Alex’s Guide is reader-supported, and purchases made through our affiliate links help us earn a commission. Read more.
Nexcess Review: Are They The Best Managed Hosting Provider?
Updated on December 4, 2023 – Written By: Shant Alexanian
When it comes to managed WordPress hosting, Nexcess is one of the biggest players in the web hosting sector. It manages over 500,000 websites. But is it the right web hosting provider for your business?
In this Nexcess web hosting review, we’ll explore every nook and cranny of the provider. From pricing to performance, and ease of use to security and customer support, we’ll leave no stone unturned. The good, the bad, and the ugly; you name it, our in-depth review has it covered.
Nexcess is a hosting provider that has an attitude. It’s not your typical company that makes bold claims and advertises how good they are.
In contrast, it spends little money on advertising and focuses its efforts on managed hosting services for popular content management systems like WordPress, Magneto, and WooCommerce. Not only are the services offered by Nexcess reliable, but they’re also powerful. This is to be expected, as Nexcess belongs to the Liquid Web family of brands (A hosting provider known for its high quality.)
Although it’s discreet, the provider does not seem to lack charisma or resilience. After all, it has been in operation for over 2 decades, which is an impressive amount of time considering the competitiveness of this industry. With thousands of satisfied customer reviews, Nexcess seems to be a very promising company.
So, we purchased a hosting plan. In this review, we will mainly be focusing on their managed web hosting services. Let’s get started.
Pros and Cons of Nexcess
Pros
- Huge selection of managed WordPress hosting plans
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- One-click staging sites with all plans
- 99.99% uptime guarantee
- Free SSL and email with all plans
- Daily backups with all plans
Cons
- Higher priced plans
- Storage space is smaller than ideal
- DDoS protection is not included in any plan
- No shared hosting options
Nexcess Hosting Plans and Pricing
Nexcess offers several managed WordPress hosting plans that are reliable but are priced a bit on the higher side compared to other hosting providers. Their plans start at $19.00/mo up to $149.85/mo. Nexcess also provides other services such as Managed WooCommerce, Managed Magento, and cloud services outside of just WordPress hosting.
Hosting type best for:
Managed WordPress hosting brings a lot of benefits to its users. It helps keep their websites running quickly and efficiently by taking over vital maintenance tasks like load balancing, server optimization, and backups – so users can focus more fully on other, creative aspects of their work.
WooCommerce hosting provides an efficient solution for small to large WordPress online stores. It brings in optimal levels of scalability and ensures high-performance quality when it comes to delivering the best user experience.
Managed Magento hosting offers a way for small business to get their eCommerce start applications up and running with minimal effort. Businesses that choose this option are ensured reliable, secure, and efficient performance for their online stores. It is the right choice for businesses ranging in size from small to large, as the managed environment provides the scalability needed to accommodate greater levels of website traffic on a budget.
Flexible cloud hosting is the perfect solution for those requiring top-of-the-line hosting performance. It’s great for hosting websites and projects ranging from small to large scale. Cloud hosting delivers far more scalability, so your data and assets can quickly roll along with global developments and unpredictability.
The prices listed below are on Nexcess Managed WordPress Hosting plans, as it’s the most popular choice among people.
Nexcess has 7 managed WordPress hosting plans that all utilize a cloud infrastructure.
All Nexcess plans come with free SSL certificates, unlimited email accounts, WordPress core updates, and plugin updates, daily backups,1-click staging, Visual compare, Content Delivery Network (CDN), Page Builders, and unlimited professional support.
Even though there are many similarities in the plans below, the main differences between them occur in the number of resources they include:
Plan Features Price
Spark plan can accommodate 1 website with up to 15GB storage and 2TB of bandwidth for $19.00/mo.
Maker plan can accommodate 5 websites with up to 40GB of storage and 3TB of bandwidth for $35.55/mo.
Designer plan can accommodate 10 websites with up to 60GB of storage and 4TB bandwidth for $49.05/mo.
Builder plan can accommodate 25 websites with up to 100GB of storage and 5TB of bandwidth for $67.05/mo.
Producer plan can accommodate 50 websites with up to 300GB of storage and 5TB of bandwidth for $134.55/mo.
Executive plan can accommodate 100 websites with up to 500GB of storage and 10TB of bandwidth for $247.05/mo.
Enterprise plan can accommodate 250 websites with up to 800GB of storage and 10TB of bandwidth for $449.55/mo.
