Do you know that if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, you might lose more than 50% of your traffic? That’s a considerable number. Right?
Recently, Google announced that, starting in May 2021, blog loading speed would be a ranking factor.
Yes, indeed, speed did not directly affect your blog’s ranking earlier, but that will change soon.
Google will consider “Speed” to be one of the ranking factors, along with other “Web Core Vitals.” So, the earlier you prepare for that, the better it is for your blogging career.
I have been a SiteGround Hosting customer for the past couple of years. Recently, I had a chance to test Rocket.Net’s managed WordPress hosting.
And Voila! What great hosting! I am highly impressed. The loading speed of my blog increased drastically.
That is why I decided to write a detailed review of Rocket.net hosting, so it’s easier for you to determine if it’s right for you.
But, before we get into the detailed Rocket.net hosting review, first of all, let us know what Managed WordPress Hosting is.
Table of Contents
What Is Managed WordPress Hosting?
Many of us, including me, know little about how a web hosting process works. We don’t know how to get the best out of a web hosting service. The result is: “We start blaming our web host.“
That’s not fair at all. To overcome these issues, most web hosts nowadays offer managed hosting.
What does that mean? Will some experts from the web host company maintain every part of your web hosting service?
They will decide how to optimise the server, identify key variables, and determine the best settings for your hosting environment.
In a nutshell, they will give you the best possible setup for optimum performance.
When discussing Managed WordPress Hosting, your web host goes one step further by optimising your hosting environment to meet WordPress’s requirements. As a result, you get the best speed and experience from your WordPress blog.
Rocket.net Hosting Overview
Rocket.net is a reasonably new entrant into the already overcrowded web hosting arena. But they are not the least experienced.
Rocket.net was founded and backed by Aaron Phillips [Aaron is no longer with Rocket.net] and Ben Gabler, both considered veterans of the web hosting industry.
Aaron and Ben have decades of experience working with industry leaders like CPanel, GoDaddy, Hostgator, etc., before they seeded their dream to start Rocket.net in the summer of 2020.
Please remember that both were at the peak of their careers, in very senior-level positions, when they started their entrepreneurial ventures.
The Rocket.net hosting is privately owned, and the team is highly experienced. They are eager to deliver perfection, helping their business grow.
I found that they treat you like a partner, not a customer. That’s one of the things I like about Rocket.Net hosting.
Rocket.Net
Rocket.Net delivers reliable, fast, and secure web hosting solutions with 24/7 support, scalable plans, and top-tier performance for all your online needs.
Rocket.Net Hosting Business Portfolio
Rocket.net believes in ” Simply The Best.” They are experts in WordPress and offer only Managed WordPress Hosting—no unnecessary plan clutter.
Along with WordPress hosting, they also offer WooCommerce hosting. But logically speaking, both are the same.
While creating a site in Rocket.net, you will get an additional option for installing the WooCommerce plugin. That’s it.
They also offer white-label reseller hosting, allowing you to sell WordPress hosting to your clients.
You will receive a payment gateway, invoice facility, custom forms, and other basic facilities that a typical reseller’s hosting company offers.
Rocket.net does not offer any email hosting. That may be a problem for some people, but given their service, I would be happy to host my emails elsewhere.
They do not offer a domain registration facility or dedicated server hosting. Hopefully, they will develop these features shortly so that Rocket.net can be a one-stop destination for all your web hosting needs.
Rocket.Net Managed Hosting Features [10 Key Features]
Rocket.Net is one of the fastest-managed WordPress Hosting. This is possible due to their world-class servers, Enterprise-grade CDN, Sophisticated caching mechanism, and, most importantly, the experienced team.
Here are some key features of Rocket.net hosting that are too tempting.
1. Enterprise Grade Servers
Rocket.net uses enterprise-grade servers with all-SSD drives, 256 GB of RAM, 16-core CPUs, and, most importantly, multi-gigabit connectivity to the internet exchange.
Please note that no matter what bells and whistles web hosts offer, all are in vain unless they use good servers. Luckily, Rocket.Net did not miss that chance.
2. WordPress Optimised Stack
Rocket.net offers optimised stacks that consider the WordPress environment. The result is faster load time, enhanced protection, and more customer benefits. Here is the key configuration of their stack.
- Latest PHP version
- HTTP/2
- Server-level micro catching
- Asset proxy
- Optimized MySQL
3. Edge Cloud
If you choose to host your website on Rocket.net, it will be hosted on Edge Cloud, which is about 2-3 times faster than a typical cloud platform.
