Rocket.Net Review: Easiest and Fastest WordPress Managed Hosting?

Looking for powerful WordPress hosting and interested in Rocket.Net? Rocket.net and WordPress are the perfect combinations for each other.

Rocket, or OnRocket or Rocket.net is a managed WordPress hosting provider that focuses on offering the best website speed possible using an easy to use interface and this is what makes it one of the best WordPress hosting services out there.

Managed WordPress Hosting is, as the name suggests, an optimized and preinstalled hosting service in which all you need to do is to pay for the hosting, and you are good to go. Managed WordPress hosting services are costlier than unmanaged ones.

In this Rocket.net review, I will guide you through all the features and benefits Rocket.net offers over other hosting services, along with its pros and cons.

About Rocket.Net

rocket net home

Rocket.net or OnRocket is a powerful and super fast WordPress hosting service that's causing a stir in the WordPress community for good reasons. Its user-friendly interface and easy-to-use setup have been exceptional.

Speed:93ms
Uptime:99.99%
Support:24/7 Live chat, Email, Over the phone
Apps:WordPress
Backups:Automated backups that last 14 days. Manual Backups are available too.
Pricing:Starter, Pro, Business, Agency
Migration:Yes, Free and Unlimited.
Refund:30 days money-back guarantee
Pricing:Starts at $1/mo (renews $25/mo)

Let's see how things went when I gave it a try.

First Impressions

One of the first things that I look for in a hosting service is how user-friendly is their onboarding process. This is my personal measuring scale for any SaaS product.

Rocket.net just nailed it. The signup and payment process was a single-page thing that took less than two minutes to do. Once that was done, I was welcomed with my own dashboard, also known as mission control.

Rocket.Net Review Dashboard

The whole process of creating a WordPress installation on a temporary URL, xyz.onrocket.net took me less than 3 minutes.

I installed plugins and moved my existing files to xyz.onrocket.net within minutes. Once everything moved, I changed the domain hosted to gatilab.com.

The domain migration took a total of 6 minutes, and my site was on a whole new hosting in just 9 minutes.

If you don't know, gatilab.com is my primary business site.

Great stuff!

The Mission Control

This is the place where you manage your WordPress site/sites. Do not confuse it with WordPress Dashboard. That is different from mission control.

Mission control shows the sites, estimated traffic, disk and bandwidth usage — along with options to create new sites and edit existing ones.

You can contact customer support using the same page.

Mission control contains other great sets of tools and information as well.

Site Stats

This looks complete to me. There are several options to manage your sites, divided into 6 main parts.

  1. Overview
  2. Plugins
  3. Themes
  4. Backups
  5. Reporting
  6. Advanced

You have already seen Overview settings above. In this tab, you can track traffic, edit FTP and other details, change domain, move from production mode to development mode and so on.

The next is the Plugins tab. In this, you can see, upload, delete, and activate/deactivate WordPress plugins at your pleasure. This comes very handy when your site is down or if you cannot access your WordPress dashboard.

Rocket.net manage plugins

You can also add new plugins using this page by searching for one.

Rocket.net Plugins list

Similarly, in the Themes tab, you can add and manage WordPress Themes.

image 14

Now let's talk about the Backups. The most important feature of any hosting service.

Manual and Automated Backups

Rocket.net has options to create both manual and automated backups for your sites. These backups can be easily restored and are lifesavers for web developers. As you can see in the screenshot below, the automated backups are recurring daily. Additionally, you can create a manual backup if you make large changes to your website.

Rocket.net Backups

Auto-updates and Advanced Settings

WordPress 5.5 started supporting auto updates for plugins, themes and WordPress installations. You can toggle these settings from the Advanced tab in your mission control. You can also change the PHP version of the server as per your requirements. If you use SSH to manage your WordPress installation, you can turn that on as well using the Advanced tab.

image 16

Rocket.Net Review

Enough with the walkthrough. All of these features don't count for much against performance, uptime and support.

I have been using Rocket.net for a couple of months now. To be honest, it has surpassed my expectations. Let's talk about the Rocket.Net Review in some sub-headings:

Uptime

On a personal level, I didn't notice any downtime at all. Even the third party monitoring tools have reported over 100% uptime for their servers. This is a great achievement. As far as I know, transient network hiccups and hardware failures make even the largest of the web hosts go down.

