Nexcess Review: The Good & Bad (Honest Thoughts)

Are you thinking about using Nexcess managed WordPress hosting for your WordPress site?

Nexcess is a subsidiary of Liquid Web, a popular host that has made significant inroads into the WordPress space through acquisitions of popular WordPress plugin companies such as iThemes, Restrict Content Pro, The Events Calendar, and others.

While Liquid Web provides a variety of hosting options, its managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting plans are hosted by Nexcess.
In our hands-on Nexcess review, we'll concentrate on regular managed WordPress hosting (which is what we'll be testing for performance). However, we will discuss managed WooCommerce plans briefly because they are an intriguing option for WooCommerce stores.

In general, Nexcess provides excellent value for money in terms of performance and features, but it does have some drawbacks, so make sure it's the right host for you.

At the end of our review, we'll discuss when Nexcess makes sense and when you should use a different host.

Here's everything we'll cover in our Nexcess 2022 review:

Key features

Performance tests

User experience

Support

Pricing

Pros and cons

FAQs

Recommendations

How We Tested Nexcess – We Bought Our Own Account

To ensure the objectivity of our Nexcess review, we purchased our own Nexcess hosting and used it to run our own tests.

Essentially, we want to experience Nexcess as you would and then share that experience with you to help you decide.

We're testing the entry-level Spark managed WordPress hosting plan, which costs less than $20 per month even with month-to-month billing.

⚙️ Nexcess Key Features

To begin our review, let's take a look at the features. We won't go into too much detail because you can find everything in the Nexcess marketing copy, but we think it's important to quickly highlight what you get access to.

Performance features:

• Built-in server-level caching.

• Integrated content delivery network (CDN).

• Built-in image compression.

• Auto-scaling to handle high-traffic situations.

Security and maintenance features:

• WordPress core and plugin updates, including visual comparison testing to automatically catch update problems before they happen on your live site.
• Automatic daily backups and on-demand backups.
• Free iThemes Security Pro access.
• Free SSL certificates.
• One-click staging sites.
• Malware monitoring.

Other features:

• “Stencils” let you quickly create sites with pre-configured settings/themes/plugins.
• Email hosting (but this is not available on the cheapest Spark plan).

Nexcess Managed WooCommerce Hosting Review of Features

If you own a WooCommerce store, Nexcess's separate managed WooCommerce hosting plans provide a plethora of useful features to assist you in growing your business.

First, you gain access to the Nexcess StoreBuilder tool, which attempts to simplify the process of creating a functional WooCommerce store and create a more "Shopify"-like experience.

Second, you get performance features built in, such as:

• WooCommerce-optimized caching
• A custom database table for orders (on the highest-tier plan)
• Elasticsearch

Finally, you'll have access to a massive library of free plugins, themes, and eCommerce tools. The exact list depends on your plan, but the following options are available:

• Astra Pro
• Iconic WP plugins
• Beaver Builder (our review) and Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder
• Jilt email
• Glew reporting
• Dokan Pro

🚀 Nexcess Performance Tests

The speed with which your website loads is critical because it affects your visitors' experiences, SEO, conversion rates, and other factors.

Your website hosting plays an important role in the page load times of your site, especially in high-traffic situations, so choose a host that provides excellent performance.

We set up our own test WordPress site and ran it through two different speed test tools to evaluate Nexcess's performance:

1. WebPageTest - We set it up to run nine different tests and take the median value. This enables us to see metrics like time to first byte (TTFB), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and fully loaded time.

2. Load Focus - WebPageTest measures performance for a single visitor, but your site will most likely have multiple visitors at the same time. This is where Load Focus comes in; it allows us to determine whether Nexcess can maintain its performance in a high-traffic scenario (20 visitors browsing in the same 60-second window).

We set up our test site with a full demo site from the popular Astra theme to create a realistic test environment.

