Nexcess : Full Review, Testing, and Presentation (2024)

What is Nexcess?

Nexcess is a subsidiary of Liquid Web, a popular web host that has made a big push into the WordPress space with acquisitions of popular WordPress plugin companies like iThemes, Restrict Content Pro, The Events Calendar, and more.

While Liquid Web offers a variety of different hosting types, Liquid Web uses Nexcess to host its WordPress and WooCommerce managed hosting plans (as well as theMagento managed hosting).

Here we are going to focus mainly on classic managed WordPress hosting (And that's what we're testing for performance). However, we'll also talk a bit about managed WooCommerce plans because it's a really great option for WooCommerce stores.

Generally speaking, Nexcess offers great performance and features for good value for money, but it does have a few drawbacks, so you'll need to make sure it's the right host for you.

Features

To start our review, let's take a quick look at the features. We won't go into detail because you'll find all of this in Nexcess's marketing text, but we think it's useful to quickly present what you have access to.

Performance characteristics :

• Integrated caching at the server level.
• Integrated content delivery network (CDN).
• Built-In Image Compression
• Automatic scaling to manage high-traffic situations.

Safety and maintenance features :

• WordPress core and plugin updates, including visual comparison tests to automatically detect update issues before they occur on your live site.

• Automatic daily backups and backups on demand.
• Free access to iThemes Security Pro.
• Free SSL certificates.
• Transit sites at the click of a button.
• Malicious software monitoring.

Other characteristics :

• “Stencils” allow you to quickly create sites with pre-configured settings/themes/plugins.
• Email hosting (but it's not available on the cheapest Spark plan).

Nexcess Managed WooCommerce Hosting Features

If you have a WooCommerce store, WooCommerce hosting plans managed separately from Nexcess offer a lot of useful features to help you make your store a success.

First, you have access to the Nexcess StoreBuilder tool, which attempts to simplify the process of creating a functional WooCommerce store and create an experience that is more similar to that of Shopify.

Second, you get built-in performance features, including:

• Optimized caching for WooCommerce
• A custom database table for orders (on the highest plane).
• Elasticsearch

Finally, you'll have access to a ton of free e-commerce plugins, themes, and tools. The exact list depends on your plan, but the pool of options includes:

• Astra Pro
• Iconic WP plugins
• Beaver Builder and Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder
• Jilt's email
• Glew Report
• Dokan Pro

Performance tests

The speed at which your website loads is extremely important because it affects the experience of your visitors, your SEO, your conversion rates, etc.

Hosting your website plays a critical role in the load times of your site's pages, especially in high-traffic situations. It is therefore important to choose a hosting provider that offers excellent performance.

To analyze Nexcess's performance, we set up our own WordPress test site and made it work with two different speed test tools:

1. WebPageTest - we set it up to run nine separate tests and take the median value. This allows us to see a variety of metrics such as time to first byte (TTFB), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and full load time.
2. Load Focus - WebPageTest allows us to see performance for a single visitor, but your site will likely have multiple visitors at the same time. That's where Load Focus comes in - it allows us to see if Nexcess can maintain its performance in a high traffic scenario (20 visitors browsing in the same 60-second window).

To create a realistic test environment, we set up our test site with a complete demo site of the famous Astra theme.

Overall, Nexcess performed very well in both tests. In WebPageTest, our test site loaded in under a second, even though we limited the connection speed to 20 Mbps for download. It's pretty good, although a bit behind the likes of hosts like Kinsta and WP Engine:

Even more impressively, Nexcess's performance withstood the tougher Load Focus test, where it maintained an excellent average response time of 0.435 seconds (which was even a tiny bit faster than Kinsta):

Overall, Nexcess offers great performance at a lower price than other hosts with similar performances, which is a safe bet.

User experience

Nexcess offers its own personalized dashboard to help you manage your WordPress website (s).

The dashboard is well-designed and helps you access key features, but it's not the most beginner-friendly dashboard you'll find. Don't get me wrong, most non-technical users of WordPress will have no problems with this dashboard. But it doesn't bring the simplified experience and terminology you'd get with a product like Bluehost.

In addition, the dashboard lacks some features that you'll find with other hosts, such as a file manager built into the browser (you need to use FTP) or a redirection manager.

When you first log into the Nexcess dashboard, you'll get a basic summary of key billing details and announcements:

To access the management dashboards themselves, you need to go to Maps → (Select plan) → (Select site).

Dashboard

The main individual site dashboard gives you access to all the tools and features of your site. You can switch between areas using the sidebar on the left.

