Liquid Web VPS Hosting Review: Very Fast

Most hosting services offer two or three types of plan: shared hosting (few or no dedicated resources), Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting where you have dedicated CPU and RAM resources and dedicated hosting where you pay a lot for your own physical box.

Founded in 1997, Liquid Web is taking a slightly different approach, with a collection of hosting solutions that go beyond the basic website. Its roster includes cloud hosting, along with bare metal hosting and GPU server hosting, premium options that have an interesting effect on its basic package – a Virtual Private Server option.

Here, four options are available, ranging quite broadly in price. Does Liquid Web’s VPS provide the reliable, efficient hosting you need for your web project? We’ve tested one of Liquid Web’s Managed VPS plans to find out, evaluating it on a range of factors. These include pricing, support, and available features, and we’ve also evaluated the performance of the hosting package, running server, database, and WordPress benchmarking tests. What we found is performance that rivals the best web hosting plans around.

Liquid Web Managed VPS

The company has a lot of configure-to-order options, but if you’re just looking for a simple managed VPS plan, a total of four VPS Managed VPS plans are availabl. The most basic option is $59/month, while the one we looked at was $99/month, though the prices on these are much lower if you pay for 24 months up front ($14.75 and $24.75 a month in those cases). Note that Liquid Web also offers unmanaged VPS plans, starting from just $5. These are useful if you’re fully equipped to configure your chosen server with your own selection of software, but this is an option that is time-consuming. It’s rare for a vanilla VPS to be selected for a standard website in a market full of managed hosting solutions.

Unsurprisingly, each of the Liquid Web Managed VPS plans increases the basic specification, adding more RAM, storage, and CPU cores as the cost goes up. Our selection, the 4 GB RAM plan (until recently labeled “Advanced”), features 4 virtual CPU cores, 4GB of RAM, and 100GB of SSD storage. A bandwidth limit of 10TB is in place for this plan.

Most hosting companies apply limits to database sizes on VPS plans. Liquid Web has no limits on databases, specifying “The database services do have configuration files that place limits, though these can be freely adjusted.” Beyond this, the only restrictions are physical; as Liquid Web’s support technician put it: “if you have a 32GB VPS, MySQL cannot allocate more resources than what is available.”

The Managed VPS plans are hosted on AMD EPYC-based physical servers. The most interesting thing to note about these packages is that when taken at face value, the only differences are the hardware. No increased features are available for paying more, just additional RAM, storage, and vCPU cores.

Unusually, Windows and Linux server operating systems are available from Liquid Web. We’ve reviewed a Linux-based server, configured with Alma Linux and InterWorx control panel. You can pay extra for more popular control panels such as cPanel.

A dedicated IP address for the VPS is also provided, along with advanced security software and configuration. This includes an integrated firewall and standard DdoS attack prevention. Liquid Web offers a “100% guaranteed power and network uptime” service level agreement (SLA) for routing devices within its network.

For better reliability, signing up to a Liquid Web Managed VPS plan gives you access to Cloudflare CDN, which can improve your website’s speed and reduce the load on your host. When the time comes to upgrade your site’s hardware requirement, Liquid Web offers a scalable upgrade solution, with some downtime.

Data on the server is backed up with Acronis, up to 50GB of storage (which is ideal for the smallest plan, but not so great for the larger ones). The InterWorx centralized hosting management software is also installed, which is useful for managing multiple websites on the same host. Root access is also provided for complete control and management of the server, within reasonable usage limits.

While it’s not as intuitive as the popular cPanel, the InterWorx hosting panel, has all the major services at the top level of the navigation and it’s divided into SiteWorx (website control panel) and NodeWorx (server control panel). SiteWorx puts all the major features you’d want front and center, including domain management, database management, FTP setup, Cron jobs, Email and File Management.

NodeWorx allows you to check on and configure the various servers your system is running, including Apache (for web serving), your SMTP server and your MySQL server.

