Review: Managed WordPress Hosting by Nexcess

For bloggers, small business owners, or developers choosing a web host is like finding a Mr.Right. It is a tough question to answer: Which hosting provider should I trust with my heart (er, websites)? 

If done right, you will spend a lifetime of happiness with a reliable and high-performing host who is available through, chat, or email to answer your burning late-night questions anytime. Web hosting is an important aspect of your business and is literally the backbone of your business. It is often overlooked in the early stages of setting up an eCommerce business, but a good WordPress hosting can make a lot of difference when things go wrong (and they will). For example, when your website faces a sudden spike in traffic (during peak sales), how quickly your hosting provider can help you scale up, is extremely important. Or if your website is under attack by hackers, does your hosting provider help you to protect or recover your website?

We are going to review Nexcess, a popular hosting provider that offers world-class Managed WordPress Hosting. We’ll discuss what’s being offered, the benefits of signing up, and, most importantly, whether it’s right for you and your website.

Before we get started, let’s understand some basic terms.

There are various different types of WordPress hosting options available such as Shared, VPS, Dedicated, and managed hosting. 

What is managed hosting?

The word managed hosting refers to a plan where the hosting service provider carries out all operational tasks on behalf of the client starting from setting up the hosting service to management and administration. The management service may vary from host to host but there are certain things that every plan comes bundled with. These are OS updates and patching, network infrastructure and hardware management, security measures and customer support.  

The primary responsibility of a managed hosting service provider is to keep the application updated and ensure the smooth running of the website. A formal service level agreement between both the parties guarantees all the services rendered by the host. The agreement covers details about every single thing starting from how the support will be provided (via chat, phone, email), hours of service (typically 24×7), response times,  and whether the hosting provider is liable to pay the client if these SLAs are not met.

The major benefits of a managed hosting plan are that you get a secure and protected website, that is maintained regularly and backed by support from experts. 

What is managed WordPress hosting? 

A WordPress managed hosting is a WordPress specific hosting plan in which all the hosting related tasks and every technical issue of running a WordPress website is taken care of by the hosting service provider.

Unmanaged hosting Vs Managed Hosting 

An unmanaged hosting plan is a basic service that involves server space with the operating system. You will need to manage everything related to hosting your WordPress website i.e. software installation, updates, security, backups, monitor and handle spikes in traffic.  Unmanaged hosting can be very time-consuming and a real pain if you are not an expert on this. Also, why would you want to spend time on all of this, when you can easily get a managed hosting provider to take care of this for you? Your time is better spent on growing your core eCommerce business.

Managed WordPress Hosting by Nexcess: Overview 

Today, we are going to dive into Nexcess’s Managed WordPress hosting service, discussing who they are, what they have to offer, pros and cons of their plans.

The journey of Nexcess began 20 years ago from a small garage in Michigan, US. Today it powers more than 45000 websites and currently has a network of eight data centres in different countries controlled directly from the headquarters in Michigan. In September 2019 it partnered with Liquid Web. Now, it is counted among the top ten managed hosting service providers.

The dedicated team is managed by Carrie Wheeler, the COO and Chris Lema, the VP of product. Carrie has 25 years of experience in IT leadership. Her favourite sectors include hosting, cloud services and telecom. On the other hand, Chris Lema holds the credit of developing the first managed WooCommerce hosting under the banner of Liquid Web. He is also a much sought after public speaker and influencer in the open-source WordPress community.

Nexcess is an all-in-one solution to host your site on the web. It proactively protects your sites from attacks, bots and malware with daily monitoring and a customizable firewall. Nexcess optimizes the site performance and speeds up loading time with its proprietary Cloud Accelerator. Nexcess is rightfully proud of its 99.99% uptime score so far. 

What makes Nexcess the best WordPress hosting? 

Here are some key features of Nexcess’s Managed WordPress hosting plans –

Sign up for a free hosting trial

The most interesting fact about Nexcess is, it offers a 14 days free trial on its “Spark Pack”.  The plan is for beginners. It lets you get familiar with the product without investing any money upfront. If you are a beginner and want a hands-on experience of the features, this is an exciting offer for you. Avail the offer and practically test how it works with your website and whether it meets your requirements.. Besides This initial free trial, Nexcess offers a 30 day- money-back guarantee on all its plans. 

Auto scalability

Auto-scaling helps you to increase your concurrency at the time when you require it. There is no need to upgrade your hosting solution permanently. With Nexcess, auto-scaling is enabled by default on all hosting plans. It monitors your website constantly and automatically adjusts its resources to maintain consistent and predictable performance, at an optimized cost.  This ensures your website doesn’t go down if it faces a sudden increase in traffic. In case you don’t require the auto-scaling feature, you can choose to disable it. 

24/7 customer support 

24/7 dedicated customer support is an absolute must when it comes to hosting because no website can afford the downtime that leads to direct revenue loss. Nexcess offers round-the-clock support too. 

