Liquid Web is a web hosting company established by Matthew Hill in the year of 1997. Matthew Hill started the LiquidWeb web hosting company in his small office in Holt, Michigan. They were awarded with the INC 5000 Fastest Growing Companies for 8 consecutive years from 2007 – 2014. Up to date, Liquid Web has 30,000 clients from over 150 countries.
Types of VPS Plans
Liquid Web offers 10 types of VPS plans. Each of the VPS plan differs in terms of RAM, disk space and CPU cores. The basic plan offers 1 GB memory and 50 GB SSD disk space. The most popular plan offers 2 GB memory and 100 GB SSD disk space. The highest configuration plan offers 480.2 GB memory, 1800 GB disk space and 24 CPU cores. The CPU core ranges from 2 CPU cores to 24 CPU cores. LiquidWeb offers managed hosting solution that offers up to 5Tb bandwidth.
Liquidweb offers fully managed, core managed and self managed VPS plans. All the VPS hosting plans will get access to the customer support. With fully managed hosting, you get full hardware and software support. You also have access to a full featured control panel. The core managed VPS plan features full hardware support, core software support and increased security. The self managed hosting will only get full hardware support. Some of the basic features of LiquidWeb VPA plans are API access, cPanel, and free incoming badnwidth. Webmasters will be able to build and deploy a custom image for the server.
Advantages of Liquid Web VPS Hosting
Operating System
You can choose from three types of Linux operating systems including CentOS, Ubuntu and Debian. It also offer Windows hosting. The Linux VPS plans support a wide range of software including MySQL database, Ruby on Rails, Drupal, and etc. They also offers a Windows VPS plan. The Windows VPS plans uses the Microsoft Windows Server 2012 OS. Windows hosting plans features Microsoft SQL Server 2012, Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange.
Root Access
Customers will get root access to make configuration to the server. With root access, you will be able to configure third party applications. The fully managed hosting plan does not allow webmasters to install third party applications on their own. However, you can get the third party software installed through the Best Effort 3rd Party Support.
Easily Resize your Disk Size and Data Transfer
If you reach the bandwidth limit, they will not shut down your account like the shared hosting account. They will bill you for the additional bandwidth your website use. There are two options when you reach the bandwidth limit including quick resize and full resize. Quick resize is suitable for customers who suddenly experience a surge in the traffic and need more resources urgently. Quick resize can increase your CPU power and RAM temporarily. If you want the additional storage, you will need to choose the Full Resize. Full Resize will resize the CPU, bandwidth transfer and hard disk storage. It takes a longer duration to perform a Full Resize. It is recommended that you perform the Full Resize when your site is not at peak.
User Friendly Control Panel
Customers will be able to manage all their hosting accounts through the cPanel/WHM control panel. On the account dashboard, you can see the server that hosts your website. When you click on a server, you will see a chart that provide information on the current load and bandwidth. You can perform all the basic maintenance tasks through the dashboard including emails, upload files, add domain names, installing a firewall, and upgrade/downgrade the resources. Fantastico lets you install over 50 scrips on your website within a few clicks.
100% Uptime Guarantee
Liquid Web guarantees a 100% uptime for customers. They promise to offer you 10 times of the downtime hours if you experience a downtime. For example, if your website is down for 3 hours, you will get free 30 hours hosting. If you want to take advantage of this offer, you need to contact the customer support within a timeframe of 5 days. The guarantee does not apply if they are performing a server maintenance.
Daily Billing
Liquid Web accepts daily biling. This means that you only pay them for the resources you use daily instead of making a monthly or yearly payment. The basic Storm VPS plan only costs $1.64 per day while the high end Storm VPS charges about $82.84 per day. Most of the basic features are already bundled in the hosting packages. However, there are also some special features which you have pay an additional fee.
Liquid Web offers several types of billing cycles to choose from including monthly, quarterly, semi annual and annual. LiquidWeb often offer promotions for the semi-annual and annual billing cycle.
Entirely Owned Data Centers
Liquid Web operates one of the most reliable networks. Their priority is to offer a reliable hosting with high uptime. LiquidWeb has three entirely self owned data centers in Lansing. They also have a fourth data center is located at Scottsdale, Arizona. The state of the art data center that is Safe Harbor Certified. Their data center meets the SSAE-16 and SOC 3 standards. They have a team of professional engineers that monitor the data center for 24/7. The data center is backed with professional backup solutions such as PDU, and UPS. It has over 13,000 servers. They perform nightly backups so that you can easily restore your files in case you accidentally delete them or lost them through server crash.
The VPS plans are hosted on servers that are equipped with RAID Protected SSD hard drive. Free Storm Firewall is available in the VPS plan. They make sure that every facility in the data center is protected with uninterrupted power supplies. The redundant power system consists of many battery cabinets and bypass cabinets. LiquidWeb data centers uses tier-1 premium bandwidth such as Cogent Level 3, Verizon and Comcast.
The Dedicated Sonar Monitor department constantly monitor technical issues that arise in the server so that they can efficiently identify and fix all the issues within a timely mannger. They regularly perform malware scanning on the server. The servers are also protected with SSL and fire walls. Besides, the servers also feature virtual private networks (VPN).
Freebies
Customers will get one free domain. You are also entitled to one free standard SSL certificate. You can request for the free domain and standard SSL certificate through the customer support department.
Customer Support
LiquidWeb offers 24/7/365 customer support through live chat, telephone and email. Their customer support staff received training in Cisco and Red Hat. The telephone customer support is toll free. LiquidWeb handle about 30,000 help desk tickets every month. They claimed that it will respond the tickets submitted by webmasters within a timeframe of 15 minutes. They stated that they answer more than 10,000 phone calls from customers every month. It takes them an average for 30 seconds to asnwer a phone call. The Heroic Promise SLA offers a 59 seconds response time guarantee response time for telephone call.
LiquidWeb has more than 400 on-site staff in various departments including technical support, networking and etc. They are equipped with more than 150 professional technicians. There are different customer support departments that handle different types of tasks. The Service Level Agreement (SLA) offers 30 minutes guarantee for hardware replacement and initial response. Liquid Web has a knowledgebase center that is filled with all kinds of tutorial articles on common problems faced by webmasters on VPS hosting.
30 Days Money Back Guarantee
Liquid Web offers a 30 days money back guarantee for their VPS plans. You can get a full refund on your hosting fee except the setup fee if you submit a request to cancel your account in 30 days.
Drawbacks of LiquidWeb VPS Hosting
Expensive
The downside of LiquidWeb is that its VPS packages are expensive. The cost of LiquidWeb VPS plan range from $50 per month to $2,500 per month. At this pricing, LiquidWeb VPS hosting is out of the budget of many small businesses. Some medium size businesses may be able to afford its hosting. Thus, LiquidWeb is not suitable for people who are looking for a cheap VPS plan.
Server is Slow Sometimes
Some customers reported that they experienced downtimes on their VPS servers constantly.
Slow Customer Support
They tried contacting the customer support but they seem to be not responding. Fortunately, this only occur in a minority of the customers. It is best to try Liquid Web yourself so that you know the quality level of their VPS hosting services.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Liquid Web offers high quality VPS cloud hosting solutions at a premium price. Liquid Web is suitable for large websites that receive a lot of traffic. They consistently upgrade their VPS hosting so that the users can have optimal experience. One of the latest upgrades is the Cloud Block storage. The Cloud Block storage can be used as a temporary space for testing your applications. You get 5 – 6 times better performance when you test your application on the Cloud Block storage in comparison to the SSD server. Most important of all, they offer superior customer support.