Database, WordPress and Scripting Performance

We’ve seen that Liquid Web offers a collection of high specification server hardware, but how does this translate into performance? To help you decide whether Liquid Web’s Managed VPS hosting is suitable for you, we’ve designed a series of tests.

This started with installing a copy of WordPress and uploading dummy content. Then, we tested how fast it could insert 87 million rows of data from Tom’s Hardware’s own page view data. The faster the test is completed, the better.

As you can see, these are impressive results, with Liquid Web delivering better performance in this test than any other web host we’ve looked at.

To push the test further, random numerical values were added into each of the 87 million rows. This is another speed test.

Testing the database more directly, the next test focuses on its ability to handle data tasks, with a JOIN command. This is used to bring two tables into the same query – in this case, traffic and data. A query using the SQL SUM command is then run to find page views for each article on different dates.

Here, a faster server response is required.

We employed the popular WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool (WPB) to benchmark the WordPress installation’s performance. This is installed like a standard plugin, and provides 0 to 10 scoring on key benchmarks. Our testing looked at database speed, file system speed, and network performance.

Liquid Web delivered an impressive score of 8.4 for this test, making it the fastest VPS plan we’ve ever tested by a wide margin. This is top-notch performance.

Liquid Web Managed VPS Traffic and Uptime

As per the Liquid Web features, “100% guaranteed power and network uptime” is promised. Making a claim like that leads a customer to expect the host to handle both spikes in traffic and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. To test Liquid Web’s Managed VPS hosting and gauge its ability to handle high traffic, we used an Apache benchmarking test that hits the server with 500 simultaneous requests.

Many web hosting services can’t handle 500 concurrent requests at all and timeout or block them (perhaps due to security software mis-identifying our test as an attack). However, Liquie Web did really well here, falling short of DreamHost VPS but only a few requests per second, which is basically within the margin or error.

We also test our sample site’s load time using Dotcom-Tools’ Website Speed Test, which hits the site (from New York) and gives us the number of seconds it look our sample Wordpress site to load fully, how long it took to first paint and how long it took for a network response.

Here you can see that Liquid Web’s page loaded 0.3 seconds slower than our leader, Hostinger. However, it fared better on time to first paint and network response which are, in some ways, better indicators of overall performance.

One other test was performed. The script timeout challenge is designed to see how long a script can be left running on the server, without any restarts. Based on the results collected from Liquid Web’s Managed VPS plan, unlimited script timeout is in place. Although some competitors time out after a specific period, these are mostly shared hosting plans. Most VPS plans we’ve looked at have unlimited timeout in place

Liquid Web Managed VPS Support

Liquid Web offers a wide selection of support resources. Primarily, a support portal provides a collection of docs covering general help, as well as things like WordPress hosting and using cPanel. Customers get access to dedicated support, with various support packages also available, but prices are available only on request. Telephone and live chat are available, as well as email.

When attempting to find out the database size limit for Liquid Web’s hosting, I attempted to contact their sales team via the “live chat” tool on the website. However, although I was informed that “An agent is on the way,” none arrived.

The quickest response, surprisingly, was via the email support. This was prompt, professional, and knowledgeable.

Bottom Line

Two things are most striking about Liquid Web’s Managed VPS plans: the price, and the performance. By some distance, this is the most expensive mid-range plan we’ve looked at (Hostinger’s VPS is $15.99/month, Hostgator’s $71.99/month, Dreamhost’s $60/month). Though if you are purchasing it, we recommend paying for two years at once which would get you down to a reasonable $24.75 /month for what is normally $99/month.

Liquid Web aces all of our tests and performs, outperforming every other VPS we’ve tested. This includes good results with the WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool, delivering the type of result we’ve come to expect from cloud and shared hosting, where WordPress installation is expected.

While this is a pricey option, everything you need is included in Liquid Web’s price. Unlike a provider like Namecheap, which cuts back the price and the features, you don’t need any enhancements to make the Liquid Web Managed VPS usable – it’s ready to use from the off.

Concerns about communication from the sales team aside, Liquid Web looks like a really strong web host, and its Managed VPS plans should be at the top of your list when planning a new live web project.