Nexcess Web Hosting Review: 4.4/5

What Are the Pros and Cons of Nexcess?

Nexcess’s speciality is managed hosting services. What this means is that rather than purchasing or renting an entire server (like you would for “standard” VPS (virtual private server) or dedicated hosting), Nexcess handles the servers for you. All you need to worry about is your instance of the service you’re purchasing, such as WordPress or WooCommerce.

Nexcess control panel

I found the Nexcess control panel well laid out and simple to navigate. It makes it easy to access your websites’ admin panels to add content or change settings.

This is also where you can turn on email and add some of Nexcess’s more exciting value-added features, including development environments, built-in CDN, and cloud auto-scaling.

Built-in development environments

For an added charge, Nexcess will let you add a development environment to your WordPress, WooCommerce, or Magento site. WordPress and WooCommerce hosting goes one step further and let you add a staging environment as well.

As a web developer and technologist, this stood out to me; it is often an afterthought for most people when starting a new website or service.

When developing a web page, having a separate development (or dev) environment is crucial to test your changes to ensure they have the desired effect. This dev environment lets you do that by acting like a private copy of your website. You could publish your content here and then see what it would look like if it were live.

As a small business owner, this adds a touch of professionalism to your work. It allows you to not only have better control of when a change you make goes live, but lets you have the confidence to know that when your changes do go live, they’ll display and behave exactly as you intended.

Cloud auto-scaling and CDN

Both of these features (cloud auto-scaling and Nexcess’ CDN) provide many similar benefits. Most hosting providers use integration with an external CDN such as CloudFlare, but Nexcess has its own, which automatically turns on when you set up your site. This is a nice touch and a high-value add-on.

Nexcess offers cloud auto-scaling for an additional charge. This will automatically scale up your site on demand, for instance, if you get a sudden influx of traffic. You’re only charged for the time you’re scaled up (billed in 30-minute increments).

These two features can help protect you from sudden traffic spikes and ensure your site is up and available no matter what.

Automatic backups included

Backups are almost always an afterthought. That’s why I was happy to see that daily backups are included with Nexcess’s plans at no extra charge and automatically activated for your sites. Additionally, if you want to do a manual backup, you can do so anytime.

Your backups are easy to access and restore from, and both files and databases are included with each backup.

Easy security and access to credentials

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Nexcess makes securing your administrative accounts for your sites a no-brainer. Nexcess web hosting automatically generates cryptographically secure passwords for your admin accounts and then doubles down on security by automatically changing them for you over time.

You can view your logins from the control panel, and after a certain number of views, you’ll need to regenerate the password. Between this and the automatic rollover, this is one of the most secure ways I’ve ever seen when handling admin credentials for a web service.

Last but not least, Nexcess offers SSL certificates for free, automatically, with Let’s Encrypt. Using an SSL certificate ensures that people accessing your site have their traffic secured and, for e-commerce sites, that they can buy with confidence, knowing that their credentials or information aren’t being stolen by a third party along the way.

Compare Nexcess Alternatives

When selecting alternatives to Nexcess, I only considered hosting providers that offered the same kind of services: managed application hosting, specifically focusing on WordPress, WooCommerce, and/or Magento (which are Nexcess’s flagship products).

A lot of these services offer a deep first-time discount, which makes the comparison less fair in my opinion. The prices below reflect these providers’ true costs rather than an introductory price.

When compiling this list, I was surprised that I couldn’t find many well-reviewed managed Magento hosting providers. If you are interested in Magento hosting, Nexcess is a great option, or you could look for more traditional VPS or shared hosting and install it yourself.

Here’s how Nexcess compares to other major hosting companies that we at Whoishostingthis.com recommend:

How I Rated Nexcess

I test web hosts based on the following factors:

• Plan value: What plans are available, and do they offer a good value?
• Ease of use: Is the dashboard easy to navigate?
• Support: How fast can you get help when needed, and is support genuinely helpful?
• Features: What features does the host offer, and how do they compare to similar competitors?
• Security: Does the host offer SSL certificates, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack protection, backup services, and scans for viruses and malware?
• Speed and uptime: Does the provider offer a fast, stable environment for your website? How does it perform in tests, and what kind of servers does the hosting company use?
• Recent improvements: What has the host done lately to update its technology and services?

Learn more about our review methodology.