Free SSL certification 

An SSL certificate is a digital document that authenticates a website’s authority and ensures secure transmission of sensitive data. SSL certificates increase your users’ trust. It informs them that your website is secure and safe by validating it in the browser and ensuring the protection of personal data. Setting up an SSL certificate for your website is not as easy as it sounds if you don’t have any technical knowledge. Nexcess helps you with SSL certification along with its hosting services at no additional cost. 

High website speed and performance   

Loading speed is a crucial factor for any website. The success of a website largely depends on its performance. A slow site irritates users causing them to move away and switch to some other site. Nexcess assures a blazing fast speed, due to their robust infrastructure.

Automatic core WordPress updates 

Nexcess automatically updates your website to the latest WordPress version, whenever a new release is rolled out. This feature helps you to keep your website updated with the latest version of WordPress. 

 Free Migration

If you want to move your website from your current hosting provider to Nexcess, but are worried that this may result in downtime or may not be done right & break your website, then you can take advantage of Nexcess’ free migration offer. 

 Email Hosting

Every Nexcess account comes with its own control panel to create an email account for each domain that you want to host with Nexcess. Every hosting plan supports unlimited emails.

 Stencils for site creation

If you have developed a site that you really like and want to re-use the design framework for another site you’re setting up, then you can use Nexcess’ stencil sites. Nexcess allows you to create stencils from existing sites and then use it as a template or baseline to create new replica WordPress sites quickly. 

CDN enabled

The Edge CDN of Nexcess automatically compresses images, CSS and Javascripts without affecting the quality of the files. The advanced caching feature creates a priority list for your files on the basis of how often you access them. The built-in features like Broti compression or HTTP/2 also contribute to improving your website performance. 

Multi-Layered Caching

Nexcess combines its cloud accelerator with an optimized Redis instance for caching applications to improve performance.  

Malware Monitoring

Security is the most important aspect of hosting for any website. Nexcess applies advanced security hardening and offers proactive monitoring for all hosting plans. The bad bots filtering and malware monitoring feature blocks more than 3 million attacks daily. 

Daily Backups

Nexcess has daily backups and instant backups facility. The backups are stored offsite for 30 days. You may restore or download them with just a single click. This feature frees you from the burden of taking backups and lowers the risk of losing your content, in case your website is hacked or you make changes that need to be rolled back. 

One-click staging 

There are times when you want to test your site before going live with major changes. Nexcess allows you to create a test copy of your live production website, so that you get a staging environment for testing your changes before going live, with just a single click. 

Cloud Accelerator 

The Nexcess Cloud Accelerator is an abstraction layer that is on top of the cloud stack, powered by NGINX. NGINX is a high-performance web server that handles static content (MicroCache), to increase capacity and performance phenomenally. Nexcess puts NGINX in front of your application and customizes it for short-lived performance. It assures near instance delivery to the users. You may turn off the cloud accelerator with just a single click on the client portal.         

In-depth resources for help

Nexcess has detailed documentation and tutorials in their large knowledge library, covering topics that can help both beginners and advanced users

What are the plans available? 

Nexcess offers different plans for different hosting platforms and purposes. They have unique plans available with different features for Magneto, WooCommerce, WordPress and Cloud. They also offer you both shared and dedicated hosting. Since for the purpose of this article, our main focus is WordPress hosting, here is a short summary of the plans Nexcess has to offer right now for managed WordPress hosting

Name	Spark	Maker	Designer	Builder	Producer	Executive	Enterprise
Price	$49 /Month Or $190 /YR	$79/ MonthOr $790 /YR	$109/ Month OR$ 1090/ YR	$149/ Month Or $1490 / YR	$299/ Month Or $ 2990 /  YR	$549/ Month Or $ 5490 / YR	$999 /Month  Or $ 9990 / YR
No. of sites	1	5	10	25	50	100	250
Storage	15 GB	40 GB	60 GB	100 GB	300 GB	500 GB	800 GB
Bandwidth	2 TB	3 TB	4 TB	5 TB	5 TB	10 TB	10 TB

What is the most popular plan and Why? 

The most popular plan is the Maker plan, that is perfect for small to medium-sized businesses. For $79 a month, this plan offers 40 GB storage space with 3TB bandwidth for 5 websites, which is adequate for most online businesses with a couple of websites.           

What do customers say about Nexcess? 

Customers’ satisfaction is Nexcess’s goal.  Here is what happy customers say about Nexcess – 

1. “ Real, Responsive, and Reliable…

As an account manager, it is always a pleasure working with Nexcess on client projects! The team at Nexcess is consistently reliable, responsive, and customer success-oriented!”  – Nicole P 

2. “Excellent customer service

Nexcess’ customer service always exceeded my expectations – quick and detailed help with anything I asked about, anytime. I would definitely choose them again whenever I need hosting.” – Meg 

Conclusion 

The hosting industry is a fiercely competitive one, with cut-throat pricing and freebies being offered all around. Considering that, I was impressed with Nexcess and the speed at which it has grown quickly from a small hosting business to a full-fledged hosting company, hosting over 45K websites. That alone tells you a lot about how robust and stable their offering is, which is their main reason for acquiring so many loyal customers in such a short time. 

Go ahead and try them out now with their 14-day free managed WordPress hosting trial.