I have been with Liquid Web since Aug 2010 now. I started on a VPS, moved to Storm VPS, now on multiple Storm Dedicated Servers (business is good!).
I was with Site5 and Reseller Zoom / JaguarPC prior, and I also have hosting at DreamHost. I’ve worked with Rack Space, Site Ground, Media Temple, GoDaddy, NameCheap, HostGator, BlueHost, 1&1, Yahoo, West Host, and more on behalf of my clients.
Things I’ve really liked:
+ Extremely fast support. 59 seconds or less on phone and live chat, 30 minute via email / helpdesk.
+ Tier 2 support by default (‘heroic support’ as they call it). I am probably on the more needy side when it comes to requests – and I would say 9 out of 10 tickets get in the hands of someone who can fully resolve the problem. That is an excellent percentage compared to every other host I’ve worked with (except maybe Rack Space). The odd exception can be reassigned on request or automatically when that person goes off shift.
+ Easy scaling and upgrading. I have a website for a show on American primetime cable television – I quickly realized the server it was on was not going to cut it. A few clicks in the management dashboard, and I’ve scaled from a small VPS to a massive dedicated storm server for that account. I had to do this one time while I was out of the country and would be asleep when I wanted to make the upgrade – their support scheduled the upgrade for one of their engineers to do and watched the server after the upgrade for a few hours to make sure it was handling the load well and there were no issues. They also have frequently custom built servers for me when the ones listed in their stock aren’t quite the right fit for what I am wanting to do.
+ Well priced. In my mind, Liquid Web is Rack Space that doesn’t cost a fortune. I have had great experiences with Rack Space, but they are not affordable – I’d much rather put all that extra money RS would charge towards some monster hardware than the brand cost that it now is. Liquid Web’s support and network have left me in just as great a position as Rack Space would have, and at a fraction of the cost.
+ No downtime. Since 2010, I think there has been a total of probably 30-60 minutes of downtime (I don’t remember the exact amount – it was the Zone B network hardware issue they had in mid 2014) on my account (monitored every minute globally from Pingdom).
Issues over the last 4 years:
- There was a long period of time when the in-house server backups in Zone B (one of their 3 zones) was disabled because of network hardware issues. They were disabled June 19th and not re-enabled again until August 6th. I maintain three offsite backup sets with three different vendors, so this wasn’t the end of the world, but it would have made a restore a lot more time-consuming and was a layer of redundancy I didn’t particularly want removed.
- I love the level or support they provide, but there was a period during 2013 or 2014 where I found it difficult to get good answers to support issues. I am of the opinion that they have resolved those issues and recent tickets have been handled to a high level of satisfaction. Growing pains would be my guess.
- Several years ago I referred a handful of clients to their shared hosting service, and the affiliate manager at the time pulled some loophole in their affiliate terms to prevent me from getting credit. We’re not talking a great deal of money hear in the first place, and I had been a loyal customer for several years at that point, so I thought it trivial and petty that they would deny the commissions that other vendors would have had no problems honoring (three of the clients shared a billing address, but are separate incorporated organizations from the view of the government – they refused to honor two of the three. There was another instance as well where I setup the account and then handed it over to someone else; they said since I set it up they wouldn’t give the commission). They have a new affiliate manager now, but I haven’t used their program since having those issues so I can’t comment if that is any better.
- On Storm servers you get a 1 gig port and free incoming bandwidth which is awesome, but the bandwidth pricing over 5TB could be a bit better. Some of the offerings (for example, on WiredTree you get 20TB free, but the 1 gig port is extra)
- Upgrades involve brief downtime unless you switch servers. So, if I ‘resize’ a storm server, it will be down during some of that process (varies in time based on server size and data on the server, typically 20-30 minutes or so for me). When I need to avoid this, I do so by spinning up a new server, doing a quick WHM account transfer, and then spinning down the old server. I would love to see the resize process become seamless with no downtime or extra work on my part (for non critical sites, the downtime is very manageable, but for a few sites I can’t afford to have them down for any period).
Moving Forward:
Overall, I have had a very positive experience. I check on other providers every quarter or so to see if the price and offering I receive at LiquidWeb remains competitive, and each time I am satisfied. If anyone at LW is reading, I would love to see improvements on the last two points mentioned above, but other than that keep up the good work! 
Context: I host a lot of small to medium WordPress and Joomla sites, as well as one or two really high volume WordPress sites.
Server Hosting Tips via [4+ Year Review] My experience with Liquid Web.