Buying web hosting: Comprehensive options with Liquid Web for large enterprises and sister brand Nexcess for SMEs

Last Updated on October 6, 2021 by Rajeev Bagra

Once you decide to start your own blog or a website, you have to take into consideration so many things. First of all, which platform am I going to choose? Will it be open source CMS like WordPress, Netlify, and Joomla or proprietary one like Weebly, Sitecore, and Squarespace. For an ecommerce store, you have open source WooCommerce, Magento Open Source or proprietary Magento Commerce.

If you choose proprietary ones like Weebly or Magento Commerce, often hosting will be provided by them only. So you need not worry about buying a hosting plan as the price includes the hosting as well. Sitecore provides both the option of choosing either their own hosting or launch Sitecore from your hosting space.

Many of us start with the most popular CMS WordPress through wordpress.com which provides a limited version of this open-source tool through their platform. They provide their own hosting. The free version comes with limited functionalities including .wordpress.com as part of your website address making you look amateur. Even the paid hosting plans by WordPress.com that need yearly commitment come with restrictions on which plugins you can deploy. This is not acceptable to many as the same against the spirit of the open-source movement.

It is the WordPress by wordpress.org that provides an open-source WordPress, hosting of which you need to have from a choice of your hosting provider. WordPress which is based on PHP programming language can be hosted on almost any web hosting package, say VPS by Liquid Web. Nexcess has managed WordPress and managed WooCommerce plans. WooCommerce is nothing but WordPress with an additional WooCommerce plugin.

Even if you are using proprietary CMS that provides their own hosting, we still believe owning your own hosting space will help make the best of web technologies. It is usual for businesses to use multiple web platforms with a combination of open source and proprietary software.

The cheapest way to start is shared hosting. The same resource is shared by many. While this may be okay for a small blog or a website with limited pages, not recommended beyond that. Issues such as lack of resources might frequently make your website down, leading to missed opportunities and poor branding.

With over 15 years of experience, 24/7/365 on-site Heroic Support® and 3 wholly-owned data centers, Liquid Web offers fast and reliable VPS, Storm Cloud, Dedicated Server, HIPAA Server within a fully managed environment.

Whether you’re using WordPress, WooCommerce, or Magento, Managed Hosting by Nexcess is one of the best in the industry. They specialize in scalability, security, speed, and support for Digital Commerce, reasons for Liquid Web merging Nexcess with its operation in 2019.

So what we recommend is to go for a dedicated server environment that can be VPS by Liquid Web that will facilitate the launching of all available popular open-source applications through one click using web admin tools like Plesk and cPanel. Or choose managed WordPress hosting, managed WooCommerce hosting, managed Magento hosting by Nexcess.

I should not use shared hosting the way it is used when you buy say 2$ or 3$ per month plans though technically resources are still shared under clustered server environment. These managed hostings come with an optimized server for the specific platform and also include many pro themes and plugins relevant to the platform. So, managed WooCommerce plans by Nexcess come with in-built PDF Invoices & Packing Slips WooCommerce Extension and Stripe Payment Gateway. The server is optimized to handle 500 sales in an hour!

Here is our relevant article: Nexcess of Liquid Web brand for Managed WordPress and WooCommerce Plans with features that justify premium pricing.

VPS by Liquid Web or managed plans by Nexcess?

VPS (Virtual Private Server): Power of a dedicated server and the flexibility of cloud hosting. Ideal solutions if you require the control of a dedicated server but need to keep your monthly costs down. With VPS, you can have WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, and any other open-source applications under one umbrella. Managed plans by Nexcess starts @19$ per month. For small businesses, you may need to take a call if to go for managed WordPress/WooCommerce/Magento hosting by sister brand Nexcess or VPS with introductory pricing of 15$ per month (360$ billed for 2 years).

If you are planning to launch multiple applications, we suggest going for VPS as with one hosting, you can launch WordPress/WooCommerce/Magento and all open source web applications and also custom applications powered by HTML, CSS and programming languages including PHP, Python, C, C++.

Managed WordPress or Managed WooCommerce even when you intend not to have an e-store?

If you intend to launch one WordPress site, I would suggest going for Managed WooCommerce instead of Managed WordPress. WooCommerce is nothing but a WordPress plugin that can be used even for displaying affiliate products, selling your in-house services. With Managed WooCommerce, you get a host of pro addons that can be handy not just for online stores for which WooCommerce is specifically built. This changes for more than one website. WooCommerce is priced 79$ for three sites against five sites for Managed WordPress.

Liquid Web plans for large enterprises

Starting with VPS (Virtual Private Server), Liquid Web has these packages for large enterprises:

Nexcess is focused on managed hosting services for small businesses. Now, even their starter WooCommerce managed plan can process 500 orders per hour. When I use the term small business in the context of Nexcess, this is rather to distinguish from the enterprise-level hosting (Fortune 500 company’s website) provided by Liquid Web to the likes of Eddie Bauer, Home Depot, National Geographic, Porsche, and Symantec. See stories, testimonials, and benefits of hosting with Liquid Web from companies like the Home Depot and Hotwire.