Nexcess Hosting Review | Why It is Most Reliable Managed Hosting in 2023?

Today’s household newbies and small businesses want a niche blog for their pets, interests, and children. But do they know where to start? Based on reliable sources, about 25% to 40% of blogs run on WordPress. 

To run a blog or site, you need hosting. Experts and experienced website owners can handle the installation and configuration. It is called “unmanaged WordPress hosting” where most of the things have to be done by you. 

But if you don’t know anything about PHP or plugins or theme errors, what do you do? Don’t worry. For those kinds of people, “Managed WordPress Hosting” comes to the rescue. 

But do all hosting providers give the same kind of support, technical expertise, bandwidth, CPU, and resources? Some will come cheap but are not reliable in speed. Some are costly and additional costs are incurred.

Nexcess is one of a kind of managed WordPress hosting that offers a premium hosting solution that includes updates to WordPress core updates, plugins, PHP workers, developer tools, stencils for rapid site creation, cloud accelerator, and many other benefits along with a secure & reliable web hosting environment. Security and optimization are given paramount importance in their plans. 

In this Nexcess hosting review, we are going to see all the benefits, features, plans, pricing, pros, cons, and speed benchmarks. 

What is Managed WordPress Hosting?

It’s a type of hosting that’s specifically designed for WordPress websites. That means it comes with a lot of features that are designed to make your life easier – like one-click WordPress installs, automatic updates, and enhanced security.

It’s worth noting that there is a wide range of managed WordPress hosts out there. Some offer a more “hands-off” approach than others. In other words, some will take care of more of the technical aspects for you, while others will give you more control.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide which managed WordPress host is right for you. To help you make that decision, we’ve put forward the benefits of Nexcess WordPress hosting.

Nexcess Hosting Review

Nexcess was founded in 2000 and is headquartered in Southfield, Michigan. The company offers a wide range of hosting services, including WooCommerce and Magento hosting. 

• Nexcess also has a managed WordPress hosting platform that’s designed specifically for WordPress sites.

• One of the things that set Nexcess apart from other hosts is its focus on performance. 

• All of their plans come with features that are designed to improve website speed and reliability, including SSD storage, server-level caching, and CDN integration.

• In terms of pricing, Nexcess is on the higher end of the spectrum. 

• Their managed WordPress plans start at $19 per month for the entry-level plan and go up to $499 per month for the top-tier plan. 

However, you do get a lot of bang for your buck with Nexcess. All plans come with unlimited storage and bandwidth, free SSL certificates, daily backups, security monitoring and scanning, and more.

Pros:

• Focus on performance with features like SSD storage and server-level caching

• The managed WordPress platform is optimized for WordPress sites

• Unlimited storage and bandwidth on all plans

• Free SSL certificates are included with all plans

• Daily backups included with all plans

Cons:

• On the more expensive side compared to other hosts

Why Do You Want to Pay for Nexcess Hosting?

There are a lot of hosting reviews on the net. But what makes Nexcess different?

If you see the WordPress.org site, they have recommended DreamHost, SiteGround, and Bluehost. But do they really fare well in speed, reliability, support, email hosting, and configuration?

Before we answer that question, let’s dwell on the speed metrics. One of the common parameters is the time-to-first-byte (TTFB) or the server response time to a user request. 

You can see that many of the hosting services that offer cheap hosting for $2 to $3 per month are not the best for quality. They offer shared hosting plans which have many disadvantages. 

I have used Bluehost hosting for 2 years and DreamHost for 3 years. But they are not as reliable as compared to earlier times. Their support and speed have drastically come down in 2023. In this case study of the Dreamhost speed test, we found that it does not do that good on TTFB and mobile scores. 

On the contrary Nexcess Managed Hosting scores well on both mobile and desktop. The page size is less small as automatic image optimization is done. It also gives a CDN, which makes it quicker for the user to load the page. The number of JS and CSS resources is less compared to other hosts. 

Top 10 Benefits of Using Nexcess Managed Hosting

A WordPress web hosting solution from Nexcess can provide your site with quick page load times, free SSL certificates, automatic plugin updates, automatic image compression, and more. 

PHP workers are also available to handle requests quickly and efficiently. In addition, you’ll have access to premium tools like stencils for rapid site creation and multi-layered caching to help optimize your site further.

1. Quick Page Load Times
2. Free Installation of SSL
3. Bulk Image Optimization on upload
4. No Additional charges
5. PHP Workers at the forefront
6. Premium Security Tools
7. PHP optimization
8. Staging and Production Sync
9. Free Premium Stuff
10. Performance Monitor Plugin
11. 24×7 Quality Support

Nexcess offers a wide range of features and benefits that are perfect for any WordPress site. From daily backups to cutting-edge security, it got you covered. They offer cloud accelerator and image lazy loading to ensure your site is always running at top speed.

