LiquidWeb has partnered with Nexcess which is a leader in eCommerce Managed Hosting Services. Focus of this partnership is on offering a more powerful and best-in-class Managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting services. We all know that LiqudWeb is one of the strongest and most popular hosting service providers across the globe.
Coming together, LiquidWeb + Nexcess has launched revised and powerful than ever Managed WordPress and Managed WooCommerce hosting plans for small and medium businesses.
Let’s dive in and know about Nexcess, this Partnership, New Interface, and Enhanced Services.
What is Nexcess?
Nexcess is a premium web hosting provider for eCommerce & CMS platforms. They offer specially catered hosting for platforms like Magento, WooCommerce, WordPress, Drupal, BigCommerce, ExpressionEngine, CraftCMS, ORO CRM, and many more. With the availability of multiple web hosting types, they offer a range of options to choose from to their customers. Each and every hosting task is managed so that you can focus on your work instead of putting your precious time worrying about hosting management.
What is LiquidWeb?
In the entire hosting industry, there are very few truly great hosting companies and LiquidWeb is among those few. At no point it is a cheap hosting option, not by price and not by quality. It is a high-performance hosting service. LiquidWeb comes is currently owned by Madison Dearborn Partners which has its investments in big companies like PayPal, MetroPCS, Nexel, etc.
LiquidWeb has a wide range of web hosting services available for different usage purposes. Let’s have a look at what web hosting services they offer:
- Dedicated Hosting
- VPS Hosting
- Cloud Dedicated
- Private Cloud
- Server Clusters
- Managed WordPress (Improved)
- Managed WooCommerce (Improved)
- Email Hosting
- Cloud Sites
What this Partnership is about?
LiquidWeb partnering with Nexcess is aiming to become a leader in the application hosting space by delivering powerful solutions to Designers, Developers, and SMBs. Nexcess is already a premier hosting provider in eCommerce space for SMBs. So, when two powerful companies like LiquidWeb and Nexcess come together, they combine resources, intelligence, technology, innovation, dedication, will, manpower, capabilities, and what else in making of a stronger product which can benefit the user at its best. So, we’ll be trying out their new managed hosting plans for WooCommerce and WordPress here so that you can get an idea in detail about the new improved products.
Carrie Wheeler will lead this Managed Application Business unit. Carrie is the EVP and General Manager of Managed Applications at LiquidWeb.
How is the New Interface of Improved Managed Hosting?
As soon as you purchase and login to the account, you’ll be able to see that the portal you get now is from Nexcess. The dashboard is very easy to understand and everything is placed well in its place. You have to option of managing support tickets and communications in the first tab, In the second tab you can see all your services in 1 place, In the third tab you can manage all billing settings, and then you have DNS and SSL tabs. So, you’ve got all basic and advanced controls in one place in this portal from Nexcess.
You will be able to see and manage all the domains you have on your service. Our current plan allows 1 site on it so here we’ve 1 only. Each and every website you add in portal will be assigned a temporary URL which can be used for developing the website and making changes to it before going live. You can also see this in picture above, there are two URLs available. Then you have your unique IP address assigned.
Now moving away from this account dashboard to the Site dashboard. You can go to site dashboard by clicking on the 3 dots you see on the right of your domain listing.
Site Dashboard of Nexcess
When a customer chooses managed WP hosting, it is very clear that he/she is looking for an easy solution. Managed Hosting itself means that one doesn’t need to do anything to manage the hosting, it is already managed. So, taking care of the service promises, You are being offered a Site dashboard which is extremely easy to work with. Caching, SSL, Database, Domain, SSH Access, Logs, FTP, etc., everything is given in this easy to manage dashboard. WordPress comes pre-installed with Managed WordPress and WooCommerce (too with Managed WooCommerce) plans. You get 3 plugins pre-installed which are:
- Cache Enabler
- Nexcess Managed Apps Dashboard
- WP Redis
- Akismet Anti-Spam
Performance & Cache
No one can underestimate the importance of Caching when it comes to the performance and optimization of a WordPress website. Caching is still not being used on a large number of websites because people are not aware of it and they end up sacrificing performance of their website. In this Nexcess powered Managed Hosting, Caching and performance of your website has already been taken care of.
Cloud Auto Scaling
Nexcess offers this feature in all their hosting plans, although, in the old Nexcess plans, this costs additionally. In new improved managed hosting plans from LiquidWeb, Cloud Auto Scaling is enabled by default in all accounts without any extra cost. It allows your service to handle more concurrent users. Some of you may be wondering what is the term “concurrent users”? Concurrent users basically mean the number of active users on your website, they may be engaged in clicking on links, moving from one page to another, adding products to cart, or anything else which consumes resources. So, cloud auto-scaling helps in maximizing the capability of handling more concurrent users on your website.
Cloud Accelerator – NGINX Caching
I have good news for you if you are choosing LiquidWeb Managed Hosting Plans powered by Nexcess, you don’t need to pay for any other caching plugin for WordPress. We often pay for premium caching plugins. Here you are already getting static asset caching enabled wit NGINX which helps in improving the performance of your website. Nexcess Cloud is engineered to leverage NGINX which is an open-source high-performance HTTP server. It is fast, powerful, simple, and easy to manage.
Also there are few more features like New Relic Performance Monitoring, Bandwidth Monitoring, and PHP-FPM.
SSH, SFTP, FTP, SSL Access
In the dedicated “Access” tab on the left side of the panel, you will be able to see all the options as shown above. Here you’ll get access to various features like SSH, SSL, SFTP, and FTP. SSH (Secure Shell) is a protocol which offers a secure command line to access server. Using SSH, one can remotely login to the server and run commands making you feel like you are sitting right to the server. In the access tab, you can see SSH access credentials along with your command line. You can either generate a new password with a click using the Nexcess portal. Below to the SSH and SFTP credentials, you can also see FTP and SSL via explicit TLS credentials.
