The Story
For the longest time now I have been very happy hosting my websites with Cloudways connected to a Vultr High Frequency server, which for any of you still on shared hosting is a big upgrade and you should make the switch today whether you decide to go for Rocket Hosting or not.
Going to cloud based servers like Vultr was such a big upgrade even for me as I was coming from WPX Hosting, which is way better than most shared hosting, but what I noticed when using Cloudways to manage Vultr was backend performance, where simple everyday WordPress admin tasks just happened faster. Everything was buttery smooth, and life was good.
And honestly life would have continued to be good if I didn't start ‘tinkering' around with more plugins and especially complex ones like BuddyBoss for one of my sites. This is where many WordPress site admins go wrong because it's so easy to just add a plugin whenever a bright spark idea comes to mind for your website. It is both a blessing and a curse, because each new plugin adds to your page load times, and also increases the chances of being hacked or suffering a DDOS attack.
But in my case, the first problem was that BuddyBoss doesn't like the ‘must use' Cloudways plugin called Breeze, and suddenly my buttery smooth admin area was a complete mess again, taking up to 20 seconds to load.
The 2nd issue happened when I watched a webinar by BuddyBoss promoting their new Rapyd Website Hosting service, and they started to show how good their servers were benchmarking. I decided to test out my own server and got these two results with Vultr Cloudways.
To put this into context, Rapyd were showing a server score of over 9 and over 3,000 queries per second – so about six times faster.
Now for most basic WordPress websites that don't even use a page builder or plugins like WooCommerce, you might only notice a 50-100% or so performance increase on the frontend. But as soon as you add more complex plugins like I did with BuddyBoss then all of a sudden that six times performance difference becomes obvious.
So after many years with Cloudways and their refusal to remove Breeze from my autonomous plan because of how it connects to Cloudflare Enterprise, I had to face the hard truth – Cloudways was no longer the best option for one of my websites anymore.
Thankfully in that webinar hosted by Rapyd they kept comparing their servers to another company, which is the focus of this review today and I'm so glad they did. So let's talk about Rocket.net.
Rocket.net Hosting Benchmark
I'm not going to keep you in suspense, here are the benchmark scores for Rocket.
After talking to Rocket.net support about that object score of 0 they did a few checks and got it back working to get a perfect score of 10 for object cache, which improved the overall server score to an average of about 9.0. Some other tweaks included upgrading to PHP 8.1 and also increasing the OPCache memory limit to 256MB to get a highest server score of 9.1 and 3,330 queries per second, which is almost identical to what Rapyd was claiming to be at and getting close to seven times faster than what I had with Cloudways Vultr.
You can see the snappiness on the frontend of the BuddyBoss platform, but most importantly for me as an admin, the backend is flying again which makes managing the website so much more enjoyable. Reclaiming the joy of WordPress, as I like to say!
And with the Breeze plugin uninstalled I no longer have those quirks where I update a page and then go view it and nothing has changed even after refreshing.
Page caching can be a real nightmare, and when you have quality hosting like Rocket.net you might not even need it. Or if you do decide to use it, you may only see a minimal performance increase, even using the best option – WP Rocket. There's always that temptation to eke out every last drop of performance and go clicking a whole bunch of checkbox settings and your website is down for days.
Been there, done that!
So don't do what I did, just get a quality host! But if you really insist on using a page caching plugin, make sure to only activate one checkbox setting at a time, and on a staging website. Most quality website hosts will include that option, and Rocket.net is no exception. Your self discipline here will save you a world of hurt, downtime and lost sales!
Rocket.net Positives
Apart from the blistering fast frontend and backend performance, I'm really impressed that it only costs $30 per month or $25 per month when paid annually. So in other words cheaper than Cloudways autonomous ($35/m), but seven times faster, which is a value proposition you will not easily find elsewhere.
I'm also enjoying their admin interface:
I'm really happy about that built in file manager because I was hacked one time through a file manager plugin. But the advanced tab is where you can really do some good stuff to boost your site performance by deleting redundant database entries from old plugins you no longer use.
Removing this plugin bloat is one of the best things you can do for your website, but make sure you do it on staging, and know what you are doing because your whole website will irreparably break, and be lost if you don't have a recent backup before doing this.
But to have Rocket.net conveniently place database edits in the client dashboard shows their commitment in focusing on things that make the most difference for WordPress performance, and it really does show.
Ok so enough with the glowing review, what are the caveats…
Things to Consider
It's still early days for me when it comes to Rocket.net but one thing I have noticed is that their support is not as fast as the far bigger Cloudways team, which is now owned by Digital Ocean. In their welcome email to me, Rocket said to expect support ticket times of ten minutes, but my first email response from them took two. But using their live chat I got helped straightaway. So maybe some improvements are needed specifically for their email ticketing process.
This reflects in my support score of 4.4.
However, unlike Cloudways where I had to wait for two days before they could approve my request for an increased OPCache memory limit, Rocket.net did it for me on the spot through live chat. So don't get me wrong, you will receive excellent support from Rocket.net, but maybe stick to their live chat if you're in a pickle.