July 13, 2007
Liquidweb’s Shared Hosting: A Hidden Gem
Liquidweb is fast, user friendly, and reliable. I would be a happy Liquidweb customer today if the basic shared hosting plan allowed customers to host more than three domains. I have not seen a single bad thing said about LW’s service and my experience was entirely positive. My experience showed this host be among the fastest and most reliable. At $14.95/month, service is less expensive than PAIR or MediaTemple, but more than most of the share hosting services out there.
SSH access is available by default, and accounts are very user friendly. You’ll even find friendly, color prompts and color directory listings when you log in for the first time. Scripts run under your username rather than www/nobody and the latest version of Cpanel is the control panel used. As an added bonus, Mailman lists come free with your account.
While the standard LAMP stack is available, Ruby on Rails and Django are not.
Uptime was 99.62% for the three month period ending 4/9/2007. Average page load times during that test period came in at 898ms, a bit slower than PAIR. As you can see from the graphs below, Liquidweb was not as consistent as PAIR, but the spikes were uncommon and not entirely unacceptable. The mySQL instance on my shared host, on the other hand, faster than mySQL on PAIR or MediaTemple by about 20%.
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Liquid Web has been an great hosting service for me. Service effectiveness has been right up there with Rackspace, but without all the overhead. I can call anytime 7×24 and **immediately** be connected to someone smarter than me.
I have run www.e7systems.com and all my customer’s domains there for 5 years without a bad experience.
They have grown from a small outfit to a big concern without making me feel any of their growing pains.
They migh not compete on the low end of shared servers - who would want to? The dedicated host is a bit more expensive than godaddy, but the CPanel host manager are far superior to godaddy’s Plesk.