Rocket.net Review: Fast, Easy-to-Use and Secure
It seems that with Rocket.net fully managed WordPress hosting has gotten a second life.
Sure, the likes of Kinsta and WP Engine are still doing great business. But those in the know (e.g. people spending an outsized amount of their time discussing web hosting in Facebook groups) have caught on to the fact that with these kind of companies you’re spending a ridiculous amount of money for hosting which isn’t all that great.
At the same time, managed WordPress hosting still has a genuine use case. Say you have an affiliate site or ecommerce store which does 5+ figures per month. At this point you don’t want to nickel and dime anymore when it comes to web hosting (or any website tools for that manner). Paying a bit more makes total sense if it means that you can save hours on configuration and get the peace of mind that you can speak to capable support staff in less than a minute night and day.
Enter Rocket.net. The TL;DR here is that Rocket.net is a great hosting provider for power users looking for a hassle-free hosting experience. But as always there are also a couple of drawbacks you’ve got to be aware of.
This Rocket.net review lays it all out for you.
Pros
Cons
Rocket.net is FAST
Rocket.net’s web hosting speed blows pretty much every alternative out of the water.
In order to test any hosting for speed I always use the exact same website setup:
- WordPress theme: Kadence
- Plugins: Block Navigation, Kadence Blocks, Post Duplicator
- SSL-certificate (Let’s Encrypt)
- No caching or speed optimizations like WP Rocket or Perfmatters
The site I use is the Affiliate24 Starter theme. As you can see, it is representative for a real-world website in that it contains plenty of images, text and graphical elements.
Given I didn’t implement any speed optimization myself of any kind, I was pretty shocked to get Google PageSpeed results like these:
Yes, those really are mobile PageSpeed scores of 99 without me messing around for hours with a speed optimization plugin.
And what’s more, thanks to Cloudflare Enterprise (which is included with every Rocket.net hosting plan), TTFB clocks in at most locations in the world below 100ms:
This is mind-blowing and a big step up from Cloudflare APO (which is no slouch either).
Now, what exactly is so exciting about having a great TTFB? In Google’s words:
In other words, the entire speed of your website hinges on it. Simply put, the response time of a server gets added on top of the perceived load time of a site. If you click on a link and the TTFB is a second, it takes a second before the site even begins to render its elements in your browser. Therefore it’s incredibly important that TTFB is as close to zero as possible.
Additionally, Rocket.net uses some monster specs to fall back on when Cloudflare Enterprise doesn’t serve a page:
- 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2667 v2 @ 3.30GHz (32 Cores)
- 128GB RAM
- RAIDED NVMe SSDs
Bottom line, Rocket.net leaves most hosting providers in the dust speed-wise.
Cloudflare Enterprise included and configured for you
For many website owners there comes a time where they can’t be bothered anymore to spend countless hours on speeding up a website. Whether that’s through hosting configuration, researching and testing CDN’s, or speed optimization plugins.
I know this is true for myself. Every hour I sink in speed optimization is an hour I can’t spend on content creation, product development or outreach. Things that are both more interesting and lucrative than tinkering with site speed.
Rocket.net gets this and therefore offers Cloudflare Enterprise pre-configured and pre-installed.
It’s hard to overstate the peace of mind this brings.
Sure, it’s always wise to use a plugin like FlyingPress for some further onpage optimizations like CSS minification and image optimization. But the hardest, most confusing and also most impactful part of speed optimization (setting up a CDN) has been taken care of for you.
24/7 support with 1 minute waiting times
If you go for a premium managed WordPress hosting you should be able to expect world-class support.
As expected, Rocket.net delivers here and then some.
When putting their live chat to the test, I was consistently getting response times of less than a minute.
Plus, when talking to support it feels like you’re in touch with an actual human who knows what he is doing.
Without exception, all questions and problems I threw their way got taken care of in a matter of minutes.
Custom-made dashboard
As you can expect from a true managed WordPress hosting provider, Rocket.net’s dashboard is custom-made.
This can be disappointing if you’re used to cPanel or Plesk. But the Rocket.net dashboard is intuitive and super easy to learn.
Plus, you’re getting access to quite some advanced features that you find sometimes missing in bespoke hosting dashboards.
Having said that, some advanced functionality (like increasing file upload size) is lacking which is a bit of shame. Though the aforementioned customer support team can easily help out with this kind of stuff.
Other features and benefits
The entire point of managed WordPress hosting is that it’s hands-off. You’re paying a premium in order to not have to worry about things like site migrations, setting up a CDN, launching servers and taking care of website security.
Among Rocket.net’s features and benefits you’ll find:
- Flawless website migrations without downtime. And you get to test everything extensively before they’ll haul your site over definitively.
- Website security with malware protection (Immunify 360) and a website firewall (WAF). All with zero impact on performance and negating the need to pay extra for an external security plugin.
- WordPress Activity Logging. Keeping track of all changes being done on your website. Super handy if others have access to your website, too. No more guessing when it comes to who changed a color or font on your website. Plus, you can give site access to external devs with total peace of mind.
Plans and pricing
Rocket.net hosting plans are pretty much divided in plans for bloggers, agencies and enterprise customers (think massive ecommerce websites).
Picking a plan is pretty straightforward: look at the number of sites you run and how much bandwidth you’ll need.
Besides this, the plans don’t differ when it comes to stuff like PHP workers, backup retention time (14 days across the board), free migrations, security features and more.
It’s all really straightforward.
At first glance, Rocket.net seems to be expensive. But once you factor in that you won’t be paying extra for a CDN, security plugin and won’t be wasting time with slow/bad support and hosting/speed configuration, it really isn’t that bad.
Plus, things get pretty wild once you start comparing Rocket.net’s cheapest plan with, say, Kinsta’s cheapest plan. The latter gives you access to just 2 PHP workers and can’t even handle WooCommerce sites.
Rocket.net’s cheapest plan has unlimited PHP workers and hits it out of the park when it comes to WooCommerce sites.
What do Rocket.net’s users think?
It seems that 99% of Rocket.net users are happy.
Here’s an individual user review which captures up my sentiments quite well:
And once you start perusing Facebook groups on web hosting and WordPress site speed, you’ll see Rocket.net popping up as one of the top 3 recommended hosting providers.
Where Rocket.net could do better
So far in this review, I’ve showered Rocket.net almost exclusively with praise.
But of course, no hosting provider is perfect, and so Rocket.net has a few shortcomings as well.
The thing I find most grating about Rocket.net is that they count sub-domains as extra WordPress installations. This is highly unusual, and it prevented me from migrating one of my sites over to them as instead of my expected $30 per month, I would have ended up spending $200.
I understand many people don’t rely on sub-domains at all. Still, I thought it was worth highlighting as this isn’t something you’ll find explained on their website.
Somewhat related to this, is the fact that if you run a large number of smaller websites, things can get expensive really fast. At 10+ websites you’ll find yourself shelling out $200 per month.
Finally, I feel that the bandwidth limits are a tad restrictive. True, Cloudflare Enterprise will for static websites carry the lion share of your bandwidth needs, but this isn’t the case if your site is dynamic (e.g. you run a WooCommerce shop).
In those cases, you might find yourself having to upgrade your plan faster than expected.
Conclusion: who should choose Rocket.net and who should stay away?
Rocket.net is great for website owners looking for a hassle-free, hands-off hosting solution which is blazing fast and super easy to use.
If you have one or a few mission-critical websites with a global audience, then you can’t do much better than Rocket.net.
Stay away from them if you’re just starting out, rely a lot on sub-domains, or run a bunch of smaller websites. If that’s the case, pick one of the hosting providers I’m recommending here.