It’s clear, Nexcess selection of plans is mostly geared towards professional users such as developers, agencies, online stores, and enterprises. Although we were happy with the storage amount, we would like to see a bit more
Now we must note that the prices you see above are based on a month-to-month basis. The host also offers an annual billing cycle with 2 months free if you pay one year upfront. However, with Nexcess’s monthly billing plan, you receive 3 months of discounted pricing before the price automatically renews at a much higher cost.
Best bang for your buck:
Are you looking to host just one website? Then, the Spark plan is the perfect choice for you as it offers tremendous value at an affordable cost. For only $19/month, you will get 15GB of storage, 2TB of bandwidth, and a free SSL, as well as a free email.
If you have second thoughts, Nexcess offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. This means that if you cancel your services within this time frame, you will receive a full refund.
What we appreciate most about Nexcess is that they never try to upsell us any products we don’t need, unlike other companies. Additionally, there are no automatic additions made to your shopping cart; something that can be extremely irritating. In contrast, you are the one who decides what items get added to your cart.
Overall, Nexcess pricing is a bit on the higher side. However, you get enterprise-level, fully managed services hosted on cloud infrastructure, and the prices are reasonable considering everything you get.
Hosting Management – Ease of Use
Now, when it comes to ease of use, Nexcess is one of the easier hosts to use. The host has its own custom user interface that also serves as the website management panel. This makes it easier to manage your website and keep track of your progress.
The user interface is very easy to understand and follow. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced webmaster, you’ll have no trouble navigating between the account and hosting management.
Below is a screenshot of Nexcess’s main dashboard:
The Home screen allows you to:
- Manage your billing.
- Customer support.
- Manage SSL certificate.
- DNS access.
- Nexcess knowledge base articles are right in the center.
Compared to other modern interfaces, Nexcess’s Client Portal isn’t the nicest-looking dashboard on the market. But, it is easy and does not require any special skills.
Nexcess control panel
The Nexcess control panel is an addition to the provider’s Client Portal that was mentioned earlier. The only difference is that this is where you can find more advanced management functionalities for your website. You can find the panel by going to the “Plans” tab on the left-side menu of the Home screen.
Just like the user interface, it’s easy to use. Here you’ll find a pre-installed content management system (CMS) of your choice and all the necessary tools to manage it.
Here’s a snapshot of what the control panel looks like:
Although it’s a little crowded, navigation is still simple. No matter what you need for hosting, you’ll find the tools neatly organized and categorized on the left-side menu.
Here is a quick look at some of the things you’ll be able to do with the control panel:
- Analytics – Here, you can monitor your storage and bandwidth utilization, as well as monitor your content delivery network.
- Backups – Here, you can manually create a backup and also manage, restore, or download both automatic and on-demand copies of your live sites, developer, as well as staging sites.
- Email management – Here, you can create and maintain email boxes as well as aliases easily, making email management a breeze.
- Domain – “Domain Options” is where you can effortlessly create pointer domains and modify the master domain.
- SSL– You can use this area to check the status of your SSL and manage which domain it is installed on.
- Staging and development environments – You can find both under the “Staging & Dev tab”. This is like a virtual playground for you to craft, test, and explore different themes, plugins, designs, and more without impacting your live website. After ensuring that everything looks exactly as you want it to, you can launch the staging site live with just one click.
All in all, Nexcess is incredibly user-friendly and functional. It has a simple-to-use dashboard and control panel offering the perfect combination of convenience and capabilities.
Nexcess Performance and Uptime
Nexcess remains a frontrunner in the industry for consistently delivering impeccable performance. When you choose Nexcess, you can trust that it will provide secure and speedy web hosting services. Even on the most economical WordPress shared hosting plan, you can rest assured that their servers are fully capable of handling a good amount of traffic without any hiccups.
To start with, we ran a test to measure the host’s uptime using Uptime Robot:
To ensure optimal performance, we monitored Nexcess for over 85 hours. During this time, Nexcess achieved a perfect uptime score of 100%, with no downtime as can be seen in the screenshot below.
Furthermore, when it comes to response times, Nexcess was nothing less than extraordinary; they achieved a lightning speed of 240ms. The slowest response time recorded was 1.6 seconds for a very short period, as can be seen from the spike at around 11:00 am in the graph above.
All in all, Nexcess is an incredibly dependable platform that guarantees perfect uptime and lightning-fast response times.
Nexcess hosting speed
For this section of our Nexcess review, we conducted a speed test to calculate the loading time of an empty and fully built website. The tool we used for this test was GTmetrix.