Rocket.net hosting has optimised edge cloud servers at 250 strategically chosen locations, bringing you closer than ever to your website visitors. Here are a few of the features of their edge cloud.
- Powered by NGNIX
- Built-in caching
- Guaranteed Resources
- Multi-Terabyte Network
- Optimised for WordPress
- 20 edge cloud locations
Edge Cloud Locations
4. Cloudflare Enterprise CDN
Do you know that all websites hosted on Rocket.net will benefit from Cloudflare Enterprise CDN service? With over 200 strategic locations, your website will be much faster, no matter where it is accessed.
The best part is that the Cloudflare Enterprise CDN plan is FREE for every Rocket.net customer. Here are a couple of Cloudflare CDN features integrated with Rocket.Net. Ideally, the Cloudflare Enterprise plan costs $6000/ month.
- 200+ Catching & security PoPs
- Enterprise-grade firewall
- PCI-compliant servers ( Must for eCommerce stores)
- Dynamic full-page caching
- Image Optimization
- Code Optimization
- Third-party script proxying
- DDoS protection
- Direct Edge peering
5. Dedicated Resources
Rocket.net is unlike any other hosting provider that sells regular shared hosting in the name of managed hosting.
With Rocket, you will get dedicated RAM and I/O. Dedicated CPU cores. It’s more than shared hosting.
Unfortunately, Rocket.net does not disclose dedicated resource allocation data, but in one of their recent blog posts, they mentioned that they use NVMe SSDs, 32 CPU cores, and 128 GB of RAM across all their plans. That is very impressive.
6. Free Migration and Premium SSL
All your websites will be migrated from other hosts free of cost. You need to raise a ticket with your WordPress admin login information and FTP details.
Once you provide this information, the website migration takes about 30 minutes. There is no way to migrate a website other than by raising a ticket.
Users cannot create a database, so you can’t transfer a website using the Duplicator plugin.
Do you know that all websites on Rocket.net will receive free Sectigo SSL certificates? That’s a saving of about $600 per year.
7. Intuitive Interface
I am a big fan of custom hosting interfaces. People are bored with the cPanel interface. Rocket.net’s dashboard is a significant departure from the boring interfaces offered by other hosting providers.
The interface and navigation are clean, and you will find everything you need to run your website.
Currently, if you are using cPanel, you will find the interface pleasing to your eyes. I moved from SiteGround, and I still feel the Rocket.net interface is far better than SiteGround’s.
Here are a couple of features of the Rocket.net account dashboard.
- Launch WordPress
- One-Click staging
- Usage Analytics
- Manage users
- Access support
- One-Click backup
8. One-Click Staging
For those who love to test new themes or plugins frequently, Rocket.net is an excellent option, as it offers a single-click staging feature.
With a single click, you can create a copy of your website for testing, and once you are satisfied, deploy it to the live environment. Here are the things that you can do in the staging environment.
- Try new plugins
- Try new themes
- Single click clone
- Debug issues
- Work on bugs in the code
- Backup of live websites
9. BulletProof Security
Security is a significant concern for any website. On top of that, if you have an established website or are running an eCommerce store, then the risk is higher. I am happy that Aaron and Ben have prioritised website safety over anything else.
Cloudflare Enterprise CDN includes an advanced firewall for your website, separate from brute-force protection.
Rocket.net has gone one step further and offers free malware scanning, removal, automated bot protection, etc. You don’t need to buy any security software or service that usually costs $1500-2000 annually.
Here are the security measures that rocket.net uses.
- Sectigo SSL certificate for free
- Advanced firewall
- Brute force protection
- Malware scanning
- Malware removal
- Captcha for automated bots
- Weak password protection
- Two-factor authentication
10. Experienced Customer Support Team
Fortunately, we have Aaron and Ben, who are still handling customer support. They are very prompt in responding and know what needs to be done to fix issues.
No matter the problem — whether WordPress- or hosting-related — they are eager to solve it.
A few days ago, I asked Ben Gabler to transfer my website. It took roughly two hours to transfer the website.
Ideally, it would not have taken more than 30 minutes, but since I placed the request at an odd time, there was a slight delay. But overall, I am pleased with their technical support team.
The rocket.Net team is available through live chat, support tickets, emails, or direct calls 24X7. So you will always have them ready to support your business.
I set SiteGround as a benchmark for customer support. Rocket.net technical support is close to Siteground, if not better.