Rocket.net is new and not a lot of customers are hosting their sites there for now. This uptime can be expected for the time being. But the real challenge will be managing more sites when their businesses scale and new customers sign up for their services.

Performance

Rocket.net is freaking fast. You can give my site at gatilab.com a quick run to check how things are. I have been advocating for site performance for a decade now. Slow-loading sites cost not only your valuable money but also your whole business. Rocket.net is in-house and optimized for faster loading time and quick performance.

Here's how Gatilab performed with Rocket:

Gatilab Page speed test on Rocket.net

A whopping 100% on Desktop and 98% on Mobile.

Even my fully optimized homepage doesn't perform this well.

Why does Rocket.net outperform? Well, such an optimization requires optimizing various PHP and other server settings. The team at Rocket has already worked through this to sell their product as the label of the fastest. And they surely deliver on that label. I didn't have to do much with optimization on my site and I am very pleased with the performance.

Rocket.net uses Cloudflare Enterprise as the CDN (content delivery network) and serves dynamic content in HTML using their speedy layer caching and compression. These two are added to all Rocket.net plans and pre-managed for the ultimate performance.

Security

A hack-proof site is the face of a bulletproof business. Rocket offers a set of security tools that are auto-setup for all your sites. They use Web Application Firewall (WAF) to scan and defer malicious web requests and hacker attacks. A network firewall filters such data and prevents them from being uploaded to your WordPress installation.

Above all, an SSL certificate is provided for free with every installation. SSL certificates are important for both security and SEO purposes. To improve this whole system of securing your website, Rocket.net also offers Two Factor Login using your smartphones or an authenticator app.

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.

Support

Hosting is a subject of troubleshooting, issues and more and that is why support is the most important part of a hosting product. Rocket.net offers 24x7 support using Email, Live Chat and over the phone. The phone support is restricted to high-tier plans, but live chat is more than enough to solve your day-to-day issues in real time.

Website Migration

I didn't get to use it, but Rocket.net offers Website Migration free of charge. If you had an existing website hosted elsewhere, you can raise a ticket to migrate that to Rocket.net for free.

30 Money Back Guarantee

Refunds are extremely important, no matter what you are selling online. What if your product is not suitable for someone? I love those brands that offer a money-back guarantee in case of a poor experience. Rocket.net, even though they have put everything into building their product, offers an unconditional 30-days money-back guarantee. You have total freedom to try and decide whether or not it fits your needs.

I love to see refunds offered by any company because it means that they are so 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 their systems so that they confidently expect that, once you make the commitment, you won’t think of going anywhere else.

Pricing

With this much goodness available, something had to be bad. And that something is pricing. Rocket.net offers single-site plans at $30 per month — which is quite high compared to other hosting providers. If you buy the annual plan, you get a $60 discount on the overall price, and the rate reduces to $25/month. Larger plans are available at these rates:

  • $25/mo for 1 site
  • $50/mo for 3 sites
  • $83/mo for 10 sites
  • $166/mo for 25 sites

To understand full pricing, see the pricing page.

Why should you buy Rocket.net hosting?

Rocket.net is one of my favorite web hosts out there. There are several benefits of using this web host for your website, which would help you take it to the next level.

So, here are some major benefits of using this Rocket.Net hosting:

  • It comes with a free Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, which makes your website super-fast and secure
  • You get unlimited migrations for free with all the Rocket.net hosting plans
  • It comes with a lot of security features like WAF, malware protection, and more
  • Rocket.net hosting comes with inbuilt performance optimizations, so you won’t necessarily need any caching plugins, image optimization plugins etc., to make your website fast.
  • It has an intuitive and beginner-friendly dashboard.
Rocket.Net
rocket net review

Rocket.net is a wholesome product for WordPress bloggers, freelancers and business owners with an emphasis on performance, security and speed.

Product Brand: OnRocket

Product Currency: USD

Product Price: 1

Product In-Stock: InStock

Editor's Rating:
5

Pros

  • Onboarding
  • CDN & Performance
  • Support
  • Automatic Backups
  • Great Bandwidth Limits
  • Cloudflare Enterprise

Cons

  • Pricing per site is high