To ensure you comprehend the outcomes, here are 3 critical metrics:
- The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – is how long it takes to load the biggest piece of content on a page. It is imperative to remember that Google considers a website’s loading speed when deciding its position on the search results page. For optimal output, ensure that your LCP is below 2.5 seconds.
- Fully Loaded Time – A website’s loading speed is defined by the amount of time it takes to become fully operational. Websites must be aware of prolonged loading times, as we all know users become aggravated and abandon the site if it takes more than four seconds to load. Therefore, swiftness is essential for a successful website.
- Speed Index– For a superior user experience, your page content should be visible to users in 1.3 seconds or less.
To begin with, we tested the load time of an empty WordPress site from three different locations. The hosting plan we chose for the test was the Spark plan. Our US-hosted site achieved the highest, and most favorable, outcomes – with an LCP score of only 168 ms
Unfortunately, Nexcess’s Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) results in India and the UK did not turn out to be as good of an outcome as we had hoped, with the results being 2.1s and 824ms respectively. However, all three servers were still able to load within the 2.5s mark set by Google – a remarkable feat.
As indicated by the screenshot below, Nexcess demonstrated excellent performance on a blank site when tested from a server located in Chicago, IL, USA.
Despite being tested on a U.S. server, the results in the United States were far better than we had expected. The fully loaded time was 450ms; now that’s super fast!
Now, what would happen if we switched the empty site to a fully-built one?
After building up the site, the LCP went up to 1.6 seconds. Now, that’s still lightning-fast. Astonishingly, in only 1.6 seconds our six-page WordPress website was fully loaded with 10 images on the homepage – just take a look at the screenshot below to see for yourself.
The Fully Loaded Time for the website was lightning-quick at 1.6s, far surpassing the suggested maximum load time of 3 seconds.
The screenshot below displays further detailed analytics regarding the completely constructed website.
As illustrated by the screenshot above, Nexcess achieved an extraordinary speed index time of 623ms – that’s less than a second. This impressive performance proves that with a fully-built website, you can achieve outstanding results.
By choosing a server that is geographically close to your target audience, you will maintain good page load speeds. Nexcess has established 8 data centers across the globe, with 4 of them being located in the United States.
In a nutshell, Nexcess is super fast. It exceeded the performance benchmark in both its LCP and Fully Loaded Time metrics.
All in all, Nexcess surpassed my expectations regarding its performance. With its reliable and lightning-fast web hosting, this platform can effortlessly handle an abundance of website visitors with ease.
Security – How Secure is Nexcess?
When it comes to security, Nexcess recognizes the importance of taking extra precautions; not only does it provide all the essential fundamentals, but it also incorporates a range of advanced features.
Here’s a quick look at what you can expect:
- SSL certificates – are a fundamental ingredient in providing security to digital transactions. They help authenticate host systems, create encrypted connections between networks, and build trustworthiness with website visitors. All Nexcess plans come equipped with a complimentary SSL certificate, which can be enabled in just one click from the control panel.
- Backups –All plans feature automated daily backups that are securely stored on remote servers for a period of up to 30 days. Additionally, you can do manual backups of your live or staging sites whenever you’d like.
- iThemes Security Pro plugin – With a security suite integrated into every plan, the plugin provides an array of protective features such as two-factor authentication, passwordless login, and reCAPTCHA protection.
- Additional security features – With fully-managed hosting services, additional security measures come with the plans, such as automatic updates for WordPress core and plugins, which are also included.
To sum it up, Nexcess security is highly sophisticated and reliable – exactly what we’d expect from a managed hosting provider of its cost. Since it lacks the safeguards of DDoS protection and Web Application Firewalls (WAF), unfortunately, it falls short of being one of the most secure hosting options available.
Customer Support – How Good is Nexcess Support?
Nexcess’s customer service agents are always available 24/7 through live chat. If you are located in the USA, Australia, or the UK, phone support is also available 24/7. Moreover, their knowledge base is extensive and covers a variety of hosting-related issues.
For this Nexcess review, we tried the live chat support channel a couple of times and found it to be a reliable method of communication. Live chat is one of Nexcess’s primary channels for customer service. On the whole, the agent joined the chat within a minute to provide support, and the agent had a good attitude.
To top it off, the representatives were well-educated and proficient in hosting and WordPress. We had an issue when we were trying to download a WordPress theme; we kept getting an error message saying this page does not seem to exist.
Within 20 minutes the agent figured out the problem and fixed it. The problem was that the home page of the website was not set up properly for our website. That was something we did wrong from our end that caused the issue.
