Rocket.net Review 2026: We don’t Recommend

Rocket.net is a managed WordPress hosting founded in 2020. As a part of our methodology, we bought a hosting account from Rocket.net in October 2020, and we have been measuring their performance for the last 5 years continuously. Back in those days, Rocket.net was the only host to be integrated with Cloudflare Enterprise Edge Caching, offering the fastest response time among any of the hosts we have tested. But things have changed now with many hosting companies offering similar solutions even at a lower price. With the increased competition and Hosting.com’s acquisition in 2025, let’s see what they’ve got inside.

Performance Overview

Rocket.net offers an impressive response time of 380ms, 99.97% uptime, WPBench score of 7.5/10, and a global TTFB of 229ms. Our load test is blocked, so we don’t have data on their load handling performance.

TTFB server response time

Rocket.net has recorded an average response time of 380ms in Q4 2025. It has earned a score of 9/10 using our methodology. This place is Rocket.net in fifth position out of 34 hosting providers that we have tested. Rocket.net is only behind Pressable (341ms), WordPress.com (357ms), GoDaddy managed WordPress (361ms) and WP Engine (367ms). Rocket.net is ahead of all other 29 hosting services.

Based on our methodology, hosts with 350ms – 400ms response time will be included in the “Elite” category. This is an excellent performance for US based audience as we have tested from Rocket.net USA datacenter.

Rocket.net uses Cloudflare Enterprise CDN with Edge caching, the key architectural design in delivering fast server response times. In 2020, Rocket.net became one of the first hosts to offer this integrated feature, but now WP Engine started offering Cloudflare Enterprise and even recorded better response times than Rocket.net.

Methodology: We use the Pingdom synthetic monitoring tool to measure the average server response time. Our test site hosted in Rocket.net USA datacenter is pinged every 60 seconds from 19 North American locations like Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Matawan, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle, St.Louis, Tampa, Washington, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. For each of the visit, the average response time is calculated. We perform this 24/7/365 days a year, resulting in 525,600 datapoints in a year.

Uptime Analysis

Rocket.net recorded an average uptime of 99.97% in Q4 2025. Using our scoring methodology (100% = 10, 99.99% = 9.5, 99.98% = 9, 99.97% = 8.5), Rocket.net earned a score of 8.5/10 in the uptime test. Only 4 other providers in Q4 2025 have recorded 100% uptime, indicating they’re much superior to most other hosts.

Uptime is one of the strongest factors of Rocket.net for years. For 2022-23, Rocket.net has recorded 100% uptime for two consecutive years with zero outages and zero downtime. In 2024, Rocket.net recorded one outage which lasted for 1 minute, and in 2025, there are two outages which lasted for 30 minutes. This outages are caused by Cloudflare and not exactly with Rocket.net. Since Rocket.net is tightly integrated with Cloudflare, Rocket.net customers have faced the downtime.

Methodology: We use the same Pingdom Syntethic monitoring tool to measure uptime. The test site is pinged from 19 North American locations at 60-second intervals. We kept a threshold of 30 seconds and if the sites are unresponsive beyond that, it will be marked as downtime.

Load Handling

Our Rocket.net load test is blocked by Cloudflare security settings. We have been doing the load test for Rocket.net since 2021 without any issues. I reached out to the Rocket.net Team, including their CEO Ben Gabler, but they seem not to be interested in working with us. This is despite we have been recommending and sending them consistent leads for years. So, we don’t have any data to support their load test performance claims. Rocket.net is the only premium managed host that blocks load test while we have completed load test with all other providers like WP Engine, Kinsta, Liquid Web, Cloudways and Pressable.

Methodology: We send 0-100 consistent users to the test site’s Homepage for 60 seconds and then the average response time is measured. Lower the response time indicates faster performance. Our load test is done from the US East location using the Loader.io tool.

Global TTFB

Rocket.net records an average global TTFB of 229ms measured from 40 global locations across America, Europe and Asia-pacific. Again, thanks to Cloudflare Enterprise Edge caching, Rocket.net delivers the site’s contents to users from nearby edge nodes instead of origin server locations.

If you have got a site with global visitors, choose a host with Edge caching CDN and Rocket.net is good to go.

Methodology: The Rocket.net test site is pinged from 40 global locations and the TTFB of every location is collected and the final average global TTFB is measured.

Server Hardware

Rocket.net records a server hardware score of 7.5/10. The score is a mid-range, and in fact, Rocket.net has slipped a few positions from the previous year’s data, as it usually scores between 8 and 8.5.

The server hardware score of Rocket.net is midrange, but its competitors are a step ahead. For example, Kinsta scores 8.8 out of 10.

Methodology: In this test, we use the Benchmark WordPress plugin, which runs 21 individual tests across 5 different categories: CPU, Memory, File System, Database, and WordPress core operations. The plug-in does advanced tests to measure the raw server hardware capabilities. While our existing tests usually measure caching or CDN-optimised performance, this test brings the real server hardware performance where no caching is involved.