Nexcess performed admirably in both tests. Even though we throttled the connection speed to 20 Mbps download, our test site loaded in under a second in WebPageTest. This is quite good, though it lags behind hosts such as Kinsta and WP Engine:

More impressively, Nexcess performed well in the more difficult Load Focus test, maintaining an excellent 0.435 second average response time (which was even slightly faster than Kinsta):

Overall, Nexcess provides excellent performance at a lower cost than other similarly performing hosts, providing tremendous value.

🤗 Nexcess User Experience

Nexcess provides its own custom dashboard to assist you in managing your WordPress website (s).

The dashboard is well-designed and facilitates access to key features, but it is not the most user-friendly dashboard available. Don't get us wrong: most non-technical WordPress users will have no trouble with this. It simply does not provide the simplified experience and terminology that Bluehost provides.

Furthermore, the dashboard lacks some features found on other hosts, such as an in-browser file manager (you must use FTP) and a redirect manager.

When you first access the Nexcess dashboard, you'll see a basic summary of key billing information and announcements:

To access the actual management dashboards, you need to go to Plans → (Select Plan) → (Select Site).

Site Dashboard

The main individual site dashboard gives you access to all of your site's tools and features; use the sidebar on the left to navigate between them.

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

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

Access – view SSH and SFTP details, along with adding site-wide password protection (useful for development).

Domain Options – manage your site’s associated domains.

Environment – enable/disable automatic plugin or core updates. You can also change the PHP version.

SSL – enable the free SSL certificate with the click of a button.

Logs – view your site/server’s logs.

Scheduled Tasks  – view existing cron jobs and set up your own custom cron jobs.

MySQL – access phpMyAdmin and manage databases/users.

Email – manage email inboxes and access webmail. This only applies to the Spark plan – other plans don’t include email hosting.

Backups – view/manage the automatic daily backups and create your own on-demand backups.

Visual Comparison – view a visual comparison after applying updates to catch issues.

Dev Environments – create a staging site.

Containers – add containers for services like Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, and Solr.

I won’t show you every single area, but let’s take a look at some of the most interesting features…

Backups

Nexcess backs up your site every day, which you can access from the Backups section. When necessary, you can also manually create an on-demand backup and easily restore any backup:

Visual Regression Testing for Plugin Updates

The Visual Comparison tab is a fantastic tool for testing updates. Nexcess will automatically run a visual comparison of your site before/after any plugin updates to flag any issues. If your website looks different after an update, something went wrong.

If something goes wrong, Nexcess will automatically postpone the update and notify you so you can investigate before anything happens on your live site:

Staging Sites

The final area we'll look at is the Dev Environments tab, which allows you to easily set up a development or staging environment:

You can choose whether or not to copy user data when you create a staging environment. There's also an interesting option for anonymizing user data on your staging site, which is useful for membership sites and WooCommerce stores:

Once you've configured your staging environment, you'll have an identical, password-protected clone of your site to work on, including access to a full site dashboard for only that staging site.

📞 Nexcess Support Review

Nexcess provides 24-hour support for all of its plans. Support is available via live chat, email/ticket, and phone, with phone numbers dedicated to the Americas, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

However, not all channels appear to be available around the clock, so you may need to rely on ticket support during non-business hours. For example, when we attempted to initiate a live chat at 8 p.m. EST on Sunday, there were no live chat operators available, leaving only ticket support as an option.

It's a mixed bag when it comes to support quality. Although the support team is friendly and helpful, many other users complain about long response times, and the inability to access 24/7 live chat support can be frustrating if you have an urgent issue.

Overall, the support should be adequate for most users, but those who require immediate response and white-glove service may want to consider Kinsta, Flywheel, or WP Engine. These providers all provide live chat support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and you can usually contact support right away (or at least within 10 minutes or so). Of course, they are slightly more expensive than Nexcess, so you aren't getting a free lunch.

💰 Nexcess Pricing Review

Nexcess has a variety of pricing plans for people of all budgets, starting with the sub-$20 Spark plan we tested and ranging all the way up to enterprise-focused plans that cost nearly $1,000 per month.

All plans allow you to pay monthly or annually to receive two months free (or four months free for your first year).

