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Nexcess Review: Should You Switch To Nexcess Hosting?

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March 18, 2023

Nexcess is not a new name in this web hosting arena. They are into this business for the last 23 years and powering over 500K websites from their five global data centers and edge CDN.

Nexcess is a subsidiary of Liquid Web, the same company that owns StellerWP. StellerWP has many WordPress products in its bucket like iThemes suite, KadenceWP, Learndash, IconicWP, The event calendar, Restrict Content Pro, GiveWP, etc.

Sometimes it may be confusing to see the business portfolio of Liquid web as they cover a broad spectrum of businesses related to WordPress.

However, in this article, we will concentrate on Nexcess Review and will figure out if you should really switch to Nexcess Hosting or not.

Although our main focus will be on Managed WordPress hosting, we will also touch upon the Managed WooCommerce and a bit about Storebuilder.

We will discuss about the key features of Nexcess Hosting and why you should consider switching but on the other hand, we won’t spare Necess if some features are missing against the price you are paying.

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What Is Managed WordPress Hosting?

Many of us, including me, do not know much about how a web hosting process works. We don’t know how to get the best out of a web hosting service. The result is ” We start blaming our web host“

That’s not fair at all. To overcome these kinds of issues, most web host nowadays offers a service called Managed Hosting.

What does that mean is that some experts from the web host company itself will maintain each and everything of your web hosting service?

They will decide how the server should be optimized, and they will decide the key variables and the best settings that your hosting environment should have.

In a nutshell, they will give you the best possible setup for optimum performance.

Now when we talk about Managed WordPress Hosting, your web host goes one step extra and optimizes your hosting environment to suit the requirement of Word

Nexcess Hosting Overview

Nexcess covers the Managed WordPress hosting business for Liquid Web, whereas Liquid web concentrates more on the premium range of dedicated servers and VPS hosting.

Nexcess was started in 2000 and is headquartered in Southfield, Michigan. Primarily they focused on Managed WordPress Hosting, Managed WooCommerce hosting, and Managed Magento Hosting.

All their plans come with enormous bandwidth, dedicated PHP workers, proprietor edge CDN, image compression at the server level, and most importantly the Object cache pro for free that saves you about $100 per month.

Don’t forget that, all their plans come with a couple of premium plugins and themes for free like Astra Pro, iThemes Security Pro, iThemes Sync, WP Merge, etc.

Many people might complain about the pricing of Nexcess Hosting plans but when you consider the pricing of all those premium themes and plugins, the cost is justified.

Nexcess Hosting Key Features [ 10 Key Features]

Here is the list of 10 key features that made Nexcess one of the Best Managed WordPress Hosting. Although there are numerous other features, in this article, we have included 10 key features that made a difference.

Edge CDN

Nexcess does not offer a Cloudflare enterprise plan. So the only option you have is to use their own Edge CDN or spend thousands of dollars on the CloudFlare Pro or Enterprise plan.

The Edge CDN offers decent speed with its 22 points of presence (POP). All your website content will be cached by the Edge CDN and delivered from the closest POP.

Currently, the Edge CDN supports caching static content only. No dynamic caching or full-page caching option is available.

Edge CDN supports Brotli compression. If your browser does not support it, Nexcess also offers traditional Gzip compression.

The Edge CDN will be configured by default for your account. If not, you can chat with any customer support executive and they will do that for you.

AutoScalling

Autoscaling is something that I always wanted from my host. I was kind of frustrated with Cloudways after seeing frequent 502 error pages that basically say that you have consumed all your server resources.

With Nexcess, you will have a different story. Your resources will be scaled automatically when there is a sudden traffic hike like during flash sales, viral posts, or during festivals. You don’t have to pay a single penny for extra traffic.

Your PHP worker limit will be adjusted so that your server can handle the additional traffic. But there is a catch!

You can only use 24 hours of Autoscalling per month. So basically, every day, one hour of traffic hike will be accommodated by the auto-scaling feature.

If you cross that limit, you need to pay $.10/minute in 30-minute increments.

Object Cache Pro (Redis)

Great offering indeed! Object cache pro plugin will be offered for free with all Nexcess Hosting plans. You will have to pay $100 per month if you buy the plugin separately. So basically, you are saving $100 per month by switching to Nexcess Hosting

Object Cache Pro is a caching plugin that eases the load on your database and server hardware to deliver queries faster and thus speeds up your applications.

