Nexcess Is All About the Tech
Nexcess doesn’t have a bunch of fancy WordPress-specific features (like InMotion Hosting’s BoldGrid site builder plugin), instead relying on its server infrastructure and a mostly vanilla WordPress experience. This isn’t a bad thing, as such, just a factor to keep in mind as you make your choices.
All in all, I like the features Nexcess does have.
I signed up for the cheapest plan, called Spark. Nexcess’ Spark plan supports 1 website/domain, 15GB storage, and 2TB bandwidth. This is all pretty reasonable for the price, and more than enough resources to get most websites up and running.
All WordPress plans come with:
- A free CDN – pre-configured on all WordPress and WooCommerce plans
- Unlimited email accounts
- Free SSL certificates
- A caching plugin installed in WordPress automatically
- Automatic image compression and lazy loading – can drastically improve site performance
But those aren’t the most interesting features you’ll get from a Nexcess plan. These are:
It’s Managed Hosting Through and Through
Nexcess takes this part of the service very seriously. Sure, you get the standard (for managed services) automatic plugin and core updates to WordPress, which is great. But you also get a lot of specialized support whenever you need it.
All WordPress plans include an innovative and very handy plugin performance monitor that measures changes in site performance after new plugins have been installed or after your site’s theme has been updated. You can then see the impact of all changes in the Nexcess Performance Monitor, which is built into the WordPress dashboard.
Also, the support team includes a bunch of, as the marketing says, “WordPress Experts.” Go ahead and ask them anything about your WordPress site. If they don’t know how to answer you or fix the problem, then it’s their job to find out.
For people new to running websites, this sort of support is invaluable to learning and growing as a webmaster.*
*An old catch-all term for people who run websites. I love it.
Free Daily Backups
Plenty of hosts don’t offer backups at all unless you pay for them. Others do weekly, or, in some cases, monthly backups. If you’re constantly adding new content to your site, none of those solutions are acceptable.
Nexcess makes daily backups, which are kept for 30 days each. This is huge. This means you’ll never lose more than 24 hours’ worth of content or updates. That can be annoying, but it’s nothing you can’t recover from with a few coffees and some relentlessly happy pop music in the background as you work.
I cannot overstate how amazing it is to have daily backups included. This is one of the biggest reasons to go with Nexcess. Back up everything, all the time, and you will reach nerdvana, my pupils.
Auto-scaling
If your website gets hit with a huge influx of users all at once, more resources will automatically be allocated to your website, for free, for 24 hours. This is great for dealing with things like “the Reddit effect” (which, fun fact, was previously known as “the Digg effect”). Getting a little extra attention on your site won’t cause your site to get suspended or shut down.
However, if the steady stream of traffic continues, and it’s not a DDoS attack, then you’ll probably need to upgrade your plan to handle the extra site users. But hey, if you’re making money from your now-famous site, that works out!
Multiple User Accounts
I think this is an underappreciated feature. You can create multiple user accounts to give other people varying degrees of access to your hosting account. This is just plain fantastic for teams, agencies, and any other situation where you might want to have more than one person working on your website.
I keep wondering why I don’t see this feature with more web hosts. Or if it’s there, why is it so well-hidden?
Honestly, Nexcess has set a new bar for me in terms of simple, obvious features that… you know… why isn’t anyone else doing this?