Rocket.net Hosting Plans And Pricing
Rocket.net offers four Managed WordPress Hosting plans. Although the basic offering is the same across all plans, the only differences are the number of websites you can host, the number of visits, SSD storage, and bandwidth.
Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, Sectigo Premium SSL Certificate, and Advanced WAF are free across all plans.
Starter Plan
The Starter Plan allows one WordPress installation. Comes with 10 GB of SSD space. This plan is suitable for 25K in monthly traffic, with a 50 GB monthly bandwidth limit.
You may feel that 10 GB of space is only suitable for a personal site or small blog. But for your information, even a very reputable blog with 200-300 articles hardly consumes 2-3 GB of space. So, 10 GB of space should be enough for a regular-sized blog.
All key features of Rocket.net hosting, such as Free CDN, SSL, and a Web application firewall, are available in this plan. This is good, as most web hosts do not offer much in the basic plan.
The starter plan starts at $30 per month. However, if you pay annually, you will get two months free. So, ideally, it will be $25 per month.
Currently, rocket.net offers a launch discount that lets you try this plan for just $1 for the first month.
I believe that $1 is worth spending to try rocket.net hosting. If you are not satisfied, you can permanently terminate the plan. They also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Pro Plan
You can install three instances of WordPress in the Pro Plan. You will be offered 20 GB of SSD space.
This plan is good for 100K visits, but the bandwidth is limited to 100 GB. The Pro plan also comes with multisite features. All features of rocket.net are also available in this plan.
The Pro plan suits small to medium-sized blogs, corporates, developers, etc. Although everything is fine in this plan, I am slightly concerned about the 100K visits. The visit limit does not justify the price tag.
The pro plan costs $60 per month. However, if you pay annually, they offer two months free.
So ideally, it will cost you $50 per month. Like the starter plan, you can try the pro plan by paying just $1 for the first month.
Business Plan
This is the plan that can efficiently run medium to prominent side blogs. The visit limit is 250K, which is pretty good.
You can install up to 10 instances of WordPress with an SSD space of 40 GB. The bandwidth is limited to 300 GB.
Other features are similar to what we already discussed in the starter and pro plans.
This plan costs $100 per month. However, if you pay for the whole year, you will get 2 months free, saving nearly $83 per month. You can try the business plan for just $1, like other plans.
Rocket.Net Hosting Review [ Performance & Test Results]
Special thanks to Rocket.net founder Aaron for allowing me to test their hosting. I had the opportunity to test for 2 weeks, and my observations on speed and performance are below.
But before we get into the test results, let’s summarise the mechanisms in place to boost your website’s speed.
- Enterprise-grade servers
- Memory level server catching
- 20 strategic edge cloud locations
- Cloudflare’s 200+ global server locations
- Dynamic content delivery
- Sectigo Premium SSL certificate
- Account isolation
- Google font optimisation and catching
- Brotli compression
- Advanced firewall
- Automated BOT protection
Please note that our test website was not optimised correctly, yet we still achieved excellent results.
The test website has more than 20 plugins, and we used a few of the worst themes and plugins to test how well Rocket.net performs in the worst-case scenario. We used WP-Rocket on our test website.
The test was performed in a very controlled environment. Your speed and Performance may vary based on how well you optimised your blog, what cache plugin you use, and from which location you are testing.
1. Speed Test
We checked the test website on GTMatrix, Pingdom Tools, and Google Page Insights, and here is the result.
The GTMetrix tool shows an LCP of 0.8 seconds, about 40% below GTMetrix’s recommendation. What does that mean that the most significant element of the website is loading within .8 seconds? Please note that the test website is not correctly optimised for speed.
Pingdom shows a load time of 656 ms, which is even less than what GT Metrix shows. Anything below 1 second is considered to be very fast.
Test Result From GTMetrix
Test Result From Pingdom Tools
Test Result From Google Page Insights
2. Uptime Test
This is the result of the test website after monitoring the Uptime Robot for a day. A long-time report is indeed pending.
However, I assume that the uptime data will not change even if we check for a long time. I will update the snapshot as and when we test for a longer duration.
3. Server Speed Test
We tested the server response time on Bitcacha, and the server responded in 2-3 ms, which is fantastic. Bitcatcha rated the server A+, their highest rating.
4. Load Impact Test
The load test data shows an awe-inspiring result. Around 5K requests were made at 20 req/s, and the server responded in about 17ms (average), which is simply outstanding.
5. Time To First Byte (TTFB) Test
We tested the Time To First Byte on the KeyCDN platform, and the first byte was rendered in about 30-40 ms. Did you notice one thing?