If you use Object Caching, there will be less load on your server as all the database queries will be handled by the plugin. Your website’s backend will be much faster than before and the frontend will get the same benefit.

Image Optimization At The Core

Images are always a painful affair for website owners. But with Nexcess, you can get some relief.

Nexcess offers image optimization at the core, which means all images are optimized at the server level. You will save a lot of bandwidth if your images are optimized.

On top of that, Nexcess will also convert your images to newer formats like WebP which will drastically reduce the image size.

NGNIX Caching

NGNIX Caching sits on top of Apache. So basically, all your queries will be handled by NGNIX and not Apache unless you are using the uncached version. That improves the website speed drastically.

Although, I am not sure why Nexcess is still using the Apache server. But NGNIX caching could able to make things a little better.

If they would have used the Litespeed server, many website owners would have opted for Nexcess Hosting with their eyes closed.

Dedicated PHP Workers

Think of a checkout line in a grocery store. If you have a grocery store with only one checkout counter and there are hundreds of customers waiting to get checked out. What will happen?

The checkout counter can only handle one customer at a time. Others have to wait. That creates frustration among customers and you lose the customer eventually.

In web hosting, PHP workers are like checkout counters. The more PHP worker you have, the more concurrent request you can handle. Otherwise, your visitors have to wait for the page to load.

Fortunately, PHP workers do not work as slowly as checkout cashiers. PHP workers respond in milliseconds. However, if you have a heavy-traffic site and have fewer PHP workers, your site will be very slow to load.

With Nexcess, you will get 10 dedicated PHP workers per site even in the basic plan whereas the top-most plan comes with 60 PHP workers which are enough to run an e-commerce site.

Premium Plugins For Free

We have already discussed that all plans of Nexcess hosting offer the Object Cache Pro plugin for free which is basically worth $100 per month.

On top of that, they also offer the following premium plugins absolutely FREE. Those who think that Nexcess plans are costly should consider how much they are saving out of these premium plugins by switching to Nexcess.

It’s about $2500 per year saving if you switch to Nexcess Hosting and spend around $13 per month. No other web hosting company offers this kind of savings.

Visual Comparison

Visual Compare is basically an automated tool that automatically creates a staging site for your website when there is an update in the process. In case, the visual comparison tool does not detect any issue with the site after the plugin update, it pushes the staging site changes to the production site.

However, in case the tool detects that there is an issue, it notifies the admin to revert back the changes. The tool basically compares the website before and after the updates and acts accordingly.

The specially of the visual Compare tool is that it creates staging sites automatically and decides if the update is good or bad, whereas in the traditional process, you need to create staging sites manually and also you need to compare the changes manually to take a decision

PCI Compliant Server

PCI (The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) Compliant servers are a must for eCommerce websites. It basically lets buyers know that your eCommerce site is following the industry standards for the secure processing, storage, and transmission of cardholder data.

The web server needs to follow a strict security protocol to get compliant with the PCI standard. Nexcess is a PCI DSS Level 1 provider across all hosting solutions. Their data centers are PCI compliant and thus your website also passes the PCI compliance criteria.

Multisite Monitor Using iThemes Sync Pro

iThemes Sync Pro is a multisite management tool that allows you to manage multiple WordPress sites from a single dashboard.

You can update the core, can update the themes and plugins, take remote backups, implement security services, or customize the WordPress dashboard for your client. All of these you can do using iThemes Sync Pro.

With any plans of Nexcess, you will get access to the pro version of the iThemes Sync plugin.

Things That Could Have Been Better

Here are the things that could have been better in Nexcess hosting being it’s a premium host. The Nexcess hosting plans are not that cheap which can stop them to offer the below features.

Still Uses the Apache-NGNIX Stack

No doubt, if they would have used the Litespeed server, we would not complain about the speed. However, they are still using the decade-old free Apache server which does not justify the pricing we pay.

Please look at the chart below. The Lite Speed server is almost 3X faster than Apache. At least, they could have gone for NGNIX.

Edge CDN Does Not Support Full Page Caching

Most of the web hosts in this price range offer Full Page Caching through the CloudFlare Enterprise plan. However, Nexcess uses its own Edge CDN that does not support full-page caching.

On top of that, Nexcess CDN has only 22 POPs whereas CloudFlare has more than two hundred POPs. From the business point of view, using Nexcessn CDN make sense as you don’t have to pay separately for a CDN. But when you are charging a premium for your hosting plans, you should have offered the best.