Domains Management (Pointer Domains)
A pointer domain is a domain which redirects visitors to that domain from your master domain. You can simply create a pointer domain in “domains” tab of your Nexcess portal. Click on add pointer domain, select server alias, and you are done.
Environment (WordPress Installation)
In the environment tab, you can see WordPress credentials, PHP version selection, and Redis version information. Environment tab will not be used frequently and it includes very little information. There is not much to talk about the Environment tab. But, you can control automatic updates and select PHP version easily as per the requirements. By clicking on the “App Admin” button, you can directly access wp-admin dashboard.
SSL Management, Logs, and Scheduled Tasks
AutoSSL with Let’s Encrypt comes included with all plans. So, when you add a domain, an SSL certificate will automatically be installed on it. Although, there is an option given by which you can toggle SSL on and off.
Usually, to access logs of websites, you first need to login to file manager and access logs from there. In the Nexcess portal, you are given Logs option by which you can directly access all logs files.
To add cron jobs, you can use the scheduled tasks option given in the site dashboard. Not only creating scheduled tasks, but you can easily switch them on or off using the toggle button given on the left side of each task you schedule.
MySQL Database
Database management is one of the most important function of any hosting panel. You may not use frequently but if you are not a geeky guy, this can trick you. MySQL management in Nexcess panel is quite easy. You can quickly create users and databases in a few clicks using the portal. PhpMyAdmin can easily be accessed through the MySQL tab in the Site Dashboard.
Emails, Stencils, and Backups
All the customers are being offered branded email access with RoundCube. Webmail can be accessed either by Email option in Site Dashboard or you can access it directly by adding /webmail to your domain. New emails can easily be created from the site dashboard and also email aliases can be added through the same.
Stencils are something that you may not be aware of if you are not an existing customer of LiquidWeb. Feature of Stencils is offered by LiquidWeb in their managed WordPress hosting plans. So let me first tell you what is a Stencil in LiquidWeb Managed WordPress Hosting. A stencil is a copy of your website which you can create using the new Nexcess portal by going in the “Stencils” tab. Stencils are used to deploy on other places so that you can create a copy within minutes and deploy it somewhere else. You can learn more about it here.
When you are using WordPress or any other platform, it is always important to take backup of your installation and files (website basically) so that if anything goes wrong, you always have it backed up. Enhanced Managed Hosting plans from LiquidWeb backup your website on daily basis. Although, you can still create backups manually in the Site Dashboard.
Visual Comparison (Because they are committed to Innovation)
I faced issues while updating plugins on my WordPress websites. So many times when we update plugins, we face issues on back-end or front-end. LiquidWeb has the solution to it. You can update plugins in the sandbox, see the visual comparison of changes made by the plugin update. If you see everything is fine then you can apply the updates to the live website. All the changes you make by updating plugins, happens first on the staging website before you apply it to the live website.
Staging & Development Environment
Last but not least, LiquidWeb gives you the ability to create multiple staging and development sites. You spend a lot of money in marketing your website. So, why don’t do all the changes and experiments in the background? The staging and development environment allows you to create a website where you can try all the changes and development practices before making them live.
This was about the new Nexcess portal for LiquidWeb Managed WordPress Hosting and Managed WooCommerce Hosting plans. Honestly speaking, this was one of the most sorted WordPress hosting interfaces I ever been through. Previously I reviewed 10Web, and I really liked and now after reviewing the Nexcess portal, I am liking this. It is really easy to use and provides all the basic and advanced functionalities of your use.
What are the Improved Hosting Plans?
New hosting plans from LiquidWeb are now powered by Nexcess cloud. As said above, Nexcess is a leading Managed Hosting Provider for Applications like WordPress, Magento, Drupal, and many more. With this partnership, you are getting exclusive features like Auto-Scaling, NGINX Caching, Stencils, and many more on the new Nexcess WordPress Platform. So, we’ve already talked about what is this partnership about and how is the new Nexcess Cloud WordPress Portal. Now, let’s check out the hosting plans, their offerings, and price you need to pay.
Managed WordPress Hosting
- Free Website Migration with 0 Downtime.
- 24*7 Expert Support.
- Automatic Plugin Updates.
- Performance Enhancement features for faster website.
- No overage fees, traffic limits, or metered pageviews.
- Worry free automatic plugin updates with visual comparisons.
- Image Optimization plugin included to improve page-speed!
- No Pageview and Traffic Limits.
- Full access to server.
- Staging site.
- Automatic SSL.
- Automatic Daily Backups.
- US Michigan and EU Amsterdam server options.
- 4 different hosting plans starting at just $29.
- 25% for 3 months using introductory offer, Coupon “HOLIDAY19”.
Managed WooCommerce Hosting
- Built to maximize conversion.
- Delivers high performance even under heavy load situations.
- Jilt abandoned cart technology.
- Performance tests for measurements.
- Helpful for both physical and digital product stores.
- 2-10 times faster.
- Complete migration support.
- 1000s Themes & Plugins included.
- 24*7 Expert Support.
- Mobile Optimization.
- Great for SEO.
- US Michigan and EU Netherlands server options.
- 4 different plans, Starting at $249/monthly.
- 25% for 3 months using introductory offer, Coupon “HOLIDAY19”.
I hope that I’ve successfully provided all the information about this LiquidWeb and Nexcess partnership to you. We’ve explained the new interface well in this article, if you still have any question or query regarding it, you can always ask us in the comment section below.
