Liquid Web vs. Rackspace Managed Hosting

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Liquid Web
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Liquid Web is a fully managed hosting service, boasting VPS hosting on the Storm Platform, and cloud dedicated hosting on the Storm Platform. Liquid Web supports managed WordPress, managed WooCommerce, VMware Private Cloud, as well as HIPAA and PCI compliant hosting, high availability database hosting, and dedicated or server clusters available for a variety of purposes, as well as websites.
$19
per month
Rackspace Managed Hosting
Score 1.0 out of 10
N/A
Rackspace Managed Hosting is cloud computing company Rackspace's managed IT services and IaaS offering. Its infrastructure options include bare metal servers, virtual single-shared servers, and cloud multi-tenant environments.
$23
per month
Pricing
Liquid WebRackspace Managed Hosting
Editions & Modules
Managed WordPress
$19
per month
Managed WooCommerce
$19
per month
VPS
$35
per month
Magenta Cloud
$49
per month
Cloud Dedicated
$149
per month
Private VPS Parent
$149
per month
Dedicated
$169
per month
Cloud Servers
$265
per month
HIPPA
$343
per month
Server Clusters
$743
per month
High Performance
1,127
per month
High Availability
1,448
per month
Database Hosting
1,498
per month
VMware Private Cloud
1,599
per month
Linux
$23.00
per month
Windows
$75.00
per month
Windows + SQL
$128.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Liquid WebRackspace Managed Hosting
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Liquid WebRackspace Managed Hosting
Best Alternatives
Liquid WebRackspace Managed Hosting
Small Businesses
Flywheel
Flywheel
Score 9.9 out of 10
Flywheel
Flywheel
Score 9.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 8.9 out of 10
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
Pantheon
Pantheon
Score 8.6 out of 10
Pantheon
Pantheon
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Liquid WebRackspace Managed Hosting
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(0 ratings)
1.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
2.2
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
1.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Liquid WebRackspace Managed Hosting
Likelihood to Recommend
LiquidWeb is web suited for small and large companies as they offer VPS and dedicated servers, from small to very big servers if you need lot of CPU, RAM or disk.
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I would choose zero, but it's not an option. In my opinion, STAY away from this company. Problems can occur, but responsiveness should occur when problems do. In my experience, I've been on hold for more than 9 hours, waiting for promised callbacks for more than 30 hours, and don't have any hope for a near-term resolution.
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Pros
  • Phone support is somewhat rare, but rapid, knowledgeable, and English-speaking phone support is rarer still. Liquid Web ticks all these boxes and more.
  • Easy staging environments.
  • Partnership with iThemes for complete site management.
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  • Fanatical Support - I can't stress how great their team is. Not only are they knowledgeable, whenever I call in (during the day or in the middle of the night), I never have to wait more than a minute to speak to someone.
  • Webmail, Hosted Exchange, and Office365 Support - As an IT team of one, Rackspace's cloud solution and migration team has really helped me over the years to minimize issues for users, but also provide a reliable and flexible email platform.
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Cons
  • The only con I can think of is Liquid-Web is more expensive, but it is a managed VPS so the price is on par with other similar services. There are some cheaper managed VPS plans out there, but in my experience, those often come with mediocre support and periodic server issues.
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  • Pricing is competitive, but other providers do beat them out with some of their pricing "features".
  • The Cloud Files offering is relatively slow and wasn't usable for us.
  • The automated backup feature that is offered for the Cloud Servers is pretty limited and wasn't usable for us.
  • There are 2-3 different web management panels, with different logins. It's hard to keep track of which one is which, and can be frustrating/confusing when trying to log in to your panel and choosing the wrong one.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
If I wake tomorrow completely incapable of managing a client cloud operation, our dedicated Rackspace Cloud Engineering Team is deployable as literal extension of our business, immediately addressing all needs and requirements without cause of business disruption for our consultancy, and more importantly for the mission-critical ones of our clients. For this reason alone, Rackspace is our choice of choices!
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Usability
No answers on this topic
The company does not put as much focus on usability as other cloud competitors and it is kind of clear. It would be good to take a quarter and gather intense feedback, and then another quarter and focus purely on UI enhancements and backend interoperability
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
In my experience, their support team is massively overworked — taking FOUR DAYS to look at tickets, and a MONTH to fix problems!
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Alternatives Considered
Liquid Web is more professional than all of them. The main reason is the rock solid support which is 24/7 available. Whenever we contact with queries, the solution is guaranteed. There is no need to create support tickets, all the queries gets solved over live chat.
The organization backend is strong. Servers are costly but good.
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Rackspace is a premier IaaS company with vast resources and an excellent reputation for reliability and support. We have used AWS and Rackspace extensively over the last 10 years, while trying other providers for smaller, less mission critical, requirements. Rackspace has been solid throughout that time, experiencing very little unplanned downtime. During their planned maintenance windows, they were incredibly responsive and helpful in coming up with solutions to deal with the scheduled downtime so as to minimize, or eliminate, the downtime experienced by our customers. We originally started working with Rackspace due to a major outage in the AWS platform, which opened our eyes to needing to diversify where our servers are located so as to reduce the risk on a single point of failure with any single provider. Compared to Linode and Digital Ocean, specifically, Rackspace's offering is much more robust. While those other companies do have a good offering, they did not provide cloud servers with enough resources for our needs (MySQL databases with fast solid state disks, and large amounts of memory available). We did host many machines with Joyent for a time, however, they were very focused on the SuSe operating system, which we wanted to move away from due to it's waning community support and relatively esoteric package management system. Ultimately, Amazon and Rackspace were our two providers for hosting our infrastructure, consisting of several (4-10) application servers, database servers (typically 1 MySQL master with multiple slaves for reporting, backups, and failover), and micro-service host machines.
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Return on Investment
  • Positive! Our team voted moving our websites to Liquid Web as a top 3 decision/change made in 2018.
  • Time! We save time managing and maintaining our website thanks to Liquid Web.
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  • We've found it helpful to host our own web sites on their cloud servers, which is a positive.
  • We've also hosted our Nagios instance on a low-end cloud server, which is also a positive.
  • A negative impact is that they've now decided to start charging for their support.
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ScreenShots