LiquidWeb Shared Hosting Review
When you first land on LiquidWeb, they are all over advertising their VPS and Hybrid plans, but a little hidden secret is they have professional-grade web hosting available if you aren’t quite ready for VPS Hosting or need a step down as a newer web hosting client. Their shared web hosting is treated as a premium product as most customers have grown to expect and love about LiquidWeb.Of course, the pricing of this service is on-par with the higher-than-normal pricing scheme on their website. As $14.95, the price is far higher than most companies we’ve reviewed here on our shared hosting review section, however, we know why. Unlike most companies that stuff as many customers as they can on each server to turn a profit, the pricing and space restrictions here indicate how things used to be in the web hosting space.
They limit you on space and transfer to provide a well-balanced server-to-customer ratio that keeps the servers running smoothly. You are far less likely to see drastic performance issues on their shared hosting compared to the ultra-cheap providers. This is a lesson in quality over quantity.
LiquidWeb Pros
We tested them about their Heroic Support® and were blown away by the results. LiquidWeb delivers a premium shared hosting experience that most “unlimited everything” hosts fail at. We wish more hosts would leave the “race to the bottom” approach.LiquidWeb Issues
Does not offer “unlimited everything” web hosting, meaning, a single client can’t load hundreds of websites that can cause performance issues. Their Knowledge Base uses an older website layout that is unappealing.LiquidWeb Shared Hosting Plan Review
LiquidWeb offers you 4 shared hosting solutions, all of which come with SSD hard disks which drastically improve read and write performance on your website(s). Each plan, as confirmed (below) by their customer support allows you to host as many websites as you wish on your plan. Your only limits are based on the disk space and bandwidth based on the plan you choose.
Since most start with the cheapest hosting plan, here’s the pricing specifics:
- 1 Month: $14.95/mo
- 3 Months: $14.95/mo
- 6 Months: $12.46/mo (after 1 month free)
- 12 Months: $12.46/mo (after 2 months free)
Based on pricing, unless you feel the need to, there’s really not a whole not of savings to prepay for hosting with LiquidWeb. In the end, I get the feeling they are extremely confident in their service. They don’t use the “tricks of the trade” approach by offering a bottom-basement price to get yoiu to buy years in advance, a refreshing thing to see in this industry.
The Checkout Process Review
The checkout process only takes 2 screens to complete the order. Another great thing we found was there was no needless upsells provided during the order, the price you see advertised on their website is the actual price you will pay.
Setup Fees: Unlike most hosts, if you want to pay monthly, they are happy to allow you to do that with no additional setup fees, again, this bucks the trend of most web hosting companies.
Easy Of Use Review
LiquidWeb recently updated their website to be 2015+ friendly with a fully responsive and full-format website. I love their design and I’m sure it has helped their conversions just from the eye-pleasing layout they went with. Most of the pages on their site have been upgraded to this new format, however, we would like to see the “Knowledge Base” page use the same layout. Currently, that area of the site and most articles and content within use the old layout and it is quite shocking, almost like you are on a different website. This deserves some attention to get converted to the newer layout.
LiquidWeb Support Review
Due to almost unbelievable claims of customer support times we found on their website, we decided to test their live chat sales support and ask a question I couldn’t find an answer to on their website.
As you can see, their representative Chris was quick to pick us up in the live chat in just 3 seconds and replied to our actual question with a long response in just 31 seconds. Given time to type his initial response, they are lightning fast to help you.
I normally find things wrong with web hosts’ customer support to knock down from 100, but not with LiquidWeb, they are fully deserving of our 100% score in this department. Impressive. LiquidWeb Heroic Support® is well-deserving of the name, I’ve never seen anything like it!
Customer Support Options Review
LiquidWeb offers 24-hour customer support via live chat, ticket system and by toll-free telephone support. They also offer other amazing features like a fully-developed Knowledge Base and loads of free training videos on cPanel, Fantastico, WHM, FTP and more.
The LiquidWeb Support Claim Review
Why did we decide to test their live chat? Well they make these Heroic Support® claims:
- 30 Minute Help Desk Response Guarantee
- 59 Second Live Chat Response Guarantee
- 59 Second Phone Call Response Guarantee
They guarantee 59 seconds for live chat, but they took just 3 seconds for initial response and just 31 seconds for the actual question response. No matter how you want to measure it, they killed their own guarantee by a mile.
Based the graphic included here, heck yes, not only did they beat their average for September 2014, they destroyed it with our request for help.
Do you have any experience with the LiquidWeb shared hosting service? Leave a detailed review below and let us know.
* Heroic Support® is a registered trademark owned by Liquid Web Inc and used here for the purposes of our T5A.com editorial review only.