Rocket.net Vs Competitors

Host	#	Score	$/mo	TTFB	Up%	Load	Glbl	WPB	Perf	Tier
Rocket.net	#29	6.10	$30	380ms	99.97%	FAILED	229ms	7.5	4.00	Avg
WP Engine	#6	7.98	$23	367ms	100%	27ms	169ms	6.5	5.67	Elite
Kinsta	#13	7.02	$30	469ms	99.97%	40ms	416ms	8.8	4.92	Strong
SiteGround	#22	6.50	$3.99	632ms	99.97%	170ms	833ms	8.4	3.59	Blw Avg
Cldways VHF	#17	6.70	$16	424ms	99.99%	96ms	444ms	7.6	4.85	Strong
Bluehost	#14	6.90	$3.99	520ms	99.95%	170ms	345ms	9.6	4.30	Avg
Pressable	#2	8.38	$25	341ms	100%	12ms	231ms	6.7	5.83	Elite

Rocket.net Vs WP Engine: WP Engine outperforms Rocket.net on both performance and pricing. WP Engine offers an average response time of 367ms, and Rocket.net secured 380ms. Similarly, WP Engine recorded 100% uptime while Rocket.net recorded 99.97% uptime, which is not what you can expect from a premium-priced host. In pricing, WP Engine offers steeper introductory discounted pricing where you can get started from $20/month whereas it costs $25/month on Rocket.net.

During my testing, one thing about Rocket.net that concerned me is their approach to WordPress installations. If you are setting up a new site, they automatically enable you to install several third party plugins. Though, they do provide an option to disable these plugin installations, they are absolutely not necessary to do at first step. These plugins might be popular, but what they do offer is a basic free version, and when installed, the WordPress dashboard is queued up with a list of notifications to upgrade to their premium versions. These installations are more of a business partnership rather than a user’s needs. It also adds unnecessary bloat, slowing down the site. I see such partnerships among shared hosts, but for premium hosting, it’s not acceptable, at least in my opinion. None of their competitors, like WP Engine, Kinsta, or Pressable, offers such a bloated installation.

Alternative

The best alternative to Rocket.net is Pressable hosting. Rocket.net offers four basic plans starting at $25/month, $50/month, $83/month, and $166/month. The $25/month starter plan offers one WordPress install with 10GB storage and 50GB bandwidth. You can get 20GB Storage, 1 WordPress install for $20/month on the Pressable Signature 1 plan, which also offers better TTFB, uptime, server hardware, global TTFB and load handling performance than Rocket.net. 

The $50/month Pro plan offers 3 WordPress installs with 20 GB storage. You can sign up for the Signature 2 plan on Pressable for $37.50/month, and get 3 WordPress installs and 30 GB storage. 

The $83/month business plan offers 10 WordPress installs with 40GB storage. You can try the Signature 4 plan, which comes at $75 per month and offers the same 10 WordPress installs with 50 GB storage. You can also try out the Signature 3 plan, which offers 5 installs and it costs $50 per month. The $166/month Expert plan offers 25 WordPress installs, with 50GB and 500GB bandwidth. Pressable does not offer a 25 WordPress install plan, but you can host 20 WordPress sites on the signature 5 plan for $129 per month with 80GB storage.

Rocket.net Agency plans are the same as regular managed hosting plans. It starts at $83/month. We always recommend Kinsta for agencies as they offer the best benefits, like up to $10,000 in hosting credits for eligible agencies with an unbranded WordPress admin dashboard.

Enterprise plans are very similar to regular plans but come with dedicated server resources and enterprise phone support. Being a young company, we don’t recommend them for Enterprise customers. WP Engine, Kinsta, or Pressable should be your choice based on the reliability over the years, customer support via native English speakers, and a mature platform.

Who Should Use Rocket.net?

We don’t recommend Rocket.net for any kind of website. Wait, you said, Rocket.net offers impressive TTFB and uptime! Yes, it offers excellent speed and we decided to recommend them for small, low traffic personal websites or blogs with a global audience. However, for $25/month, it’s overkill.

When you are not running a business website, spending $25/month is not worth it. There are options like WordPress.com, which comes with edge caching CDN and better performance than Rocket.net at $2.75/month, including the renewal charges.

Who Shouldn’t Use Rocket.net?

For any of the sites that are expecting a traffic spike, we don’t recommend Rocket.net because we don’t have the data.

Budget-conscious users who are looking for simple WordPress hosting, Rocket.net is not for you.

If you are looking for managed WordPress hosting with email services enabled, Rocket.net is not for you. You can choose Liquid Web Managed WordPress hosting.

If you are moving from WP Engine or Kinsta, then Rocket.net is a great alternative. In this case, I recommend you to try out Pressable Hosting.

Our Verdict

Rocket.net’s score of 6.1/10 places them at 29th out of 34 hosting services that we have tested in 2026. Rocket.net started well with Cloudflare Enterprise Integration in 2020, but now competitors like WP Engine and Pressable have caught up, offering even better performance. The company is also acquired by Hosting.com, which is acquiring multiple hosting companies in the industry. Now, Hosting.com offers Rocket.net service on its own website, which raises the question of how Rocket.net is going to survive as a separate brand. To support this fact, I also happened to see that Hosting.com’s customer support team is also handling the Rocket.net customer support in recent times. However, in the previous year, the Rocket.net team had its own customer support.So, unless Rocket.net brings new features into its platform, we don’t recommend it as we have stable platforms like WP Engine, Kinsta, and Pressable as an alternative to Rocket.net.