Nexcess WordPress Hosting Review

Disclaimer: Our reviews are not sponsored, as we used our own money to purchase hosting subscriptions. Our reviews are 100% based on our sole opinions. Reviews contain affiliate marketing links where we get a commission when you purchase or subscribe to that service. Read our Affiliate Marketing Policy here. Also, please verify all product and pricing information directly with the linked brands, as product offerings change often. FastestWP.Website is not responsible for errors or product discrepancies.

We proudly host our website on Rocket.net.

Nexcess claims they have 23 years of hosting experience and host over 500,000 websites along with their sister brands. These are pretty strong numbers, with the top hosting websites hosting 1-2 million websites. Nexcess’s sister brands are Liquid Web and Servers.com, which offer top-tier, dedicated web hosting solutions (and beyond the scope of this review). But for small businesses and bloggers, can Nexcess deliver?

In this review post, we will detail Nexcess’s WordPress services, how they performed on our performance benchmarks and speed tests, and our overall ranking of their web hosting services. Note that Nexcess also offers WooCommerce and Magento hosting plans as well.

Nexcess General Features

Nexcess offers many standard features that we want from a WordPress Hosting Provider. They offer 24/7 support via email, chat, and phone, which we love. Nexcess provides free site transfers, daily backups, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Plus, free SSL certificates and email hosting are included, which some WordPress hosts charge extra for – this saves you money! Overall, we found Nexcess’s standard features to be on the higher-end of WordPress hosting companies, which is excellent.

However, we were confused about Nexcess’s lack of an uptime guarantee. Most WordPress web hosts offer at least a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Nexcess proudly displays that they have a 99.998% uptime, but Nexcess does not explicitly guarantee it. We are less worried about the uptime guarantee itself and more about why a company won’t provide a guarantee.

Either way, we really like Nexcess’s uptime performance, so don’t get us wrong about that. But we are confused as to why Nexcess doesn’t guarantee it when many other WordPress hosts offer an uptime guarantee. The table below shows the uptime guarantees other WordPress hosts offer so you can compare.

Finally, Nexcess is unique because they offer to buy out your current WordPress Hosting contract if you switch to Nexcess. They won’t pay more than $1,000 towards your contract buyout, but this is a cool feature. This is especially useful if you want to take advantage of Nexcess’s performance for your website without having to wait until your current contract terminates.

Nexcess Optimization Features

Nexcess includes most of the standard optimization features you will want in a WordPress hosting company. The biggest deal is that Nexcess upgraded their CDN service to use Cloudflare as of August 2023, which we love. Cloudflare is one of the largest CDNs in the world, and its reputation is very strong. We love that Nexcess includes Cloudflare CDN in all of its plans.

On the other hand, we didn’t realize at first that some optimization features are only part of the upgraded Nexcess Performance Shield. Besides “enterprise-level” DDoS and firewall, the Performance Shield includes image optimization and CSS/Javascript minification. The Medium and Large Performance Shield plans also include full-page “cache reserve” on the CDN.

All Nexcess WordPress plans include image compression via Cloudflare, but optimization only occurs with the Performance Shield plan. You can use plugins to optimize images and minify CSS/Javascript, such as W3 Total Cache or LiteSpeed, so upgrading just for these two features is unnecessary. However, although we upgraded to the Medium Performance Shield plan to test it out, Cloudflare did not provide image optimization.

We contacted Nexcess Support to help solve this problem. However, they could not diagnose the problem before our subscription ran out. We would caution you on upgrading to make sure that your needs are being met while paying for the Nexcess Performance Shield.

Nonetheless, if you are running a high-level WordPress site, especially an eCommerce site, or if you store customer data, you may want to consider upgrading to the Nexcess Performance Shield. Then again, you may want to consider another provider, such as Rocket.net or Kinsta, that includes Cloudflare Enterprise in its plans for free.

As part of its managed WordPress plans, Nexcess offers its Visual Comparison tool to ensure WordPress core and plugin updates don’t break your website. Visual Comparison will take screenshots of some of your pages and compare the before and after updating results. If there is a change, it will notify you so you can investigate. Plus, since Nexcess offers free backups, you can restore a backup if necessary.

Nexcess WordPress Managed Hosting Plans

Nexcess’s managed WordPress hosting plans are based on the resources you consume: storage space, bandwidth, and the number of individual sites you manage. However, performance doesn’t change except for the number of PHP workers, which starts at 10 PHP workers on the lowest plan and scales higher with each plan.

In fact, one of the standout features of Nexcess is the amount of PHP workers it provides, starting from the lowest-tier plan with 10 PHP workers. PHP workers are crucial if you have a busy, intensive website that requires a lot of freshly generated pages, such as an online shop or community forum. 10+ PHP workers on the lowest plans are very high. However, if you don’t have much web traffic or you have a well-visited but relatively static website, you don’t need to worry about PHP workers so much.