Nexcess Hosting Plans And Pricing

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Nexcess plans cover a wide range of businesses. The pricing starts from $19 per month and goes all the way up to $883 per month if you go for annual billing.

Frankly speaking, I did not understand the pricing strategy. Nexcess is offering low-cost hosting services along with its premium services.

Premium customers won’t like the same experience that a normal customer is experiencing. That should have gone for different branding for premium customers.

All plans come with similar kinds of features. The only difference is the allocation of resources that varies from plan to plan.

Nexcess Managed WooCommerce Hosting

Nexcess Managed WooCommerce hosting is different from the traditional WordPress hosting that they offer. Ideally, that is not the case with other hosts in the same price range.

Please note that Nexcess offers PCI-compliant servers which is a must for secure transactions. This will build up more trust in customers toward your business.

You will get better resources compared to WordPress hosting and the pricing is also different. Nexcess offers the following eCommerce-related features for free.

Here are the other tools/ plugins that you will get for free if you choose Nexcess WooCommerce hosting

If you don’t want the hassle of setting up a WooCommerce store, you can opt for their StoreBuilder plan which will elevate your Woocommerce store experience.

Even if you don’t know anything about WooCommerce, you can build an online store using StoreBuilder within hours.

It is more or less like setting up a store on Shopify, the only difference is that Nexcess StoreBuilder is based on WooCommerce.

StoreBuilder is a separate offering from Nexcess that automatically sets up your WooCommerce site with all functional features so that you can start earning from your store from day one.

Nexcess Support

Nexcess has phone support, email support, and chat support. Out of these, chat support is the best. However, I have never experienced the Nexcess support team going beyond their limit and helping customers.

The response time would have been better in the case of chat support. Email support easily takes a day to get a response and phone support is not always feasible.

Overall a decent technical support team but nothing extraordinary like Rocket.net or Cloudways.

Nexcess Hosting Performance And Test Results

We have tested one demo site on Nexcess hosting and here is how it performed. Please note that we have used Perfmatters to optimize the site.

GTMetrix Speed Test

GTMetrix test report shows an impressive result as the site loads in less than 0.2 seconds.

Speed Vital TTFB Test

TTFB ( Time To First Byte) is a key indicator of how fast the server response is. Fortunately, Nexcess passed that test with flying colors.

How To Host A Website On Nexcess Hosting

Setting up a website on the Nexcess platform is a little tricky. The interface is not that user-friendly. It may take a while to get used to the Nexcess interface. However, if you follow the below step-by-step process, I don’t feel that you will have a hard time setting up things.

First thing first. And the first thing is that you need to buy a hosting plan. For that, you can consider clicking this link which will take you to the Nexcess home page.

On the home page, you will get the option to choose the type of Hosting you want. For example, I decided to create a WordPress blog, so I have chosen the option “Fully Managed WordPress Hosting”

Clicking on the “Fully Managed WordPress Hosting” option will take you to a page where you will be shown different WordPress plans. Choose the plan as per your requirement.

Yearly plans are cheap. If you sign up for Nexcess by clicking on this link, you will get a maximum 33% discount on almost all plans.

For this demo, I decided to choose the Spark plan. Once you decide on the plan, click on Buy Spark.

You can also use the coupon code FOURMONTHSFREE to get four months free on all annual plans.

On this page, you need to create an account if you don’t have one. You need to provide your payment details and billing address.

You can also change the hosting plan (1) if you like on this page. And finally, you need to select your data center (2). Nexcess has a data center in the following locations.

Once everything is done, click on “Complete Purchase“

As soon as you make the payment, you can access the Nexcess Hosting dashboard that looks something similar to the below image ( It reminds me of a typical WordPress dashboard)

On the left, you will get options (1) for Plans, Sites, Billing, and Support. If you need any help, you can simply click on the support options at the bottom of the page(2)

Click on Sites, to access the site that is hosted on this platform. Click on the respective URL to go to the specific site settings.

The below image shows the site-specific settings. The credential tab will show you FTP details, Redis Cache details, and your IP address. Click on “Admin” to access the WordPress admin dashboard.

Clicking on the Backup option will show the backup details. When you click on the Analytics tab, you will see the following page that shows the analytics of your hosting environment.

The Staging & Dev and Email tab will show respective settings that are self-explanatory. Fortunately, Nexcess offers email hosting too for free.