1: Fast Server Response Times 

Google has well maintained that your site should load well below 3s for a good user experience. Otherwise, the user will move back to search for another result. 

In this era of short attention spans, you should be able to attract your visitors at first glimpse. If the page is circling and loading forever, search engines put a bad remark on your site. 

Nexcess has liquid web hosting at the back end that uses PaaS to deliver fast performance results. Many blogs have tested the speed of sites on Nexcess Managed WordPress Hosting and found it to be loading well within 2s. 

2: Why Pay for a Paid SSL Certificate, When You get Free?

Most starters and bloggers who are so stubborn about security buy high-quality SSL certificates to have HTTPS on their websites. But is it necessary?

We need to think of the costs incurred in buying a subscription for a costly SSL certificate. If you are using it for an eCommerce site or any payment-related site, then we think it is necessary. What about simple blogs containing information?

No, you just need to have a simple SSL certificate like Let’s Encrypt SSL to make sure you confirm Google’s goals of HTTPS standards. Nexcess provides this for free and installs it on every website with ease. You can always talk to their tech support to get it installed without spending a dime. 

3: Images Take Bulk of Resource Load

When you have done a speed test and checked for resources like images, js, CSS, icons, etc, you see that the majority of it is in images. 

You can easily convert your images to WebP and other formats that are less in size with Nexcess hosting features. PNG and JPG files are bigger in size and offline optimization takes a lot of time. But Nexcess does the magic of doing it on upload. It is automatic image optimization.

You save a lot of bandwidth and page load quickly using Nexcess Managed Hosting plans. 

4: No extra Amount for More Traffic

Some hosts tend to charge extra fees for their email hosting and other features. Also, when your traffic increases, their customer team bombards you to upgrade to their next plan. 

This will incur additional costs without knowing whether it will improve uptime, performance, scalability, and resource load. Once you pay for these new plans, you don’t get back your money.

But Nexcess keeps its promises of providing the necessary infrastructure using Liquid Web hosting. So, in that case, your disk space and bandwidth are assured, and not related to your traffic. No additional cost is incurred to your current plans of Nexcess hosting. 

5: PHP Workers and Autoscaling

These are little background processes on servers that run PHP code. When a user clicks a result in search engines, it makes a request to your site page. Then your server gathers all the resources and provides them to the visitor. 

WordPress sites are written in PHP. A lot of plugins and themes use this code. In addition, you have database requests. PHP workers reduce the amount of un-cached load on your server. Nexcess provides PHP workers with managed hosting plans. 

It is one of the specialties of Nexcess hosting plans that are not found anywhere. Some requests miss the web cache and make a request to the Nginx server. It delegates the requests to PHP workers who process the PHP codes and MySQL requests quickly. 

If traffic increases, you can increase the number of PHP workers on demand in Nexcess plans. 

Recommended Read – Nexcess StoreBuilder Review

6: Nexcess Tools Provide Great Security

Free SSL certificates are inherent to Nexcess plans. You don’t need to buy them. When the free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate is installed, you have HTTPS automatically configured. Otherwise, the Nexcess support team will help you. 

Daily Backups are another great feature of Nexcess security. Some hosts provide weekly or bi-weekly backups for your WordPress sites. It becomes a hindrance when malware hits a site on a specific day. Using daily backup, you can quickly restore the site. Nexcess has the benefit of security in this method. 

Solid Security Pro is a powerful security plugin that adds code to your .htaccess file to prevent access to WordPress default directories and pages. Once your WordPress installation is hacked or corrupted, your site tends to load slowly. 

It protects from WordPress vulnerabilities, hacks, Site scanners, two-factor authentication, and breached password protection are some of its features. It is provided free with Nexcess WordPress hosting plans. 

7: PHP Optimization

As we said before, uncached resources are taken care of by PHP workers of the Nginx server. 

Optimizing PHP code offers faster page loading times compared to other hosts. WordPress can handle more HTTP requests using the same server resources. Storage, memory, and the number of CPUs all add up to the cost of server hosting. 

So, Nginx makes sure that expert developers in their team optimize the PHP code of WordPress themes, plugins, and JS. You can update to the latest PHP version. Using single quotes gives 2x faster performance than double quotes. 

The usage of loops, static methods, and unset variables are some of the PHP optimization techniques. When you subscribe to Nginx Managed Hosting plans, these are automatically taken care of. 

8: Staging and Production Sync

You can have production sites and take them offline when needed. When this feature is available with hosts, you are better at SEO and will lose less ranking. 1-click staging is a standard feature of Nexcess plans, where you can take your online site to offline mode.

There you can make the required changes and see your design changes. Frequent changes to themes and plugins can negatively impact your rankings. So, when your production site is offline, you are safe in the hands of Nginx. 

Then you can automatically sync the staging site to the production site. 