Though, if you’d rather take a more direct approach, then you should turn to its extensive knowledge base for assistance. They have hundreds of articles available there, providing comprehensive information on all hosting topics. Whether you need help getting started, or have trouble with anything else, Nexcess’s extensive knowledge base has it covered.
Additionally, each article is comprehensive, carefully crafted, and organized systematically. There is no need to worry about difficult terminology or complex terms; even if you’re just starting out, it’s easy to understand the articles.
All in all, Nexcess support has earned the highest praise for its swift and accessible service, highly trained agents, and extensive knowledge base.
Nexcess Review – Final Verdict:
This Nexcess web hosting review demonstrated that the company is highly proficient in its hosting services. Even though the cost may be higher than other hosting services, on the flip side you’ll receive fully managed WordPress hosting services, superb performance, and a plethora of tools to ensure a good hosting experience.
Who would we recommend Nexcess to?
Nexcess is an outstanding choice for those who want to run a WordPress site without any stress. It provides everything you need to have peace of mind that your website is running smoothly and securely, all at an affordable price. You can benefit from the convenience of fully managed hosting services and remarkable performance.
Nexcess Alternatives to Consider
Although Nexcess is an excellent web host, it might not be the optimal choice for your specific requirements and goals. If your budget is tight, there are many reliable managed WordPress hosting solutions that might be the perfect fit for you.
Here are 2 close Nexcess alternatives: WP Engine and SiteGround
WP Engine
WP Engine is a top-tier managed WordPress hosting solution with monthly prices starting at $20.00/mo. WP Engine provides an array of tools to conveniently enhance WordPress performance, tailored specifically for professional users, businesses, and agencies.
SiteGround
SiteGround is a must-mention hosting provider, offering plans tailored for WordPress users with plans starting at just $2.99/mo! This incredibly low price makes it the perfect choice for anyone looking to get their website up and running without breaking the bank.
FAQs About Nexcess Web Hosting Review
What is Nexcess?
Nexcess is a subsidiary of Liquid Web that offers managed hosting services tailored specifically for WordPress and WooCommerce users. Additionally, they provide solutions for those who utilize other platforms like Magento.
Is Nexcess Good?
Yes, Nexcess is a great choice. With its robust security, excellent performance metrics, easy setup, and well-trained support team – you can expect nothing short of excellence.
Is Nexcess a Reliable Web Hosting Provider?
Yes, Nexcess is a dependable host that guarantees 100% uptime. With 8 data centers strategically located for optimal security, performance, and positioning, you can be sure that your business is in safe hands. Nexcess’s data centers not only meet the necessary PCI compliance requirements but are also equipped with extra levels of security and a reliable 24/7 customer service team.
What Types of Web Hosting Does Nexcess Offer?
Nexcess offers WordPress Hosting, Magento Hosting, WooCommerce Hosting, and Cloud Hosting; however, unfortunately, it does not offer Shared Web Hosting.
Is Nexcess Easy to Use?
Yes, Nexcess is easy to use. The host’s user interface/control panel is intuitive, giving you easy access to all the neatly-organized tools for your convenience. With its user-friendly design, the learning curve is practically non-existent.
Does Nexcess Offer a Money-Back Guarantee?
Yes, Nexcess offers a no-hassle 100% money-back guarantee for the first 30 days of your purchase.
What's Better Managed WordPress Hosting or Unmanaged Hosting?
Managed WordPress hosting is the ideal solution for novices and busy entrepreneurs alike. With Managed hosting users have a hassle-free experience, eliminating the need to worry about any technical stuff. With a managed WordPress hosting plan Nexcess also takes care of security threats, as well as program and CMS updates.
How Does Nexcess Match Up to the Competition?
With ease, Nexcess rivals its competition. Despite its higher-than-average pricing, Nexcess compensates with generous features and remarkable performance. On top of that, the provider offers good security tools along with an extremely helpful customer service team.
What Makes Nexcess Stand Out?
Nexcess provides remarkable services that set it apart from other hosting providers; in-house CDN, cloud-based scalable solutions with auto-scaling capabilities, high-quality WordPress and WooCommerce plugins, as well as robust security protocols, and top-tier customer service are all part of the package. Our comprehensive review has uncovered why Nexcess is the ideal solution for your WordPress or Woocommerce projects.
Does Nexcess Have an Uptime Guarantee?
Yes, Nexcess guarantees 100% uptime.
Does Nexcess Handle Site Backups?
Yes, All Nexcess web hosting plans come standard with daily backups, created and stored on a secure remote server for up to 30 days.