The visual comparison tool is already discussed in this article before. Clicking on “Show More” will show all the other settings of this particular site as shown below.

Click on the “Domain” option and then click on “Modify Master Domain” to change the temporary URL to your own domain name.

Add the CNAME records for your domain in the domain registrar. The CNAME record will be the Nexcess temporary URL.

For example, here in this case, the CNAME record value will be b6ab2467bc.nxcli.io for blogbyts.com

Once the DNS is propagated, the temporary URL will be redirected to your domain name.

Click on the Management tab to enable the following features.

The Database and the SSL tab will show respective settings that are self-explanatory. Click on the Nexcess CDN tab to enable the Nexcess CDN and change its settings.

The Nexcess CDN will be enabled by default. If not, you can chat with a customer support representative and they will do that for you.

Anytime, if you want to access the WordPress admin dashboard, you can click on “Enter WordPress” at the top right corner.

That’s it. Your site is now hosted on Nexcess.

Nexcess Positives And Negatives

Conclusion: Nexcess Hosting Review

We reviewed Nexcess hosting thoroughly and found that it is relatively better than other web hosts that deal in a similar price range.

With its own CDN, object caching, and premium plugins (for free), Nexcess is not a bad deal and is worth every penny that you spend.

With WooCommerce StoreBuildder, they have elevated the eCommerce hosting experience to the next level. Not to forget that Nexcess is backed by Liquid Web.

I would definitely prefer to switch to Nexcess if I have a WooCommerce store or a blog that generates a decent income. For newbies, Cloudways is still a better option.

Nexcess Hosting Alternatives

Cloudways, Rocket.net, and WPX are the three best alternatives to Nexcess that I can thick off. All these three hosts offer similar feature sets and the pricing is also in the same range.

Cloudways

Cloudways is a cloud hosting provider where you can choose your servers from different vendors like Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, AWS, Vultr, and Linode.

This is a VPS environment where you can choose your CPU cores, RAM, and other resources. Cloudflare offers some free services like Bot protection and SSL etc. No email hosting is available.

All Cloudways plans comes with Varnish cache for the server and an Object cache for database caching.

The pricing starts from $10 per month for the Digital Ocean standard server which is a little less than the Nexcess basic plan.

If you want more speed, you can choose the Vultr High-Frequency server. Cloudways supports CloudFlare Enterprize CDN plan which is a plus

Overall, Cloudways is one of the best alternatives to Nexcess, if you feel that the price of Nexcess plans are way too much.

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WPX hosting

WPX is one of the most popular managed hosts available in the market. People usually choose WPX when their shared hosting could not bear the load of traffic.

One of the best things about WPX is its own custom-built CDN. That changed the ball game altogether. I had a chance to test WPX and they are simply the best when you talk about the price-to-feature ratio.

However, CloudFlare Enterprise CDN is still the best and neither Nexcess nor WPX offers that.

One of the other differences between Nexcess and WPX is that WPX uses a Litespeed server whereas Nexcess is still with Apache.

Coupled with this great server, sophisticated server-level cache, and great support, they have established themselves as a great host in recent years.

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Rocket.Net

Rocket.net is fairly a new company established in 2020. But they have some excellent plans that can even beat Kinsta. Like Kinsta, Rocket.net also uses the NGNIX web server, but the real trump card is the Cloudflare Enterprise Plan.

All rocket.net customer gets the Cloudflare Enterprise plan for free. On top of that, you will get Sectigo Premium SSL for free which will save almost $700 per year.

Apart from that, Rocket.net uses an edge cloud that is much faster than the traditional cloud.

I recently reviewed Rocket.net and I am simply blown away by the speed. The support of the Rocket.net team is also awesome.

The pricing is almost similar to WPX and Nexcess. Even the topmost plan for $200 is a great deal for high-traffic blogs. You can try any of the rocket.net plans by paying just $1 for the first month.

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FAQ | Nexcess Review

Nexcess Review

Nexcess is one the finest WordPress hosting that offers a bunch of web hosting plans suited for beginners as well as for big publication houses. With in-house Edge CDN, Object Cache pro, and a wide list of premium themes and plugins for free with all plans, Nexcess is hard to beat in terms of a value proposition. Sign up today and save up to $2500 per year with Nexcess Hosting.

Price: $12.67

Price Currency: $

Operating System: Linux

Application Category: Web Hosting

Editor's Rating:
4.5

Nexcess Review: Should You Switch To Nexcess Hosting?

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