Nexcess' plans do not include arbitrary visit limits, which are common with many other managed WordPress hosting providers. Instead, your only constraints are:

• The number of websites
• Storage
• Bandwidth

There is also a limit on the maximum number of orders per hour if you use managed WooCommerce hosting.

Nexcess Managed WordPress Hosting Pricing

Nexcess Managed WooCommerce Hosting Pricing

👍👎 Nexcess Pros and Cons

As we near the end of our Nexcess review, let's go over some of the pros and cons...

Pros

• Nexcess offers excellent performance even under scale, as evidenced by stellar results in our tests from both WebPageTest and Load Focus.
• Nexcess’s entry-level Spark plan is cheaper than equivalent plans from hosts like WP Engine or Kinsta.

• You get access to all the managed WordPress hosting features you’d expect such as staging sites and daily backups.
• You get some unique features that most other hosts don’t offer, such as the visual comparison testing when applying updates, which is really convenient.
• There are dedicated managed WooCommerce hosting plans, which is great if you’re running an eCommerce store.
• There are no arbitrary visit limits like many other managed WordPress hosts have – only bandwidth limits.

Cons

• The support isn’t as responsive as you’d get from other hosts like WP Engine, Kinsta, or Flywheel. If you value premium support, you might want to pay a little more for those hosts.
• The dashboard lacks some useful tools like in-browser file manager.
• Nexcess only offers email hosting on its cheapest tier – if you upgrade beyond the Spark plan, you need to find separate email hosting, which is a bit odd.

❓ Nexcess Review 2022 FAQ

Here are a few common questions you might have…

Is Nexcess good?

Nexcess provides exceptional value for money, which is the most important factor in web hosting. However, support isn't as good as it is with other managed WordPress hosts.

What is Nexcess?

Nexcess is a Liquid Web subsidiary that provides managed hosting solutions for WordPress and WooCommerce.

What’s the difference between managed WordPress and managed WooCommerce plans?

The managed WordPress hosting plans are designed for "regular" WordPress sites, whereas the managed WooCommerce hosting plans are designed for eCommerce stores that require WooCommerce-specific performance features and benefits, such as free WooCommerce plugins.

🤔 Should You Use Nexcess WordPress Hosting in 2022 and Beyond?

Now for the most important conclusion of our Nexcess review: should you host your WordPress website with Nexcess?

Actually, the answer is "it depends." So, let's go over some scenarios in which Nexcess is the best choice and in which you might be better off with a different host.

Use Nexcess If…

Overall, Nexcess provides excellent value for money when it comes to managed WordPress hosting because you still get excellent performance and useful managed WordPress features at a lower price than similar providers like WP Engine, Kinsta, or Flywheel.

Nexcess' Load Focus results were on par with those of the other hosts, despite costing roughly two-thirds the price.

You also gain access to tools that not all other hosts provide, such as visual testing for plugin updates. Furthermore, there are no hard visit limits; you are only charged by bandwidth.

However, in comparison to those other hosts, I believe the two trade-offs are as follows:

1. The dashboard experience isn’t as nice.

2. The support isn’t as responsive.

Use Another Host If…

There are a few reasons why you might want to switch web hosts.

The first consideration is pricing. With its level of speed/performance, Nexcess is reasonably priced for a managed WordPress host. However, if you need to host multiple sites (especially multiple low-traffic sites), it can quickly become expensive. Here are some possible alternatives:

• WPX Hosting – good for <3-5 sites and still offers excellent performance (use our WPX Hosting coupon to save).
• InMotion Hosting – good for <6 sites and still offered good performance in our tests.
• DreamHost – a definite downgrade in terms of performance but very affordable and supports unlimited websites. Can be good for low-traffic sites.

Second, there is help. If you value having a highly responsive hosting support team, you may want to consider paying a little more for one of the premium managed WordPress hosting providers, such as Kinsta, WP Engine (our review), or Flywheel (our review). These three hosts provide the same level of performance (if not slightly faster) and have higher support quality. The disadvantage is that they are approximately 50% more expensive and charge you based on visits rather than bandwidth.

Still have any questions about Nexcess or our Nexcess WordPress hosting review? Let us know in the comments!

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