Rocket.net Review 2024 – Rocket or Sinking Ship?
Have you heard of Rocket.net? It’s the new kid on the block when it comes to managed WordPress hosting platforms, founded in 2020. But don’t let its young age fool you – this company is led by Ben Gabler, who has worked with big names like StackPath, Hostgator, GoDaddy, and Help.com. So you know they’re reliable and trustworthy.
But here’s what sets Rocket.net apart from other web hosting providers – they use Cloudflare Enterprise CDN. It’s a game-changer when it comes to speed and security for your website. Want to know more about it and how it can benefit you? Let’s dive in.
Table of Content
Rocket.net Review: Features Summary
Rocket.net is a managed WordPress hosting provider that offers a variety of features to help users optimize their website’s performance and security. Some of the notable features of Rocket.net include:
Automated website backups: Rocket.net automatically backs up your website every day, so you can easily restore your website to a previous version if anything goes wrong.
Fast-loading servers: Rocket.net uses enterprise-grade infrastructure to ensure your website loads quickly, which can help improve your website’s search engine rankings.
Global CDN: Rocket.net uses a global Content Delivery Network (CDN) to ensure your website loads quickly no matter where your visitors are located.
Free SSL certificates: Rocket.net provides free SSL certificates to ensure your website is secure and can be accessed over HTTPS.
Advanced security features: Rocket.net includes advanced security features like a web application firewall, malware scanning, and DDoS protection to help protect your website from attacks.
Developer-friendly tools: Rocket.net includes tools like SSH access, Git integration, and staging environments to help developers streamline their workflow.
WordPress-specific optimizations: Rocket.net is optimized specifically for WordPress, which can help improve your website’s performance and reduce load times.
24/7 customer support: Rocket.net offers 24/7 customer support via live chat and email to help users with any issues they may encounter.
Overall, Rocket.net offers a comprehensive set of features that can help WordPress users improve their website’s performance, security, and reliability.
Rocket.net Control Panel – User Interface
This is where you’ll manage all the WordPress sites that you’ve spun up. Rocket.net has a great set of tools and information pages all presented on their clean, uncluttered interface. Here are my use stats for my website:
It looks great and shows me, at a glance, what I’m using.
The most important and useful tools that the Rocket.net control panel offers are detailed below. In addition, to those tools, the control panel is your central location for managing all your WordPress sites.
You can spin up new sites in a few seconds and get the details (IP, hostname, etc.) as soon as they go live. You can also manage all your users and the FTP and SFTP accounts that they use to manage your files on your WordPress sites.
Rocket.net will also record and display your site visitor statistics without you needing to install any plugins or turn to a third party. It’s all right there in the control panel. This makes your WordPress install lighter and easier to manage.
Time To First Page – Evaluating Rocket.net Efficiency
My personal metric for evaluating the speed and efficiency of a hosting provider is “time to the first page,” which involves assessing how quickly a brand-new client can go from signing up to having a test page live on the internet. This metric is a reliable indicator of how well a hosting provider has streamlined its processes and systems. If there are delays during sign-up, it’s likely that similar hold-ups will occur throughout their service.
Rocket.net stands out in this regard. Their sign-up and payment process is a single page, taking only a few minutes to complete. I was able to create a new WordPress site and launch it within a few more minutes. The only significant delay I encountered was waiting for my DNS provider to resolve my domain to the new IP address.
Overall, the entire process – including DNS resolution – took less than 10 minutes to get a test page visible on the internet. This showcases Rocket.net’s exceptional speed and efficiency!
Rocket.net Reliability and Uptime
All of these features don’t count for much of Rocket.net can’t keep your site online. I’ve been using Rocket.net for a couple of months and none of the third-party monitoring tools has reported even a single minute of downtime. This means a greater than 99.99% uptime which is a great achievement.
This is an excellent record for any web host where transient network hiccups and hardware problems are much more common than is widely credited. I’ve been impressed with how solid the performance and availability of my WordPress site have been.
Rocket.net Performance
Slow-loading websites will cost you, visitors. In fact, Google found that pages that take 10 seconds to load will suffer a 123% bounce rate. That is to say that visitors will simply get bored and frustrated on a slow website and try a different site that loads faster.
I benchmarked my WordPress website on Rocket.net using the Google Lighthouse developer tool from my laptop and got this result:
Outstanding!
Normally this kind of result takes a lot of work optimizing PHP and Apache settings, implementing a caching layer, and other arcane server settings. This was an out-of-the-box performance from my Rocket.net WordPress instance. I didn’t have to mess with anything to get this performance.
Rocket.net achieves this impressive speed by offering several advanced web technologies on all their plans. These are:
Cloudflare Enterprise – A CDN is a Content Delivery Network which is a technique usually used by the likes of Netflix and Amazon to make sure that their web assets are geographically close to the end-users. This proximity of the user to content ensures that the user’s experience is as fast as possible because their data doesn’t have to travel from the other side of the world.
Rocket.net Automatically implements the Cloudflare Enterprise for all their plans. You don’t need to do anything to start enjoying the same advantages that the big boys use. Full-page caching, edge optimization, and full WAF are all on by default and free of charge for every WordPress site deployed!
Caching – This technique stores your website assets in a speedy layer that sits between your visitors and your website. When a visitor requests a page the caching layer will serve it instantly speeding up their experience of using your site immensely.
Caching is supplied for all Rocket.net plans and doesn’t need any configuration or setting up. Just create your beautiful website and start enjoying the benefits.
Image optimization and asset compression – The size in MB of a webpage make it slower to load as the visitor has to wait for all the data to arrive at their device before they can see your webpage. This is especially bad on mobile devices with slower internet connections are much more common.