We also feel that for the prices and being a top-tier WordPress host, Nexcess provides above-average storage space and bandwidth. If your storage needs are on the mid-to-high side, Nexcess provides a good deal for the amount of storage each plan provides. And with bandwidth measured in terabytes per month, you shouldn’t need to worry about excess bandwidth charges unless you run multiple very popular websites.

Nexcess WordPress Agency Hosting Plans

Nexcess Agency WordPress hosting plans don’t differ from non-Agency hosting plans other than based on resources consumed. As noted above, Nexcess plans scale up based on the number of websites managed, storage space requirements, bandwidth, and the number of PHP workers offered.

Nexcess Performance Tests

As with all of our web hosting reviews, we tested Nexcess using our test WordPress website to see how Nexcess performs in real life. We ran all of these tests using the Spark Managed Hosting plan, which is the cheapest WordPress hosting plan Nexcess offers but our recommended plan for one website. There are three components: Google Core Web Vitals, GTMetrix Performance, and worldwide speed testing. The results are below, and you can read our detailed testing specifications on this page.

Google Core Web Vitals – Lighthouse Scores

Nexcess scored poorly on the Google Core Web Vitals, one of the few hosts scoring less than 80 on overall Performance. However, unlike other poorly-scoring hosts, Nexcess’s problems stem from high LCP times and high FCP times. Furthermore, based on the GTMetrix testing below, Nexcess’s performance suffers across all locations.

The scores above are not the actual Lighthouse values but rather the scores Lighthouse assigns to each metric. We chose to display these scores instead of the actual values to make comparing scores across web host providers easier. Below is the chart showing the actual Lighthouse values for those of you who are more technically minded.

GTMetrix Performance

Nexcess performed okay on our GTMetrix tests. As mentioned above, Nexcess had high FCP times and LCP times. Fully loaded times were not as bad in comparison, but still high. No location fully loaded in less than two seconds, although a few locations fully loaded in less than three seconds, which is our cut-off for top-performing hosts.

We believe this is because Nexcess doesn’t offer full-page caching on the CDN unless you upgrade to the Nexcess Performance Shield. Without full-page caching on the CDN, the CDN still has to call the server to fetch the initial HTML, even if the static assets like images are stored on the CDN. As we mentioned above, we tried upgrading to the Medium Performance Shield plan to improve CDN performance, but we didn’t get the upgraded performance. Thus, we were unable to test the Medium Performance Shield plan with GTMetrix.

On the other hand, only Dubai was a true laggard, with a fully loaded time of over six seconds. Most locations fully loaded in under four seconds, while Johannesburg and Hong Kong took a tad longer than four seconds to load fully. The scores aren’t terrible, but they aren’t great either.

Having said that, Nexcess’s PHP workers will probably shine better on a more complicated website, especially a busy e-commerce website. Our test site isn’t that complicated to need many PHP workers. Thus, if you have a resource-intensive website, Nexcess may be a better solution than other web hosts because of the amount of PHP workers provided.

Worldwide Load Testing

Nexcess advertises its Autoscaling program if your website gets a spike in traffic. Nexcess will automatically increase resources to your website for 24 hours for free each month, which is awesome for viral posts or a surge in traffic from being mentioned by someone famous. After 24 hours, Nexcess charges in 30-minute increments, although there is a $3 minimum charge.

As such, we ran our Global Load Test with Autoscaling turned off and then turned on to see if there was a difference. With Autoscaling turned off, Nexcess did not perform well on the global load testing. Almost all locations failed around 67% of the time and had very high loading times. However, with Autoscaling turned on, Nexcess’s performance failure rate decreased, demonstrating that the increased performance kicked in. The failure rate was 45-47%, which is quite better than the 67% failure rate without Autoscaling.

The first table is without Autoscaling, and the second table is with Autoscaling turned on.

Nexcess Global Load Test Scores *without* Autoscaling

Nexcess Global Load Test Scores *with* Autoscaling

Our Nexcess WordPress Review Recommendation

We like that Nexcess offers many standard features bundled with their WordPress plans. Nexcess includes features such as email hosting, Cloudflare CDN, and 24/7 phone support – compared to only live chat support – which other providers don’t automatically include. Nexcess’s prices are not that high either, making it a great value, especially if you host multiple websites.

On the other hand, Nexcess’s performance wasn’t the best during our testing. While Nexcess’s performance wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t that great either. Performance didn’t really vary between Lighthouse and GTMetrix, and most GTMetrix locations didn’t load that fast. Nexcess also didn’t do well on our global load test, with high failure rates and long loading times. For top-tier performance, you’ll want to look at GoDaddy or Rocket.net, both of which had amazing performance scores.

Having said that, we believe that Nexcess’s performance would be better if you have a resource-intensive website that requires a lot of PHP workers, such as a busy e-commerce website. Nexcess stands out in the number of free PHP workers it provides. Compared to other websites, Nexcess’s performance may be better when loading heavy websites.

Like almost all other hosting providers, the good thing is that Nexcess offers a 30-day money-back guarantee for you to try out Nexcess before committing. Additionally, Nexcess will migrate your website for you, so you don’t have to waste time migrating the website yourself.