Nexcess Web Hosting Review | PCMag

Nexcess is the small business branch of the larger Liquid Web hosting service. Whereas the excellent Liquid Web has an enterprise-class focus, Nexcess is a more streamlined, user-friendly, and affordable web host with a WordPress-centric hook. The managed, cloud-based web host offers numerous attractive features, including excellent uptime, flexible data totals, and rich e-commerce plans from Magento and WooCommerce. Nexcess’ power and convenience make it a strong option for anyone who wants to build a powerful website.

(Credit: Nexcess)

Nexcess Pricing and Features

Like Liquid Web, Nexcesss offers an excellent selection of managed hosting packages. This means that Nexcess handles your site’s administrative and support tasks, alleviating the complexity and challenge that comes with managing these systems yourself. As a result, you can focus on developing your business.

Nexcess’ website doesn’t specify whether the company offers shared, VPS, or traditional dedicated hosting. However, a chat with a sales rep cleared the confusion: Nexcess uses a cloud platform built on OpenStack. Each account has a cloud environment with its own dedicated resources, so you needn’t worry about resource-hogging clients affecting your site’s performance.

Nexcess offers eight tiers of reliable, managed WordPress hosting. The entry-level Spark plan ($19 per month) lets you build a single website and includes 2TB of monthly data transfers and 15GB of solid-state drive (SSD) storage. The top-tier Enterprise Plan ($999 per month) lets you create 250 websites and comes with 10TB of monthly data transfers and 800GB of data storage.

In a nice touch, every Nexcess plan safeguards your site from traffic spikes with auto-scaling technology that keeps it up and running. You get 24 hours of auto-scaling per month. The plans also have staging environments where you can tinker with a copy of your website. They’re great places to explore WordPress plug-ins before moving them to your real, live site.

The plans are impressive, but A2 and BlueHost remain our Editors’ Choice winners for WordPress hosting. The former has managed WordPress plans with unlimited websites and storage; the latter has managed WordPress plans with unlimited websites and monthly data transfers.

If you’re looking for cheaper web hosting, check out our recommended shared and WordPress hosting options.

(Credit: Nexcess)

Nexcess E-Commerce Plans

Nexcess offers six fully managed Magento plans for businesses with e-commerce in mind. This open-source e-commerce platform comes preinstalled on your server, and shares many of the WordPress hosting plans’ features. Magento’s tiers start with the XS plan ($62 per month) that gives you 50GB of storage, 1TB of monthly data transfers, and the ability to create 11 websites. The top-tier XXL plan ($904 per month) includes 800GB of storage, 10TB of monthly data transfers, and support for up to 51 websites. 

The web host also offers eight WooCommerce plans for your e-commerce needs. The $19-per-month Starter plan bundles 30GB of storage, 3TB of monthly data transfers, and a single site. The highest tier, Enterprise, packs in 800GB of storage, 10TB of monthly data transfers, and a 30-site capacity for $999 per month.

The only notable feature not included with any of these plans is a domain name. Many web hosts offer free domain registration for a year as part of an introductory package. No such luck with Nexcess. You can still register one with the company for an additional $15 per year (or $20 per year with Whois privacy added). This isn’t a bad rate but many registrars, like Namecheap, offer domain names with Whois privacy for significantly less money. Shop around with other name registrars first before committing to one from Nexcess, unless you prefer the convenience of having all your web host billing coming from a single place.  

(Credit: Nexcess)

How to Build a Nexcess Website

Once you’ve selected and purchased a package, you’re taken to Nexcess’ backend portal. Nexcess has a clean user interface with lots of at-a-glance information about your server. The vital menus are located on a blue tab, and that’s where you’ll find links to Home, Plans, SSL, Support, Billing, and DNS. Your server is under Plans, and clicking this opens an expansive submenu with important commands pertaining to the respective server, such as Performance, Domain Options, SSL, Logs, Scheduled Tasks, and Backups. 

Some web hosts can take up to 48 hours to confirm your payment and activate your site. Fortunately, Nexcess had our account running within minutes. The website setup process was extremely snappy, too; a single button press built out the WordPress environment. We built our test site by keying in prose and adding a few images.

Adding and enabling other features is a cinch, too. For example, creating an email box is as simple as selecting Email from the tab, scrolling to Email Boxes, and selecting Add. Overall, a Nexcess website is wonderfully easy to build, which is a feather in its cap considering Liquid Web’s complex setup process.

(Credit: Nexcess)

Nexcess Performance and Uptime

It’s vitally important that your website has impeccable uptime. If your site goes down, clients cannot find or access it, which is especially troublesome if you’re selling products. We used site-monitoring software to test for website uptime and outages. It pinged our test site every 15 minutes and was set up to alert us if it couldn’t access the site for more than a minute. 

After 14 days of testing, we were pleased to see that our site didn’t go down once. Nexcess is an impressively stable host for building your online business.

Nexcess Security Features

Nexcess’s managed servers come with 30 days of automatic backups, which are kept on remote servers should you ever need to recover precious data. Nexcess also migrates your website for free. Many web hosts offer free site migration, but Nexcess’ management team handles these requests for you, making the process a breeze. All Nexcess plans include a free secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate, too.

Nexcess Customer Support and Money-Back Guarantee

As a managed web hosting service, Nexcess offers 24/7/365 customer support via email, live chat, and phone. Phone support is based in the USA, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Sales chat can be reached at any time via the Nexcess website. Support-specific live chat can only be reached via the Nexcess portal. 

We contacted support at various times (including off-peak hours) to get a feel for the Nexcess team’s response time and knowledge. We asked the sales team about domain registration renewal rates via live chat, and a person responded in about seven minutes with a satisfying answer. We later contacted the support crew via the Nexcess portal about changing our registered email address. Support replied within two minutes, and forwarded our request to billing to make the appropriate changes. This request took about four hours to process. Overall, customer service was satisfactory. They responded to all of our requests appropriately, though we wish they were a bit faster in some instances.

If, for any reason, you have an issue with the service, Nexcess offers a no-hassle, 30-day money-back guarantee. This is an industry-standard trial window that should give any curious user enough time to decide whether or not to stick with the service. That said, it doesn’t hold a candle to DreamHost’s 97-day guarantee for shared hosting plans. 

5 Things You Need to Know About Web Hosting

Should Nexcess Be Your Web Host?

Nexcess condenses the impressive (but expansive) Liquid Web hosting brand to a simpler and significantly more accessible selection of excellent web hosting packages. The focus on e-commerce and WordPress servers streamlines your options, making it much easier to choose a plan that fits your business vision. You don’t get a domain name in the package and will pay more compared with other hosts such as A2 and Bluehost (our top picks for WordPress hosting), but the managed server structures, helpful customer service, staging environments, and auto-scaling technology make maintaining a website an effortless affair.

For more, check out How to Create a Website. If you already have one up and running, consider these 10 Easy But Powerful SEO Tips to Boost Traffic.