Nexcess Magento Hosting: Pros & Cons [2020 Reviews]
You may never hear about Nexcess if you do not search for Magento hosting provider, however, in fact, they have been in hosting industry for 20 years. Unlike other hosting providers, Nexcess is only dedicated to Magento hosting. Nexcess is a reputed hosting brand that is serving more than 45.000 websites from small to large-sized.
In this article, we will go through every aspect of Nexcess, from pricing and support to hosting features and performance. You have all the answers you’re looking for about Nexcess here.
About Nexcess
Nexcess was founded in early 2001 in a small garage, and now they have become on of the most trusted provider for hosting Magento and Magento 2 website. Nexcess is different with other providers, they have in-house certified Magento developers working as support staff.
Instead of Directadmin or Cpanel, Nexcess use Siteworx as their hosting control panel. Siteworx is much lighter than Cpanel or Directadmin but it’s still fully functioned. With Siteworx, you can get SSH access detail, create and manage databases, manage file, FTP … and every common hosting features.
Pricing and features
Nexcess offers affordable hosting plans for Magento 2 with a lot of optimization dedicated to Magento 2. There’re 5 hosting plans available:
- SIP 100: $19.95/month, up to 100 daily visitors. 7.5 GB storage space, 75GB/month bandwidth and hosted on 24GB ram server
- SIP 200: $74.95/month, up to 500 daily visitors. 25 GB storage space, 125GB/month bandwidth and hosted on 24GB ram server
- SIP 300: $189.95/month, up to 1000 daily visitors. 55 GB storage space, 250GB/month bandwidth and hosted on 24GB ram server
- SIP 400 (dedicated server, not shared hosting): $539.95/month, up to 5000 daily visitors. 7.5 GB storage space, 650GB/month bandwidth and hosted on 24GB ram server
- SIP 500 (dedicated server, not shared hosting): $674.95/month, up to 10000 daily visitors. 7.5 GB storage space, 1000B/month bandwidth and hosted on 24GB ram server
There’s a metric that we should be noticed: daily visitors number. Nexcess indicates that each hosting plan can serve a specific number of daily visitors. However, as I tested on many Necess acounts, the real number is much more higher. I tested a store on SIP 100 plan and even when the number of daily visitor reaches 250, my client’s website still performs well.
As a Magento 2 dedicated hosting solution provider, Nexcess has done a lot of optimizations for Magento 2.
- Hosting running on Centos 7 server with latest release.
- PHP and PHP-fpm optimizations with many runtimes variables
- PHP Opcache as PHP caching extension
- Percona Server instead of the standard version of MySQL for database management
- Session caching, full-page cache
- Varnish as HTTP reserve proxy
- While other hosting providers off PCI Compliance for their most expensive plan only, Nexcess offer PCI Compliance for every hosting plans. PCI (The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is a set of security standards that is required if you accept, process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment.
Nexcess also offer free website Migration, you will have Magento developer transfer your Magento 2 store from old hosting to Nexcess for FREE.
Hosting performance for Magento 2 website
How about the real performance of Magento 2 website on Nexcess versus others provider? We measure every metric carefully through many tests, and here are results:
Server Load and Stress
This test indicates how Magento 2 website hosted on Nexcess handles an increasing number of visitors in a specific period.
At first, there was a spike that makes load time jumped over 800ms. This happens because in the early stage, Nexcess’s caching systems starts to build cache to store static files.
After this stage, load time remains stable at 700ms till the number of visitors peaked at 100. This is a good loadtime number for Magento 2, Nexcess archives this because they have done a lot of optimizations for Magento 2.
Latency test
We tested with US server and latency is stable with no Loss packet. The gap between Min and Max response time is very small.
Nexcess has a lower response time in different countries compared with other Magento 2 hosting providers
Load speed
With default Magento 2 – Luma theme installed, Nexcess score 82 performance Grade and loadtime was 754ms for 162 requests. Nexcess achieves this high grade because of their caching solution.
With more products and modules/theme installed, you will need to optimize a lot to maintain this grade.
Uptime
One of the key factors for a successful eCommerce website is uptime, with every downtime moment, you may lose customers forever. We use uptimerobot.com to monitor uptime/downtime of a website running on Nexcess and results are shown below.
Base on the results, we can insist that Nexcess is very solid and stable. During 3475 hours, there’s no single downtime moment.
Customer service & Support
We do 2 things to review a hosting provider’s customer service and support.
- First, we record the process of solving customer issue with our project running on Nexcess.
- Second, we collect Nexcess customer’s feedbacks over the internet, including social networks and customer reviews website.
We can request support from Nexcess in 3 ways: Phone call, Ticket system, email support. There’s a big minus here as Nexcess does not offer live chat support.
- Phonecall is recommended for urgent situation
- Ticket is the most common support method on Nexcess, you can keep track of your issues until it’s done. Normally, you will receive answers from support staff within 1 hours (work-time)
- Email support: This is mostly used for asking pre-sales questions, if your request is related to technical issues, support staff will create a ticket for you to keep track.
In addition to the 3 options above, Nexcess also provide a knowledge library with many how-to and other tutorials related to Magento
There’s one more thing I love about Nexcess is that they offer 30-day 100% money-back for those who do not love their hosting.
Pros & Cons
From our experience using Nexcess as a Magento 2 hosting provider to host client’s websites and real users comments/review, we can summarize Necess hosting Pros and Cons as following:
Pros:
- Expert support on Magento 2
- Well-optimized for Magento 2
- Magento official parter
- PCI Compliant for very hosting plan
- Stable and fast hosting
- Very high uptime
- 30-day money-back without question
Cons:
- Price is not very affordable
- Limited bandwidth and other hosting resources.
- Hosting control panel is SiteWorx, not Cpanel or DirectAdmin. This may cause difficulty for new users.
- No livechat support
Conclusion: Is Nexcess the Right Choice for hosting Magento 2 website?
The answer is YES. You can trust Nexcess support team, I’m never disappointed with their support since I started my first project on Nexcess.
I highly recommend Nexcess for new Magento 2 user. Nexcess support team will help you fix many Magento 2 issue with their inhouse Magento developer. If you need premium Magento 2 hosting and don’t mind paying a little bit more, Nexcess is always a good option for you.
If you have good understanding on Magento 2 platform, I still recommend choosing a VPS provider for lower price and higher hardware resources.