9: Nexcess Speed Performance

Nexcess has invested considerable resources into developing a platform that provides industry-leading speed performance. 

Nexcess WordPress hosting plans use a combination of caching technologies – like our Full-Page Caching (FPC) and Memcached Object Caching (MOC) services – as well as NGINX-based Nexcess Cloud Platform to deliver superior speed performance. 

Nexcess utilizes Google’s PageSpeed Modules (PSM) to further optimize the platform and the performance of the websites hosted on it.

10: Nginx and Apache as Nexcess Servers

Nginx, Apache, and LiteSpeed are the most popular web servers today. All of them are great choices for Nexcess Managed WordPress hosting. But which one is the best for your site?

Nginx is a lightweight server that is known for its high performance and low resource usage. It is a popular choice for high-traffic sites and can handle thousands of concurrent connections without issue.

Apache is the most widely used web server in the world and it powers some of the largest websites on the Internet. It is a versatile service that can be configured to suit a wide variety of needs.

LiteSpeed is a high-performance alternative to Apache that is gaining popularity in the WordPress community. It offers many of the same features as Apache but with better performance.

11: Liquid Web as Back End of Nexcess

Nexcess is a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers top-tier performance, security, and support. It partners with Liquid Web to provide its managed WordPress hosting services.

After the merger with Liquid Web, Nexcess has become the eCommerce front face of the hosting combination. Liquid Web was founded in 1997 and has a lot of subsidiaries around the world. 

Liquid web words on Platform as a Service architecture. They have a lot of Nginx and Apache servers in the cloud which is managed by cloud hosting. You can get enterprise hosting for small business needs.

Dedicated servers, server clusters, VPS, and VMware are some of the technologies that they use. They have HIPAA-compliant hosting. 

They have add-ons for storage, backups, software, email, performance, and security. Managed WordPress sites are available for eCommerce and WooCommerce sites. In a few words, the Liquid Web provides the backbone for Nexcess Managed Hosting plans. 

12: Customer Support of Nexcess team

Nexcess has a team of in-house support experts who are available 24/7/365 to help you with any questions or issues you may have. They offer support via live chat, email, and phone, and are always happy to help.

13: Dashboard of Nexcess WordPress Site

If you are a hosting customer of Nexcess, you have access to the customer portal. The portal is a secure login environment that provides customers with direct access to their Nexcess services and support information.

On the customer portal, you can view your Nexcess invoices, contact our support team, submit new support tickets, change your hosting passwords, and much more. The customer portal is available 24/7, so you can always find the information and support you need — when you need it.

Speed Case Study of Nexcess Managed WordPress Hosting

Some of the blogs on the Internet have done case studies on speed, TTFB, and interaction time of Nexcess Managed Hosting. 

One of wpkube performance tests clearly ranks Nexcess as one major speed hosting. They have chosen the server location as “Michigan”. Then they tested it from 7 different locations around the world. It includes centers like Mumbai, Paris, and Seoul which are far away from the data center. 

In all the tests, the test page was loading well within 3 seconds. For US locations, the site was loading within 1 second. The TTFB times were also between 300 to 600ms. In comparison with the standards, they are well within good limits.

For far-off locations, the first paint and interaction times were quicker. They were between 1.5s to 2s. 

It is enough proof of the speed and performance of Nexcess WordPress hosting. 

Nexcess Managed WordPress Hosting features

There are additional features to each plan. 

• WordPress Core Updates
• WordPress Plugin Updates
• Visual Compare
• 1-Click Staging Site
• Email Included
• Page Builders
• Language Translation
• SEO
• Daily Backup
• Advanced Speed Optimization
• Marketing Tools
• Multi-Site Management
• Free Premium Stuff
• Advanced Security Features
• 365x24x7 Dedicated Support
• 30 Days Refund Policy

The updates feature is useful to prevent logging in frequently and saves a lot of time. In case anything fails, you can always restore the backup. The staging site can be used to make any changes in themes and functionality. Then if everything is right, you can move it to production. 

Most managed hosting does not provide email hosting. They charge a separate fee for that.  But Nexcess provides that with WordPress Managed Hosting and has all the features for custom email creation. SEO tools like Yoast install, make your site traffic boost quickly. 

Hubspot marketing tools can be useful to promote your blog. It brings in public relations to different blog owners and thus produces publicity for your WordPress site. It creates backlinks and thus more domain authority scores are available quickly. Search engines like it and will rank you well. 

If you have many sites, configuring each site can be troublesome. But Nexcess WordPress management makes it easy to keep all sites under one umbrella with Solid Security Pro. 

Nexcess Hosting Products

No matter which business you are in, Nexcess offers a complete hosting solution with blazing-fast speed and graded security.

If you are one who doesn’t require shared hosting and dedicated hosting, Nexcess would be the #1 choice for you.