Rocket.net solves this problem by automatically optimizing images, that is making them smaller without altering the way they look, and also compressing the files that make the web pages. Just like everything else, this all happens automatically without you needing to worry about it.
Rocket.net Security Features
Having a super-fast website is of no use if it gets hacked. Rocket.net offers a whole suite of security tools that you don’t need to do anything to take advantage of. They are automatically offered on all their plans and protect every site you host on Rocket.net.
WAF – This slightly strange name is a Web Application Firewall. It is an advanced security tool that scans every web request before it reaches your WordPress site. If a hacker attempts to send a malicious request designed to hack your site or take it offline the WAF will block it before it reaches your site.
Network Firewall – This is the standard network firewall that filters any malicious data before it can reach your site and cause harm.
Two-Factor Login – This cutting-edge security technique protects your Rocket.net login. Once you enable this then a hacker cannot just guess your password. They also need your smartphone in their hands. This makes it virtually impossible for them to hack into your Rocket.net account.
Free SSL Certificate – An SSL certificate is a technology that powers secure HTTPS websites and it used to cost up to $100 USD per year. Rocket.net supplies free unlimited SSL certificates for all your sites protecting your users and giving them confidence that you take their privacy seriously.
Rocket.net Support
The most frustrating part of dealing with any company across the internet is getting in contact with a human when you need to. Rocket.net obviously got the memo and offer 27/7/365 support.
You can get in touch with Rocket.net by Email, live chat, or over the phone. The phone support is restricted to the upper-tier plans which are pretty standard for web hosts.
Free Add-on: Automatic Backups
Any system administrator worth his salt will tell you that the most important first step in creating a rock-solid web presence is backups. You could use some WordPress plugin to do this for you why bother when Rocket.net provides a backup facility that can take manual and automatic backups.
You can restore from any of these backups with a single click. Even better, your data is securely stored on fault-tolerant hardware.
Free Add-on: Automatic WordPress Updates
A typical WordPress instance has lots of plugins and themes that, along with the WordPress core installation, always need updating. These updates provide new features and functionality and also, most importantly, security fixes. This makes it critical to update as regularly as you can.
The only problem is that updates are a chore.
Rocket.net has a built facility to keep all of the components of your WordPress site automatically updated. This frees up your time from logging in and updating your WordPress instance so you can focus on what is more important to you.
Maintaining your WordPress site is now as easy as toggling a switch in the Rocket.net control panel.
Free Add-on: Website Migration
If you’ve got a WordPress site hosted somewhere else then one of the major barriers to using an alternative host is the hassle and cost of moving it to a new host. Rocket.net removes this barrier by offering website migration for all of your existing WordPress sites free of charge!
It doesn’t get much easier than that!
Rocket.net Money Back Guarantee
Rocket.net offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. I love to see this offered by any company because it means that they are so much confident in the product they offer that they don’t expect to ever have to make good on this promise.
Rocket.net has obviously designed and built its systems so that they confidently expect that, once you make the commitment, you won’t think of going anywhere else.
Rocket.net Pricing Plans
As a managed WordPress hosting company, Rocket.net provides a limited selection of hosting packages, with only three pricing plans available for customers to choose from.
| Features | Starter Plan | Pro Plan | Business Plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Annual Pricing | $25/month | $50/month | $83/month |
| WordPress Installations | 1 | 3 | 10 |
| SSD Storage | 10 GB | 20 GB | 40 GB |
| Bandwidth | 50 GB | 100 GB | 300 GB |
| Monthly Traffic | 2.5 lakh | 10 lakh | 25 lakh |
| Inode Count | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Rocket.net offers Domain Validated DigiCert SSL certificates, built-in CDN support, and WAF support for free on all their plans. In terms of traffic, they count only unique visitors to your website, rather than multiple views from the same person within a 24-hour period. This means that even if one person visits your website 15 times in a day, it will be counted as only one view. This feature is especially advantageous for their Starter plan, which allows up to 250k unique visitors.
If you choose annual billing for the Starter plan, which is priced at $30 per month, the cost drops to $25 per month, and you’ll receive two free months. Furthermore, Rocket.net provides custom pricing plans that can be tailored to your specific needs. If you have more than 25 websites, you can contact them to discuss a custom plan.
While their plans may be costly, there are other options to consider such as Hostinger, Chemicloud, and Cloudways. However, if you’re interested in Rocket.net, I’ve got detailed information below about a special discounted offer you can take advantage of.
Rocket.net Downside
What are the downsides to using Rocket.net for managed hosting? The only drawback that stands out is the higher cost of their hosting services. While their basic plan starts at $25 USD per month, their other plans are priced even higher.
Compared to cheap VM or shared hosting accounts, this cost may seem steep. However, based on my experience with Rocket.net, it appears that they are not trying to compete with the cheapest options available on the internet.
Their extensive list of features and the quality of their service clearly position them as an enterprise-class product. At $25 per month, it’s a steal for any enterprise-level product. So, don’t let the price discourage you.
Conclusion
I’ve hosted a WordPress site on Rocket.net and I have got to say I really liked it. The huge list of features that just work is amazing. I haven’t got time for micro-managing technical details like wringing the last drop of performance and security from a hosting platform. That’s why I love that all of Rocket.net’s features don’t need any of my input. They’re always on and always working for me.
If you need a WordPress solution that’s got it all don’t hesitate to give Rocket.net a try.
Rocket.net Coupon Codes
Find below the exclusive Rocket.net Coupon Codes. Using these Rocket.net Promo Codes, you save more on your Rocket.net Managed WordPress Solution.
