domains 

You can only host a single website on your WordPress Starter plan. Even a sub-domain is counted as a new website. So, if you need a sub-domain, you need to upgrade your plan, which could be expensive. 

4. Expensive for Beginners

Beginners who just started out and have little traffic or revenue coming through their website might find Rocket.net a quite expensive hosting solution. 

Thus, they might prefer going with other affordable options like Hostinger.

Should you use Rocket.net?

Honestly, I would not recommend Rocket.net to beginners who have just started blogging. If you are a newbie, this hosting platform would be too expensive for you! 

However, if you are an experienced website owner earning a decent amount of revenue from your site, Rocket.net might be a value-for-money option for you.

With the Starter plan that comes for $30/month, you get 2.5 lakh visitors, unlimited PHP workers, Cloudflare Enterprise services, excellent uptime, etc. So, you can host anything from a simple blog to a business site on it.

However, it only offers 10 GB of storage space, which may not be enough for heavy websites and e-commerce stores. Overall, Rocket.net is improving at a fantastic pace. You can try it for a month if you have an established website.

Rocket.net Alternatives

Cloudways

Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting provider built on top of 5 unmanaged web hosts, namely AWS, Linode, Vultr, DigitalOcean, and Google Cloud. They offer 65+ data center locations around the world!

Cloudways promises lightning-fast website speed, no downtime, reliable customer support, and easy scaling options, along with the ability to stage your website with ease. 

However, it lacks the email hosting feature, and charges higher fees on opting for a larger server! Its Managed Hosting plans start from $11/month (DigitalOcean Server).

Conclusion

Rocket.net is a budding web host with a lot of potential. It offers everything you need to build a perfect WordPress website. 

You get excellent speeds and uptime, easy backups, good support, security, free SSL, migrations, and WAF on all the plans! Litespeed servers and Cloudflare Enterprise CDN with 200+ caching locations ensure that your content is delivered swiftly around the globe. 

If you have limited websites and need Cloudflare Enterprise performance, ensuring excellent speeds, uptime, and load management, then Rocket.net is a suitable host for your needs. They can work on improving their support. But apart from that, it’s a really powerful host.

I hope this Rocket.net Review helped you gain in-depth information about all its major features. You can get an additional discount on any hosting plan you purchase from Rocket.net by using my links.

But if you’re still confused, you can check out my blog for reviews of other popular web hosts as well! Anyway, this is Kripesh signing off. 

You can get the latest updates on my YouTube videos, blog posts, and discount deals on digital tools by subscribing to my weekly newsletter. See you in the next article. Cheers, and keep learning!

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