All locations show almost similar TTFB. That is the power of Edge Cloud, which means your website visitors will get similar speeds worldwide.
How To Start A Blog On Rocket.Net
1. Buy A Hosting Plan
Go to the Rocket.Net website, click ” Pricing,” and select a plan. Once you decide on the plan, click “Get Started.”
2. Create An Account
If you click on the “Get Started” button, you will be taken to an account creation page, where you must enter your email ID and password to create an account.
Click on “Continue” once done.
3. Enter The Billing Information
Enter the billing information here, then click “Sign Up.”
4. Log In To Your Dashboard And Create A Site
Once you log in to the control panel using the given user ID and Password, you will be presented with the dashboard below. Click on ” Create Site” to create a new site.
5. Choose Data Centre
Give your site a name (not the URL) and choose the data centre location. Try to select the nearest data centre.
6. Enter WordPress Information
Enter all required WordPress information, such as the Admin ID, Password, and the Admin email. If you wish to install WooCommerce, you can also check that option.
Once you click ” Continue,” wait a few minutes, and you will be presented with the site dashboard below.
You will be given a temporary URL, as shown. If you scroll down, you will see the site information and FTP details.
If you go to your web hosting dashboard, it will show details such as the number of websites, visits, space utilisation, etc.
7. Explore Different Options On The Dashboard
Please note that the WordPress installation on Rocket.net includes several key plugins and themes.
If you don’t want those plugins, you can delete them after logging into the WordPress dashboard. Click “Plugins” in the site dashboard to see the list of installed plugins.
Click on the respective tabs for the theme details, backups, and advanced information.
For example, clicking “Themes ” shows you the themes you have installed.
8. Go Live And Start Your Journey To Space!
You will be given a temporary URL when you add a site to the rocket.net dashboard.
You must add some DNS records to change the temporary URL to the actual URL and make your website live.
First, click the “Get Started ” button, as shown, to start the process of going live.
Enter your site’s actual URL. You can choose your protocols here, such as HTTPS:// or https://www. Please make sure you enter the correct protocol here.
Once you click continue, you will see the following window. In it, you will be given two CNAME records that you need to add to the DNS section of your domain registrar.
Please note that you don’t need to change the nameserver. Also, please add the CNAME records correctly, as this will activate the SSL certificate and connect to Cloudflare.
That’s It. Your site will be live in about 5 minutes, and you will be ready to start your journey to space using your ROCKET!
Rocket. Net Hosting Positives
👍 Pros
- Enterprise-grade servers [ Reduce TTFB]
- Cloudflare enterprise plan CDN [ The Deal breaker]
- Edge cloud at 20 locations [ Improve site speed]
- 200+ location Cloudflare CDN delivery PoP [ Great for speed and catching ]
- Web application firewall [ Secure your website from brute force and malware ]
- Dedicated resources [e.g., CPU cores, RAM, I/O]
- Sectigo SSL [ Offered for free- Savings of $600 per year]
- 14-day backup
- One-click staging [Great for testing]
- Intuitive Dashboard [ No more boring cPanel dashboard]
- Experienced customer support team
- 30-day money-back guarantee
👎 Cons
- No Domain registration facility [ A must be considered as a one-stop web hosting destination]
- No email hosting [Nowadays, no one uses web-hosted email.] You can use GSuite or any SMTP provider ]
- No web-based File Manager
- No Transparency in dedicated resources
- No way to create a blank website [ A must for those who want to start from scratch]
- Support is not available 24X7
- Live Chat shows third-party branding [ Not Cool, as they consider themselves a premium host]
- Pricing is a bit on the higher side [ To compete with WPX, Kinsta, or WP Engine, pricing should have been a bit lower]
Conclusion: Rocket.net Hosting Review
No doubt, Rocket.net is one of the fastest-managed web hosts I have experienced. It is fast and secure, and the overall experience is excellent.
Though I did not get a chance to test Kinsta, I tested WPX hosting, and I can say that rocket.net is a perfect alternative to WPX if it is not Kinsta.
However, Rocket.net is a relatively new company with much space for improvement. Hopefully, they know where they need to excel and can develop a plan.
Down the line, Rocket.net is going to give a tight fight to WPX and Kinsta.
Rocket.Net
Rocket.net is a fast, secure WordPress hosting platform with built-in CDN, WAF, and edge optimization for high performance and reliability
Price: 25
Price Currency: $
Operating System: Linux
Application Category: WordPress Hosting
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