Nexcess review: managed services for worry-free hosting
Our in-house experts conduct internal independent, hands-on testing and transparent reviews of web hosting providers by using custom-built tools or utilizing industry-recognized tools and methods to ensure impartial and evidence-based assessments.
Using the same criteria for all services, we share our detailed methodologies and practices to help customers make informed hosting decisions.
Learn more
Nexcess is a hosting company that helps you run websites built with WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento. This provider is part of the well-known Liquid Web family, which is known for fast and reliable hosting. Nexcess focuses on managed hosting, which means it takes care of the technical stuff: updates, speed, and security, so you don’t have to do any of that yourself.
To see how good Nexcess is, I tested it with our research team. In this review, I share my honest thoughts about Nexcess pricing, performance, support, and features. Read on and find out what I liked and didn’t like about Nexcess and whether it’s worth your money.
Nexcess review: my verdict
✅ Choose Nexcess if you want a stress-free hosting experience where updates, speed, and backups are managed for you. From my experience, everything worked smoothly and even under traffic spikes, my site stayed fast and stable.
❌ Avoid Nexcess if you're on a budget. It's more expensive than many other hosts and doesn't include a free domain. Hostinger and IONOS are much more affordable, and both offer free domains with their plans.
| Hostinger | Nexcess | |
| ⭐ Rating: | ||
| 💵 Price: | From $2.69/month | From $4.16/month |
| 📑 Uptime guarantee: | 99.9% | 100% |
| 🔥 Coupons: | Hostinger coupon 81% OFF | Cybernews Web Hosting Coupons |
| Storage space (from): | 20GB SSD | 15GB |
| ✂️ Free domain (first year): | Yes | No |
| 🔒 Free SSL certificate: | Yes | Yes |
| ➡️ Site migration: | Free unlimited migrations for WordPress and open-source sites | Free automated migration by an in-house specialist |
| 💾 Automated backups: | Free (weekly) | Yes (daily) |
| 📧 Email accounts: | Free (first year) | Unlimited |
| 👨💻 24/7 live support: | Yes | - |
| 💰 Money-back guarantee: | 30-day | 30-day |
Our in-house research team and expert writers work hand in hand to regularly test hosting services and provide accurate and fact-checked information. Discover the ins and outs of how we test and evaluate website hosting providers.
Pros and cons of Nexcess
Nexcess hosting plans and pricing
Nexcess is a premium managed hosting provider offering various services, including WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, and cloud hosting. Its most affordable WordPress plan starts at $4.16/month if you pay for the whole year upfront. With this plan, you'll get a WordPress website with 8GB storage and 1TB bandwidth.
Magento and cloud hosting plans come at a higher price but include more advanced features and greater scalability to support larger or more complex websites. Take a look at the table below to see the pricing yourself.
| Type of hosting | Starting price |
| WordPress hosting | From $4.16/month (if you commit for 12 months or longer) |
| Magento | From $37.52/month (monthly commitment) |
| WooCommerce | From $4.16/month (for a 24-month term or longer) |
| Cloud hosting | From $37.52/month (monthly commitment) |
When it comes to renewals, with Nexcess, there are no tricky intro deals or surprise price hikes. The price you pay when you sign up is the same when it’s time to renew. This kind of honest, upfront pricing makes it much easier to plan your budget long-term.
Additionally, Nexcess offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on all hosting plans. That means you can treat it like a risk-free trial – test out their service, and if it’s not the right fit, you can cancel within the first month and get your money back.
To sum it up, Nexcess isn’t the cheapest host out there – it’s more expensive than other premium options like Hostinger or IONOS. But it's a strong choice if you care about having a smooth experience, fast website speeds, and reliable service.
Hosting management – is Nexcess easy to use?
When it comes to ease of use, Nexcess is pretty straightforward. The host comes forward with its own native user interface, which also serves as the website management panel.
When I tested Nexcess, I found its user interface intuitive and well-structured. Beginners and experienced webmasters alike will have no trouble navigating between the account and hosting management.
This is what the main Nexcess dashboard screen looks like:
From the Home screen, you can:
- Manage your billing.
- Access your website’s management via Plans.
- Access DNS to connect domain names.
- Reach support for assistance.
- Find knowledge base articles, which are right smack in the center.
The dashboard – or Client Portal, as Nexcess calls it – isn’t exactly the sleekest candidate in the market, especially compared to other modern interfaces. But, it’s straightforward and does not require any extensive skills.
Nexcess control panel
Nexcess control panel is basically an extension of the provider’s Client Portal. The only difference is that this is where you can find more advanced functionalities for your website’s management. Here I could access the panel by clicking on “Plans” in the left side menu on the Home screen.