The default zone is Performance, which allows you to enable performance features (like auto-scaling, content delivery network, and Nginx acceleration). It also allows you to purge your site's cache and show basic usage statistics:

Here's what you can do in the other areas:

• Access - view details of SSH and SFTP, as well as the addition of site-wide password protection (useful for development).
• Domain options : manage the domains associated with your site.
• Environment - activate/deactivate automatic plugin or kernel updates. You can also change the PHP version.
• SSL - activate the free SSL certificate at the click of a button.
• Logs - display the logs of your site/server.
• Scheduled tasks : view existing automatic tasks and create your own custom automatic tasks.
• MySQL - access phpMyAdmin and manage the databases/users.
• Email - manage email boxes and access webmail. This only applies to the Spark plan - other plans don't include email hosting.
• Backups - view/manage automatic daily backups and create your own backups on demand.
• Visual comparison - show a visual comparison after applying updates to detect issues.
• Development environments - create a transit site.
• Containers - add containers for services like Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, and Solr.

I'm not going to show you all the areas, but let's take a look at some of the more interesting features...

Backups

Nexcess automatically backs up your site every day, which you can access from the zone Backups. You can also manually create a backup on demand when needed and easily restore any backup:

Visual regression testing for plugin updates

The tab Visual comparison is a very useful feature for testing updates. Each time you update a plugin, Nexcess automatically starts a visual comparison of your site before and after to report any problems. If your site looks different after an update, it's a sign that something went wrong..

If something is wrong, Nexcess will automatically delay the update and send you a message so you can investigate before something happens on your live site:

Development environments

The final area we're going to look at is the tab Development environments, which allows you to easily set up a development environment or a transit environment:

When creating a test environment, you can choose whether or not to copy user data.

There is also an interesting option that allows you to anonymize user data on your demo site, which is useful for membership sites and WooCommerce stores:

Once you have set up your test environment, you will have an identical clone of your site, protected by a password, on which you can work, including access to a complete dashboard for this single test site.

Customer Support

Nexcess offers 24/7 support on all of its plans. You can get support via live chat, email/ticket, and phone, with dedicated phone numbers for the Americas, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

However, not all channels seem to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and you may need to use ticket support outside of business hours. For example, we tried to start a live chat at 8pm EST on Sunday and there was no live chat operator available, meaning ticket support was the only option.

When it comes to the quality of support, opinions are divided. The support team itself is friendly and helpful, but lots of other users complain about long response times and not being able to access 24/7 live chat support can be frustrating if you have an urgent problem.

Overall, support should be fine for most users, but people who value instant response and quality support highly could opt for a provider like Kinsta, Flywheel, or WP Engine. These providers all offer 24/7 live chat support, and you can usually get in touch with support instantly (or at least in about 10 minutes). Of course, they also cost a bit more than Nexcess, so you don't get a free meal.

Pricing

Nexcess offers a wide range of pricing plans for people of all budgets, from the under-$20 Spark plan we tested to business plans that cost nearly $1,000 per month.

With all plans, you can either pay monthly or pay annually to get two free months (or four free months for the first year).

Nexcess's plans don't include arbitrary visit limits as is the case with many other managed WordPress hosting providers. Instead, your only limitations are:

• The number of websites
• Storage
• Bandwidth

If you're using managed WooCommerce hosting, there's also a limit to the maximum number of orders per hour.

WordPress hosting

WooCommerce hosting

FAQs

Here are some common questions you might ask yourself...

Is Nexcess good?

Nexcess offers great performance for the price, which is the most important factor in web hosting. However, the support is not as good as that of other managed WordPress hosts.

What is Nexcess?

Nexcess is a subsidiary of Liquid Web that offers managed hosting solutions for WordPress and WooCommerce (as well as forother platforms like Magento).

What is the difference between WordPress and WooCommerce management plans?

Managed WordPress hosting plans are for “regular” WordPress sites, while managed WooCommerce plans are optimized for e-commerce stores with performance features and benefits specific to WooCommerce, such as free WooCommerce plugins.

Final Verdict

Overall, Nexcess offers very good value when it comes to managed WordPress hosting, as you still get great performance and useful managed WordPress features at a price that's a bit cheaper than similar providers like WP Engine, Kinsta, or Flywheel.

The results of Nexcess's Load Focus are at the same level as those of these other hosts, despite a cost equivalent to around two-thirds of their price.

You also have access to useful tools that all other hosts do not offer, such as the visual test for plugin updates (WP Engine is the only hosting provider to offer it and it costs an additional fee.). Also, there's no hard limit on visits - you're only billed based on bandwidth.

However, I would say that the two trade-offs compared to these other hosts are as follows:

1. The dashboard experience is not as pleasant.
2. Support is not as responsive.

For this reason, I think Nexcess is more interesting for experienced users who are comfortable with WordPress sites and who will not be affected by these compromises.