Nexcess offers managed Hosting services for many popular applications like WordPress, WooCommerce, Craft CMS, ExpressionEngine, Magento, etc.

All the hosting types come with a lot of features and resources that you have ever required to run your business smoothly and efficiently.

Although, you may hesitate to use their service due to its expensive price (compared to other hosts in the market). But one thing I can assure you is that the features and resources you get will be less than the cost that you pay for some premium tools after getting hosting from another host.

Here are some awesome tools that you get for FREE OF COST,

• Premium Theme (Depend on Hosting Types)
• Premium Nexcess CDN with 22 Edge Locations
• Beaver Page Builder Pro
• Solid Security Pro
• Built-in Yoast SEO
• Multi-Site Management with Solid Central
• Marketing Tools Powerd by HubSpot
• Object Cache Pro
• Plugin Performance Monitor

These are the few Premium tools that you will get at no extra charge and it is quite sure that you will not get these resources with another hosting. Sounds good!

So, try Necess Hosting Today

Nexcess Managed WordPress Hosting Plans

Here I am going to highlight only Nexcess Managed WordPress Hosting but you can check other types of hosting plans and pricing as per your business needs.

So, let’s see the Nexcess managed WordPress hosting pricing and plan structure,

Nexcess has a variety of managed WordPress hosting plans to suit the needs of any type of WordPress user, from bloggers and small businesses to agencies and enterprises. We offer four managed WordPress hosting plans: Spark, Maker, Designer, Builder, Producer, Executive, and Enterprise.

1: Nexcess Spark plan

The Nexcess Spark plan is a great choice for small businesses and individual bloggers who need reliable hosting at an affordable price. 

This plan includes all of the features you need to get started, including a free domain name, unlimited storage* and bandwidth*, and a free SSL certificate. You’ll also get access to Nexcess’ easy-to-use control panel and 24/7 customer support.

Pricing for the Spark plan starts at just $19 per month, making it one of the most affordable hosting options on the market. 

Pros

In terms of pros, the Nexcess Spark plan is very affordable and includes all of the features you need to get started with your website. The control panel is also easy to use, and customer support is available 24/7 if you have any questions or need help with anything.

Cons

The only real con of the Nexcess Spark plan is that it’s not suitable for larger websites or businesses that need more than just basic hosting features. If you need unlimited storage space, bandwidth, or emails, you’ll need to upgrade to a more expensive plan.

2: Nexcess Maker plan

The Nexcess maker plan is a great option for those who need a little more power and flexibility than the average user.

This plan provides all of the features of the basic plan, plus unlimited storage space and bandwidth, a free domain name, and a free SSL certificate. Pricing for this plan starts at $79 per month.

There are some pros and cons to consider before signing up for this plan. On the plus side, you’ll get unlimited everything, plus a free domain name and SSL certificate. On the downside, you’ll be paying a bit more per month than you would with the basic plan.

3: Nexcess Designer plan

Nexcess is a hosting company that has been around since 2000. They offer a wide range of hosting plans, but their designer plan is one of their most popular. This plan is designed for people who need a little more than the basics. 

Pricing for this plan starts at $109 per month. There are also some other great features that come with this plan, including a free migration from your old host and a money-back guarantee.

4: Nexcess Builder plan

The Nexcess builder plan is a web hosting solution that offers several features and pricing options. 

The pricing for the Nexcess builder plan starts at $149 per month. 

There are several Nexcess data centers all across the world. It gives you the possibility to choose a server located in North America, Australia, and Europe. 

Nexcess operates eight data centers, which are located in the following cities:

• Southfield, Michigan
• Dearborn, Michigan
• San Jose, California
• Miami, Florida
• South Surrey, United Kingdom
• South West Sussex, United Kingdom
• West Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Apart from that there are three (Producer – $299/Month, Executive – $549/Month, and Enterprise – $999/Month) other Managed Hosting plans available that you can get as per your requirements and budgets.

Note – This pricing is standard and may vary depending on Discount or Offer Availability. However, you can take advantage of these Offers and Discounts to save money while purchasing Nexcess products. You are advised to check their official website for more information related to pricing structure.

FAQs Related to Nexcess Hosting Review

Final Thought on Nexcess Hosting Review

Nexcess Managed WordPress Hosting has all the features of a regular hosting service. In addition, you get some special features like daily backups, Solid Security Pro, autoscaling, customizable technology Slack, etc. These types of features are not available with any other host. 

Nexcess has made it simple for WordPress novices to install, configure, and repair themes, plugins, optimization, and speed using their regular plans. PHP optimization is not available with any other host. It makes the site faster and helps to scale for surges in traffic.

With static asset caching, you can deliver your WordPress resources at high performance. 

With only $9.50/month you can easily get additional benefits compared to cheap hosting. The speed case studies and testimonials from other users clearly show that Nexcess WordPress hosting is one of the best in the industry.