Just like the user interface, I found it very intuitive and user-friendly. Here you’ll find a pre-installed content management system (CMS) of your choice and all the necessary tools to manage it.
Here’s what the control panel looks like:
It’s a little packed but still very easy to navigate. In any case, all the necessary tools that you need for hosting are neatly organized and categorized on the left-side menu.
Here are some of the highlights of what you’ll need the control panel for:
- Performance metrics – found under Performance. Here you can track your storage and bandwidth usage, as well as clear your cache and manage your CDN.
- Domain Options is where you can configure domain settings easily. This includes things like creating pointer domains and modifying the master domain.
- SSL – this is where you go for all things SSL-related. For instance, check your SSL’s status and manage which domain it is installed on.
- Email management – for this, you’ll need to head to “Email”. Here you’ll be able to create and manage email boxes as well as email aliases.
- Staging and development environments – you can find both under Environment. This is essentially a sandbox where you can develop, test, and experiment with things like themes, plugins, layouts, and more, without affecting your live site. Once satisfied, you can easily push the staging site live with just one click.
- Backups – this is where you can manually create a backup as well as manage, restore, and download both automatic and on-demand backups of your live, developer, and staging sites.
To sum it up, Nexcess is very intuitive to use. It comes with a native dashboard/control panel that is both user-friendly and functional.
Performance – is Nexcess fast?
Continuing with its winning streak so far, Nexcess nailed it performance-wise too. During my tests, the provider was both reliable and fast. Plus, its servers seamlessly handled intense traffic without flinching.
Let’s examine Nexcess performance results more closely.
Nexcess uptime and response time
The first test is to check the host’s reliability and server response time.
For that, I monitored Nexcess for over 2 months. This time, the provider had 5 outages or 9 minutes of downtime. This together has resulted in a near-perfect uptime of 99.99%.
While the provider does issue an official 100% uptime guarantee, this does not cover unforeseen circumstances or mandatory server maintenance. So 99.99% uptime is a very good result.
Additionally, Nexcess did quite well for its average response time too. The response time initially lingered around the very speedy 300ms mark but climbed up to over 1s during one of the outages before improving.
Nevertheless, it averaged at 479ms, which is a very good result that falls right under the market’s average of 600ms.
Overall, Nexcess reliability is undeniable with its near-perfect uptime and a very speedy response time.
Nexcess website speed
Next up for this review of Nexcess hosting, I also tested the provider’s load times for an empty site and a fully-built one.
Before we get to the nitty-gritty, there are 2 important metrics to know:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – this is the time it takes to load the largest chunk of content on the page. Google takes this measure into account when ranking sites on its search result page. For best results, it should be under 2.5 seconds.
- Fully loaded time – the time it takes to fully load all elements on the site. For the best user experience and minimal bounce rates, aim for a time under 3 seconds.
With the above in mind, I tested an empty WordPress site from 3 different locations first: San Antonio (USA), London (United Kingdom), and Mumbai (India).
Since the site is hosted in the US, it’s no surprise the LCP here is the lowest – just 705ms. While other locations did have slightly increased LCPs, neither have surpassed the undesired mark of 2.5s.
Now, if you cater to international audiences, you might want to reduce the latency by opting for a server location that is closest to your audience. For that, Nexcess has 8 data centers in the US, Europe, and Australia.
Next, I tested the fully-built WordPress site, and this time the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) was impressively fast – just 846ms. That’s well below Google’s recommended threshold of 2.5 seconds.
Since this is a fully built site we’re talking about, fully loaded time is another measure to look at. And just like LCP, it did not disappoint. Nexcess demonstrated a very speedy fully loaded time of just 954ms.
In short, Nexcess website speed gets two thumbs up from me. It loads quickly, and the provider has data centers around the world to cater to your needs.
Nexcess stress testing
The last test for this Nexcess review is to see how well the provider can handle traffic surges on the site.
The ideal result here would be for the blue line (speed) to remain as stable and as flat as possible even when the gray line (number of visitors) goes up. The red line (failures) should also be non-existent.
To start the ball rolling, I sent 50 virtual users to my site. Now, that doesn’t sound like much but 50VUs every minute each day would equal around 50,000 monthly visitors. It’s a massive load on the server that could significantly slow it down or overwhelm it completely.
But, Nexcess handled the full 50VUs well.
Its speed (blue line) remained constant and extremely stable. Plus, there were no signs of failures (red line). This suggests that the hosts could withstand even more intense traffic with no problem whatsoever.
Overall, you can be assured that Nexcess will easily support big spikes in traffic.
All things considered, Nexcess demonstrated incredible performance on all fronts. It has excellent uptime, average response time, and loading time. Plus, it handled intense traffic without breaking a sweat.
