LiquidWeb VPS Review
Although we did find a few issues with LiquidWeb that we will discuss below, overall, LiquidWeb is an excellent choice for your VPS hosting needs. LiquidWeb also has a very strong branding appeal with many of their features include registered trademarked names that no other host can use.
LiquidWeb is one of the most widely used and well respected VPS hosting companies on the market today. Below you will find our review of their virtual private servers service.
LiquidWeb VPS Pros
LiquidWeb runs and operates their own data center and equipment. They offer a 100% network uptime SLA. Windows and Linux VPS solutions with multiple control panel solutions available. Now offers SSD with all plansLiquidWeb VPS Cons
Extremely expensive price. However, if you are looking for the best VPS hosting solution and cost doesn’t matter to you, LiquidWeb is your solution.LiquidWeb VPS Packages Review
LiquidWeb offers 10 Storm VPS Hosting plans as shown above in our animated gif above. All plans are displayed by actual RAM available, so when selecting your plan, if you choose the 8GB tier, you’ll be getting 7.8GB of dedicated RAM.
The first thing we’re going to call your attention to is the fact that any VPS plan past 16GB is pointless. Why would you get a VPS with 32GB RAM when you can flip over to their Storm Dedicated section and pick up the Dual Processor plan we highlighted to the left? Ah-ha, that’s why we put a dedicated server listing on our VPS review page, it’s here to prove a point. That cloud server has more CPU cores, over 4x more disk space and is cheaper.
Now, let’s talk about bandwidth because we’re seeing a lot of people confused about what 5TB of outgoing bandwidth means. Each VPS plan they offer allows unlimited incoming bandwidth but they limit the outgoing bandwidth. To put it simply, when a customer visits your website or downloads a file, that counts as outgoing bandwidth. When you send data to your VPS, such as uploading files or sending emails to your VPS which then sends emails to your customers, that counts as inbound traffic. If you own a website that demands a ton of data transfer, we’d recommend looking at our top 5 VPS hosting list and compare what’s available if you feel you’ll need more than 5TB of bandwidth. For every 1TB of bandwidth you exceed past 5TB, you’ll be charged $50/mo. Most customers, however, will never come close to 5TB of bandwidth so it shouldn’t be too much cause for concern.
VPS Pricing Review
The lowest price for any VPS plan on LiquidWeb is $50 without upgrades. Take a look at our gif in the section above for other package prices for reference. There are necessary upgrades you’ll likely need so let’s cover those now:
Operating System – You’ll have several choices here. The majority should choose the $10/mo upgrade to CentOS with cPanel Fully-managed. This plan includes cPanel/WHM which is the most popular control panel that most use today. Other options include CentOS with no cPanel, Ubuntu or Fedora. With CentOS, you can opt to have “Core-managed” for $10/mo which will include OS support and restoration services if needed.
Bandwidth – Skip this. If you happen to go over your 5TB outgoing bandwidth limit, you’ll be charged $50/mo per 1TB over.
Daily Backups – Optional. I love the $0.12 per GB option though, that means if you only use 5GB of disk space, your backups will only cost $0.60/mo per retained backup which is a really good deal. As an example, if you wanted your 5GB site backed up and retained for 14 days, that would be $0.12 x 5(GB) x 14(days) = $8.40/mo. Of course, you could always use WHM to create your backups for you as long as you can remember to login and download them.
Additonal IPs – $1 per IP address. Typically you won’t need this unless you need eCommerce and SSL.
For most that are just starting out, you’ll be looking at $50/mo + $10/mo cPanel = $60/mo. Quite expensive but the reviews we’ve seen continue to indicate that their service is premium quality and extremely reliable. Of this price tag is too costly for your budget, be sure to take a look at our main page of this VPS hosting review section for alternatives.
VPS Customer Support Review
They continue to promise 24/7/365 Heroic Support® (LiquidWeb’s restricted copyright) and are very transparent with their support statistics such as those shown on the right. These are statistics reported from the prior month of this review that shows a 10 second response time on telephone support requests, 11 minute initial response time for helpdesk tickets, 65 second live chat response and an over 98% customer satisfaction rating.
Customer Self Help
Knowledge Base – To be honest, this section is a complete mess when observing this section as a new VPS customer who is just learning about their VPS plan. Featured articles are very random, covering current trends and topics (as an example, installing a dogecoin wallet is shown today). Honestly, the most use you’ll get out of this knowledge base is search. If you know what you need help on, search it there and you’ll likely find an answer (our default test questions returned expected results that answered our newbie questions). We would like to see “Categories” expanded to allow the customer to reference guides and answers based on their service, such as “Storm VPS”, “Dedicated Servers” or “Shared Hosting.”
Tutorials – This section of their site is impressive. They’ve got video tutorials that will help you with Fantastico, cPanel, WHM, FTP, DNS and Email. The bad? The videos are fairly basic with simple popups explaining what they are teaching you. There’s no voice-over or audio other than the occasional click of the mouse. You want to talk about a boring way to learn? This is it right here.
Company Blog – We liked this area because they talk about current trends, how they’ve updated the chaotic Knowledge Base, server tools, security and many other categories as well. You will very likely learn something by frequenting their blog, it’s not just a bunch of company fluff and self promotion. It’s useful and we recommend it.
Getting Help from the Customer Support Staff
Live Chat – Available 24/7, this service allows you to get instant help for not just pre-sales questions but technical support for existing customers as well. All departments were available at the time of this review and response times were well within a minute.
Telephone – Technical support and sales are available via toll-free telephone 24 hours a day.
Email – A direct support email address is found on the bottom right of their website labeled Email Us.
Ticket Support Request – Under their Contact Us page, you’ll be able to submit a support request via form. The department options for this form are support, sales, abuse, dns, dedicated or billing.
Summary
Overall, the quality of LiquidWeb has been very top notch but that service comes at a hefty price tag. If reliability, uptime, and premium hardware are important to you and the cost isn’t, then LiquidWeb would be the perfect fit for your VPS hosting needs. It’s your turn, if you are a current customer, how has your experience been so far? Has their customer support been reliable and knowledgeable? Has is the VPS stability? Rate LiquidWeb’s VPS services below and share your thoughts with our readers.