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Nestify Review – Managed WordPress Hosting At A Super Low Price
You know what I love about managed WordPress hosting? Beyond the awesome features…it’s how competitive things are becoming. See, competition is great because it brings innovation and lower prices. Hosts may not love it, but I do!
You’ve probably heard of the big names in managed WordPress hosting, but have you ever heard of Nestify? I hadn’t until I sat down to write this Nestify review.
But after playing around with Nestify’s interface and running it through a few tests, I think we’ve got another solid entrant to the managed hosting marketplace.
Nestify manages to pack a full array of managed hosting features into a surprisingly low price. If that piques your interest, keep reading for my full Nestify review.
What Features Does Nestify Offer?
Nestify is fully managed WordPress hosting. That means you get tons of concierge features you’ll never see on cheap shared hosting.
With Nestify, those features are:
- Ability to spin up a new WordPress/WooCommerce site in under a minute.
- Infrastructure powered by Amazon Web Services.
- Built-in caching
- Security features to like firewalls, malware protection, DDoS protection, and more.
- Free SSL via Let’s Encrypt. It’s also set up by default for your site.
- One-click updates for core, themes, and plugins.
- Automatic and on-demand backups + one-click restores.
- Built-in CDN
- One-click staging sites
- PHP 7.0 for improved performance
- Free migration and setup services
Nestify also has this really interesting On Page Optimization feature that I’ve never seen anywhere else. It lets you make lots of little tweaks to JavaScript, CSS, and Google Analytics/AdSense scripts to improve their performance.
And if you’re a developer, you’ll dig that Nestify integrates easily with Git and offers WP-CLI and SSH access.
Also, while I didn’t have a need to use their support personally, all Nestify’s support is handled directly by their engineers, not outsourced to live chat operators. That means they have the ability (and willingness) to actually help you tweak your code if needed.
Hands On With the Nestify Interface
One of the great things about Nestify is how easy it makes it to spin up a new site. They claim you can “Launch WordPress in 55 Seconds”. After using the interface, I can say that they’re definitely not exaggerating.
To spin up a new site, all you need to do is:
- Enter your domain name
- Choose your platform (includes both vanilla WordPress and WooCommerce)
- Choose your data center (the options are North America, Europe, or Asia)
- Click the Deploy button
Then, in about 15 seconds (I timed it!), you’ve got your brand new WordPress install. All you need to do is grab your username/password and log in to the WordPress dashboard:
So what all can you do in the Nestify hosting dashboard? Let’s find out…
Nestify Dashboard Home
Here’s what the main dashboard page looks like:
As you can see, you have the button for one-click WordPress updates, as well as a quick overview of your usage stats so far.
The dashboard certainly isn’t fancy, but I actually like its minimalist look. It’s easy to find everything and it isn’t bogged down by unnecessary design elements.
Backups Dashboard
The Backups dashboard lets you do three things:
- View your upcoming and recent automated backups.
- Run an on-demand backup.
- Restore from a backup.
It’s a pretty standard backup setup as far as managed WordPress hosts go, but it’s always nice to be able to run on-demand backups on top of the regular schedule:
Database, FTPs / Git / SSH, Memcached, Advanced Dashboards
Across these three dashboards, you can manage most of your services and integrations.
In Database, you can change your database password and launch phpMyAdmin:
In FTPs / Git / SSH, you can view your FTP accounts and quickly set up Git push details:
Then in Memcached, you can click a button to integrate Memcached with WordPress (no further configuration needed):
And finally, in the Advanced tab, you can downgrade to PHP 5.6 if needed. But the default for all new installs on Nestify is to use PHP 7.0:
Built-in Optimization Tab
The Optimization tab includes all of those tweaks that I mentioned in the feature list. These are what I’ve never seen on another host. They let you tweak how JavaScript and CSS are handled, minify your code, lazy load your images, and more. All without needing any plugins!
That’s pretty dang cool:
Quickly Push/Pull From Staging Sites
And finally, like most quality managed WordPress hosts nowadays, Nestify lets you easily set up a staging site and push changes to your production site:
You can send data in both directions. That is, from “production → staging” and “staging → production”.
Your staging environment is automatically shielded from Google. And if you’d like, you can also password protect it.
Running Nestify Through a Few Tests
To test Nestify’s performance, I thought it would be appropriate to use the Divi theme (because that’s what Nestify uses for their landing). I built a quick homepage using one of Divi’s premade layouts to add some complexity for the test:
I didn’t do anything specific for optimization. Of course, Nestify does already include some optimization methods like built-in caching, as I mentioned above.
Then, I ran it through Pingdom testing from the New York test center:
Under one second isn’t bad for not adding any optimization!
And here’s the results from Load Impact after running 30 VUs through:
How Much Does Nestify Hosting Cost?
One of the key differentiating features that Nestify has is its price point. If you just read everything that I wrote above, you’d think Nestify would cost at least $20+ per month, right? That would put it in the range of the lowest tiers from WP Engine and Flywheel.
That’s actually what I thought before I looked at the pricing page. But I was very pleasantly surprised when I actually saw the price list…
Nestify starts at just $5.99 per month for 25,000 monthly visitors and 5 GB SSD storage. Now, that plan doesn’t have staging, but the other plans (with staging and more traffic) only cost $8.99 and $11.99 per month respectively. That’s crazy cheap!
You can view the full chart below:
One thing to keep in mind is that all of those prices are for a single domain. If you’d like to add additional domains, each added domain costs $3.99 per month.
What about overages? As you can see, Nestify’s plans are per visitor. But don’t worry – Nestify will not shut you down if you go over your limits.
The first three times you go over your limits, Nestify will handle those visitors at no extra cost to you. After the third time, they’ll upgrade your plan to the next available plan. I think that’s a very generous and fair approach.
If you need even more power, Nestify also offers more expensive VPS plans. You can view details for those below:
Wrapping Things Up
Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to set my expectations when I saw that Nestify was running their landing page on Divi. I mean, nothing against Divi, but it’s not something I’ve ever seen used by a managed WordPress host.
But the Divi front-end belies the easy-to-use backend and performance. I guess it’s true that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover!
Performance was great in my speed tests, the dashboard is clean and functional, and the prices are pretty dang affordable.
Plus, you can sign up for a free trial (no credit card needed). So, sign up and play around with Nestify. If you like what you see, Nestify will migrate your site over for free. If not, you’re not out any money!
The control panel looks really great. Git, auto backup and optimization are very cool features.
WordPress is good but with Nestify it can be great! As we all know, slow loading WordPress sites suck and it is bad for user experience.
Hi,
Any nice deals from Nestify for WPLift readers? :)
Pat