Rocket WordPress Hosting Review: Speed to the Edge

While creating a website, one of the most important and crucial things that you can do is choosing a good web hosting provider. A solid hosting is fundamental to make your website faster, stable, and user-friendly. In search of the best web hosting provider out there, we have been reviewing several companies all over the Internet. Today we are going to take a look at something quite different. A WordPress hosting that comes with a built-in edge catching feature that will not only create a WordPress website but will distribute it all over the globe for blazing-fast performance.

Rocket is a managed WordPress hosting platform built with a powerful hosting stack, secure servers, and a scalable model. After having a quick look at the features, we thought that Rocket will be a great addition to our hosting reviews. Without further due, we are going to take a look at the features and functions of the Rocket WordPress hosting service.

Quick Overview

Feature	Rocket WordPress Hosting
Hosting Provider	Rocket Hosting
Plan Types	Shared, VPS, Dedicated
WordPress Support	Optimized for WordPress
Performance	High-speed SSD storage
Uptime Guarantee	99.9%
Scalability	Easy scalability as website grows
Security	SSL certificate, DDoS protection
Backup	Automated daily backups
Support	24/7 customer support
Control Panel	Custom control panel
Migration Assistance	Free website migration
CDN Integration	Content Delivery Network integration
Developer Friendly	Support for PHP, MySQL, Git, SSH, etc.
Pricing	Various pricing tiers available
Money-Back Guarantee	Typically 30-day guarantee

Rocket Hosting Interface

The interface of the Rocket is specifically made for those who do not have any previous experience working with those complex hosting control panels such as cPanel. In the dashboard, you can see the basic details such as the number of sites you added, the visitors to your website, disk usage, and bandwidth usage. Creating a website is as simple as clicking on the create site button and it will take you to a two-step website creation wizard. All you have to do is entering the name for your website, selecting the location of the hosting, and filling out the details of your WordPress installation. As soon as you click on the create button, a new website will be created which you can instantly start using.

As simple as that, you have a WordPress website up and running. As soon as you create a website, it will be listed on your main dashboard with an option to manage the settings anytime you want. Options to create Tickets or contact their support and manage your billing plan are also given. That’s pretty much it. No fancy features, confusing sections, or complex functions. Easily one of the best interfaces we have seen in a managed WordPress hosting provider.

Rocket Hosting Features

While choosing a WordPress hosting service, it is very important to carefully go through all the functions and features they provide as well as any limitations that they set to the hosting accounts. We are going to take a look at the features of Rocket WordPress hosting to get a better idea about their service.

The WordPress Control Panel

One of the best and most useful features we found on Rocket is their easy to use WordPress control panel. A single control panel will let you deploy WordPress sites, manage it including plugins and themes, backing them up whenever you need it, enable the options to update your WordPress themes and plugins, change your PHP version, and even create a staging environment for your production site. An all in one dashboard to easily manage your WordPress website.

A Powerful Hosting Stack

Rocket is built on NGINX with the latest version of PHP, the PHP 7.4 powering it. The enterprise servers are specifically crafted for the best performance of the WordPress websites. The entire hosting stack is optimized for WordPress core functionalities making sure that everything works at its level best. No matter what type of website you are planning to run on Rocket, if it runs on WordPress, your website will perform like never before.

The Built-in Edge Caching

Rocket has a built-in edge caching system powered by Cloudflare to catch your websites and distribute it over 200 locations all over the globe. The built-in CDN will make sure that your website is fast in every region, no matter where your target audience is from. The advanced features provided by Cloudflare will be more than enough for your website to load in under a second. From our tests, we were able to load our websites in less than a second even with all the essential plugins and themes installed. Thanks to the edge caching layer provided by Rocket.

Apart from just catching your website, the rocket caching system also optimizes different aspects of your website. The features such as the Google fonts optimization, brotli compression, the free enterprise CDN will make the use of an external catching plug-in insignificant. You do not have to spend money on and additional caching solution such as WP Rocket in order to make your website faster.

Automated Backups

The Rocket hosting comes with an automatic backup feature that will backup your WordPress files every single day. Even if you do not manually backup any of your files, the backups will save them automatically on a daily basis. In addition to the automated backups, you can also manually backup the websites any time you want. You can restore any of the backups in case of any vulnerabilities with just a single click of an icon. Your website will be brought back to the normal working state.

Superior Security

Rocket hosting also has a built-in website firewall that protects your WordPress installations on an application level. In addition to that, the service is also coming with its custom malware scanning, malware patching, brute force protection, automated bot protection, etc. to ensure the security of your website. You do not have to do a single thing to secure your website, everything will be done by the hosting service itself. No need to purchase premium security plug-ins to protect your website anymore.

In addition to that, you can also protect your website with the free SSL certificates available on Rocket hosting. The installation process is as simple as everything else. Choose a domain, install an SSL certificate, and that’s it. No additional steps required.

99.9% uptime

We reduced that 0.01 percentage just because nothing is certain in life. We never experienced downtime during the entire testing process. All of our testing websites were up 100% of the time during the process. We tested the websites by running some resource-hungry plug-ins such as Woo-commerce. Still, the server was able to manage the heavy load and deliver the web pages without any issues at all. The extra edge caching layer really helps in the performance of the website by caching the pages so that the server does not have to use the website resources to load content for the repeated visits. The cached pages will be served instead.

Amazing Support

Customer support is an essential part of any business. When it comes to a WordPress hosting service, a great support team is a crucial part of the business to keep customers happy. Most of the people who choose a managed WordPress posting will be beginners in the technical aspects of their website. So, a support team that is available 24 x 7 is extremely important.

To test the customer support of the Rocket WordPress hosting, we created a couple of fake support tickets. They helped us with every issue we had generously without any hesitation. Reminded us of the Siteground support. Would definitely give them credit for deploying a great support team to assist the customers.

Speed Test

To make sure that the websites hosted on rocket hosting is fast enough for every kind of usage, we ran some tests using different page speed test tools such as GT Metrix, Google page speed insights, Pingdom, webpagetest.org, etc. The results are given below.

GT Metrix

Pingdom

Google Pagespeed Insights

WebPageTest

With the help of proper optimizations, we were able to achieve excellent pageload speeds as well as optimization scores from most of the popular pagespeed test tools. Only a powerful hosting can make that possible.

Pricing

Rocket has four different hosting plans that allow different numbers of WordPress installs, website visits, storage, etc. All of them have features such a Free SSL, Free CDN, and the WAF (web application firewall.) The details of their pricing plans are given below.

As you can see, it is not the cheapest WordPress hosting service out there. The number of WordPress installs and website visits are also limited. So if you are planning to start an e-commerce website with hundreds of thousands of products having huge images, you might want to go for an alternate hosting. But if you are running a company and want to create a simple website or running and blog with a good amount of traffic, Rocket will be the perfect fit for you.

Verdict

After testing the service for a while and trying out different things including installing some resource-hungry plugins and themes, we can confidently say that Rocket is a great WordPress hosting service for beginners. It is a great hosting-edge combo that provides all the essential features to make your website super-fast and super-secure with minimum effort. You do not have to be an experienced user to make your WordPress website perfect. From the interface to the most advanced caching features, everything seems perfect. So if the pricing seems fair to you, you can give it a try.

As a launch special offer, they are providing the hosting service for just $1 for the first month. So if you want to give it a try, this is the best time to do it.