Security – is Nexcess secure?
When it comes to security, Nexcess takes it very seriously. It covers all the necessary basic features and doesn’t skimp on the more advanced ones, either.
Here’s what you can expect:
- SSL certificates – this tool encrypts data from and to your server. This way, it creates a secure data transmission between your site and the user. All Nexcess plans include a free SSL certificate, which you can enable with a click on the control panel. The host also offers paid upgrades like EV and Wildcard SSL certificates.
- DDoS protection – Nexcess recently stepped up its security game by adding built-in DDoS protection. This helps keep your website safe from malicious attacks that try to overwhelm it with traffic and take it offline.
- Backups – All plans come with automated daily backups, which are stored on off-site servers for up to 30 days. You can also manually create a backup of your live or staging sites whenever you see fit.
- iThemes Security Pro plugin – a security suite included in all plans, the plugin offers various security features like two-factor authentication, passwordless login, reCAPTCHA, and geolocation.
- Malware Monitoring – Nexcess claims that running malware scans and constantly monitoring your site’s wellbeing is its standard practice. Alas, that’s an internal measure that you can’t see in action or have control over. So, you’ll just have to take the provider’s word for it.
- Other security features – basic measures such as automatic updates for WordPress core and plugins are also included as a part of fully-managed services.
All in all, Nexcess security is pretty robust, as you’d expect from a managed provider at this price point.
Customer support – will Nexcess support help me?
Nexcess customer service representatives are available 24/7 via live chat. If you’re in the US, Australia, or the UK, the Nexcess support team is also always available via phone calls. Additionally, the provider has a massive knowledge base covering a myriad of hosting-related topics.
Live chat is Nexcess’ main support channel, and it’s also the option that I tried multiple times for this Nexcess review. Generally speaking, the agents were quick to join the chats within seconds to offer assistance and were very friendly.
Even better, the agents appeared to be well-trained and knowledgeable when it comes to hosting and WordPress. I had an issue with logging in into my WordPress admin panel.
Within minutes, the support agent figured out it was a DNS issue and offered to fix it. The conversation took less than 10 minutes, and the problem was solved.
However, if you prefer a more hands-on approach, you want to head straight for its broad knowledge base. This is where you’ll find hundreds of articles covering all-things hosting. Whether you need help getting started, have trouble with Nexcess login, or even writing a Nexcess SSL review, there’s an article in there for you.
Moreover, the articles are very detailed, well-written, and strategically structured. There are no jargons or complex terms to complicate things – making them a good starting point for beginners, too.
Overall, Nexcess support deserves an A+ with its fast and accessible service, efficient agents, and helpful knowledge base.
Nexcess review – the final verdict
As a whole, this Nexcess hosting review proved that the provider is very much experienced in what it does. While the price is not the lowest, you do get fully managed services, great performance, and many tools for a simplistic hosting experience.
| Feature | Premium managed hosting solution | |
| Pricing | Nexcess is slightly more premium, with its cheapest managed WordPress plan starting at $4.16/mo. | |
| Ease of use | The provider’s native user interface/ control panel is straightforward, functional, and very easy to use. | |
| Performance | Nexcess is very reliable with a 99.99% uptime, extremely fast, and has no trouble handling intense traffic. | |
| Security | Nexcess includes plenty of basic and premium features like an SSL, automated backups, iThemes Security Pro plugin, and malware scans. | |
| Support | Nexcess delivers swift and knowledgeable customer support 24/7 via live chat. If you reside in the US, the UK, or Australia, you can also contact it by phone. |
Nexcess FAQs
Is Nexcess good?
Yes, Nexcess is good. You can expect simplicity, good performance, robust security, and a well-trained support team.
Is managed WordPress hosting better than unmanaged?
Managed WordPress hosting is better for beginners or busy business owners. With managed hosting services, the user has fewer things to worry about. Nexcess agents take care of security threats, as well as program and CMS updates.
How does Nexcess match up to the competition?
Nexcess matches up to the competition with absolutely no problem. While Nexcess pricing is higher than other average providers, the provider justified it with generous features, incredible performance, good security tools, and a helpful customer support team.
What WordPress-oriented tools does Nexcess have?
Nexcess has many WordPress-oriented tools. This includes automatic WordPress plugin and core updates, visual regression testing, one-click staging sites, and WordPress experts, among other things.
Does Nexcess have an uptime guarantee?
Yes, Nexcess has a 100% uptime guarantee.
Is Nexcess easy to use?
Yes, Nexcess is easy to use. The host’s native user interface/control panel is intuitive, with all tools easily accessible and neatly organized. There’s virtually no learning curve as everything is as straightforward as it gets.
