Rocket.net Review – Is this WordPress Managed Hosting Actually Faster? Better? Absolutely.

We had to do a Rocket.net review after testing a few WordPress sites on their platform. For us, speed is incredible important. They say they have thew world’s fastest WordPress hosting, and we think they just might be right. We host WordPress websites on several hosting platforms, and we’re always looking for a specific combination: speed, ease of use, reliability and customer service.

We consistently pick Generatepress as our fast, go-to theme. We also use a very specific set of plugins, too. You can learn about Rocket.net below and what makes their managed WordPress hosting unique – and very, very fast.

What is Rocket.net

Rocket.net is a Managed WordPress hosting platform that was created in 2020 by Ben Gabler and Aaron Dewell Phillips. Their innovative approach to content delivery includes CloudFlare Enterprise, two web application firewalls (WAF), support for both HTTP/2 and HTTP/3.

That’s just for starters. As a part of this Rocket.net review I took note of a few standout features:

Rocket.net Review: Features

Extremely Fast WordPress Hosting

Just about every hosting company says that they have fast, or the fastest, managed WordPress hosting. We usually roll our eyes. Sometimes we get a bit frustrated tuning and tweaking – trying to eek every bit of performance.

Our Rocket.net review set out to scrutinize the managed hosting provider’s speed.

Above all, what drove us to write this Rocket.net review, and for it to be so positive, is that Rocket.net is simply the best WordPress host we have every used.

On Rocket.net we sincerely, absolutely got an incredible result. Period. And, we didn’t change anything from our previous host’s setup.

PageSpeed Insights & GTmetrix Results

When I checked our speed score on Google PageSpeed Insights, our score was either 99 or 100 on mobile and 100 on desktop across the entire site. In a follow-up we’ll show our exact optimization and caching setup for those who are interested).

And, there’s still some optimization we can do on our end!

GTmetrix also reported excellent speed with next to no latency. An overall grade of ‘A’ with both performance and structure coming in at 100%.

Our previous host it was fast, but not that fast. These are among the best performance scores I’ve seen for First Contentful Paint (FCP), Time to First Byte (TTFB), First Input Delay (FID) and Time to Interactive (TTI). If you’re not familiar with the previous list of acronyms, they’re some of the ways web site load speed is measured (whether they’re relevant or not).

How are they doing it?

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Rocket.net is using several optimization techniques to serve their WordPress pages at incredible speed. One worth note is that they’re using CloudFlare Enterprise.

CloudFlare Enterprise is expensive – a $6,000 value you can get from Rocket.net for $30 or less a month depending on the plan you go with.

But, Rocket.net has made arrangements to include with all of their hosting plans. And, at the time of writing this, they’re the only managed WordPress hosting provider that does.

Another big boost is by way of full page caching and where Rocket.net’s hosting servers are placed.

Our hosting servers reside at the Edge of the Cloud in what’s known as Internet Exchanges. Every exchange has direct connectivity to the local ISP’s which ultimately reduces latency and drastically boost your WordPress performance.

– Rocket.net

Easy WordPress site administration

Instead of using cPanel or Plesk, Rocket.net uses a simple control panel of their own design. It is intuitive to navigate and simple to use.

Once logged in, you are presented with the Rocket.net Dashboard. It cleanly displays a list of you managed WordPress sites and the total number of visitors, disk usage and bandwidth usage for your account.

From the Control Panel’s dashboard you can either select a site to work with or launch its WordPress Admin. It’s also a launching point to view or submit support tickets. We’ll talk more about support in a bit.

Choosing a site allows management of all aspects of that WordPress site including:

All the features are well thought out and straightforward to use.

Other notable features

There’s far too much to note in a single post (there will be more)! But, we’ve handpicked a few features that we find important when choosing managed WordPress hosting.

• Automatic Updates – Updating of the WordPress Core, Themes and Plugins is automatic on Rocket.net. Settings are available those who prefer to make those changes themselves.
• Backups – Rocket.net includes daily backups with every hosting account. Restoring from a backup is easy, too. Beyond automatic daily backups, ad hoc backups can be made at any time.
• Customer Service – Finding hosting with good customer service seems much harder than it should be. Rocket.net has responsive and helpful customer service. I was pleasantly surprised the few times I have need their help.
• Reliability – Rocket.net is newer on the scene, but their hosing uptime has been great so far. With their investment into their platform, we’re not surprised.
• Security – WordPress security often requires a handful of plugins to lock a site down. Rocket.net takes away most of that burden and cost with their built-in security features.
• Staging Site Included – Every WordPress installation includes a staging server. This not only takes away any concern when performing a theme or plugin update, but also allows for a place to test a new release of a site on an environment identical to the production WordPress site.

Rocket.net plans and pricing

With their entry level plan, a single WordPress site with or without WooCommerce is $30 when paid monthly. Annual billing brings that down considerably.

For affiliate sites and business hosting 3 WordPress sites the cost is under $17 a site. And, for agencies doing reseller hosting with 25 sites that cost comes in under $7 a site monthly.

There’s more options available than those few cases above, too.

Rocket.net Hosting Value

Following our Rocket.net review we recommend their Managed Hosting

For years we leaned toward the lowest cost hosting we could find. As page load speed has become a ranking factor, I’ve migrated many sites to faster hosting environments. Doing so is inevitably more costly.

Spending, $20 or $30 for Managed WordPress Hosting service that is simply better isn’t a deterrent to us at all.

We don’t mind paying $30 or more for managed WordPress hosting that solves the speed challenge, but is also easy to use, and most importantly, has great customer service.

Rocket.net meets all our criteria, and we recommend Rocket.net Managed WordPress hosting without hesitation.

Cost vs. cost benefit

Beyond being blazingly fast, having great customer service and being focused on WordPress hosting specifically, there’s actually cost savings with Rocket.net, too.

How? There’s several plugins you won’t need to purchase for starters. On top of that, Rocket.net can save you time managing your WordPress site with features like automatic updates. And, finally, by providing world-class security, you’ll avoid extremely costly downtime that comes with a security breach or hack.

Above all, what drove us to write this Rocket.net review, and for it to be so positive, is that Rocket.net is simply the best WordPress host we have every used. It is blazingly fast, faster than any host we have seen to-date, easy to use, feature rich and, importantly, has prompt, excellent support.

Ready to give Rocket.net a try? Get started and pay only $1 for the first month.