Rochen Hosting Review
"Rochen hosting is a huge WordPress and open source supporter and they have the hosting services to back it up."
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Expert Rating
of 5
User Rating
Thousands of businesses trust Rochen as their provider for fast, highly secure, and incredibly reliable WordPress hosting at an affordable price. Backed by a friendly and helpful 24/7 support team, web applications are in safe hands every minute of the day.
Rochen was established by Chris Adams in July 2000. They are headquartered in the UK and with data centers in the United Kingdom and the United States, this company specializes in hosting for WordPress, other OpenSource CMSs.
In addition to the excellent web hosting plans, Rochen is known for its certified engineers, strong backup, top-class facilities and reliable infrastructure. Rochen owns all of its own servers so there are no middlemen.
in the writeup below we will go through each of these points to learn more about Rochen Hosting
Pros and Cons
Pros
Rochen are true WordPress and Open Source Pros, they were the official host for Joomla.org, so you know they are experts.Cons
Support is email only and the VPS and dedicated server plans are a more expensive than competitor plans.Performance and Reliability
Their servers are not oversold like many of the large hosting providers. They stay up to date with the latest technology and always quick to respond to support tickets.
Rochen is a few dollars more per month than many of the discount hosts and the extra money spent is well worth it.
Customer Support
Excellent customer support. They do a great job with support via trouble tickets. For trouble tickets, you log in, open a ticket and they respond. Their staff members are extremely talented programmers and system administrators.
- Phone Support: Yes
- Support Ticket System: Yes (24hr/day)
- Live Support Chat: No
- Support Forums: Yes
- FAQ & Knowledgebase: Yes
Customer support options are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Hosting Plans & Packages
For hosting your WordPress website, Rochen provides the below hosting plan options. All plans include all of the WordPress and other benefits listed above.
Premium Web Hosting Plan Features:
- Disk Space: 20GB, 60GB, or 80GB SSD redundant SAN storage
- Data Transfer: Unmetered
- Refund Policy: 30 Days
- Domains in plan, 1, 10, and unlimited
- Price: Starting at From $4.95 /mo
- Control panel: cPanel with custom WordPress plug-ins
- Free SSL Certificates for all sites
- LiteSpeed Enterprise Web Server (with HTTP/2, PHP 7.1 and caching)
- Daily automated backups
- Unlimited email accounts
- Free WordPress website migration
- No price increase upon renewal
Hosting Features
Rochen includes all of the hosting features you want in a WordPress Hosting Company. The features range from, Free SSL certs to unlimited MySQL databases. Let’s go into detail with the major hosting features you will care about for your WP website.
SSL Certificates
With each website you host with them you can install a free, easy to add SSL certificate through Let’s Encrypt. If you are not familiar with Let's Encrypt, they are the largest SSL provider in the world. So you should feel safe using their SSL cert.
If you are running an eCommerce site or need a higher level SSL certificate then you can purchase a GeoTrust Rapid SSL or for $49.95/year or a GeoTrust EV Certificate for $249.95/year. If you are not familiar with this then no need to worry about it. It is a higher-level SSL that requires more verification.
Control Panel
Rochen uses cPanel for their control panel. If you are not familiar with cPanel, this is the hosting industry-standard. The majority of hosting companies use it and Rochen has it well implemented and configured.
With Rochen’s Professional Web Hosting plans each individual website gets its own cPanel account.
In addition to cPanel, you get a range of Rochen developed plugins including WP staging sites.
cPanel is great because it is so widely adopted in the industry. The WordPress development team and plugin developers are familiar with it. The work to ensure their code is compatible and runs well on cPanel. We are big fans of the Rochen/cPanel configuration.
Website Backups
Rochen has you covered when it comes to website backups. File and database backups are automatically made once per day and are stored off the server. The backup data is retained for 30 days.
Should you need to make your own backup, Rochen allows you to make your own backups using the included easy to use cPanel backup tools. This is particularly helpful when you are upgrading lots of plugins or making big design changes. It is nice to have something to roll back to should you need it.
If you are on the Managed Cloud Server plan then you can set a custom backup schedule using its control panel.
Just as important as backing your website up is restoring the data. This can be done through the Rochen control panel. The process is simple and easy to follow.
Domain Registration
If needed you can register domain names with Rochen. This is a nice feature if you have just a few names and like to have your domain name and hosting in the same place. This makes billing and renewal much simpler.
Note: It is our opinion that if you own lots of domains is better to keep domain names registered with a larger registrar such as GoDaddy or Network Solutions. This makes it easier to manage all of the names and to switch hosting companies should the need arise.
If you are looking for the free domain name registration with each hosting account, that freebie has gone away. Rochen no longer offers free domain name registration with each hosting account.
DNS and Nameserver Services
Managed DNS is included with all hosting plans.
If you are not familiar with this, all domain names need name servers. This can be provided by the domain name registrar or the hosting company. Either location works just fine.
Having the service available at Rochen makes it easier to add subdomains or IP addresses should the need arise.
If you are on a reseller plan or Managed Cloud Servers then you have the option to register custom label name servers. Again if you do not know what this means then no need to worry about it.
Email Services
Email hosting is included with all of their hosting plans. This means if you want to use the address of you@yourdomain.com then you can use Rochen’s email servers to do just this. To set this up you will go to the Rochen cPanel interface.
Out of curiosity, I asked Rochen how many people use this service. They said the majority of shared hosting accounts have at least one custom email address configured.
MySQL Databases
Finally to run a WordPress website you need a MySQL database. Good news. Rochen offers unlimited MySQL databases with each hosting account.
Typically you need just one database per website. You never know, sometimes you get into advanced configurations or you want to make a duplicate copy for testing and it is nice to have the ability to create unlimited databases.
The current trend with many hosting companies is to offer one database per website but with Rochen this is different. You get unlimited MySQL databases.
WordPress Specific Features
WordPress runs great at Rochen. They use cPanel for the control panel which is a perfect fit for WordPress. In addition to cPanel, they are extremely familiar with open source PHP & MySQL applications. If the previous sentence did not make sense to you all you need to know is Rochen is very familiar with hosting WordPress.
WordPress site Migration
If you already have a Wordpress site then you are in luck. Rochen provides free assisted WordPress migration. Rochen will transfer up to 10 sites from any host at no extra charge.
WordPress Installation
If you are starting with a new site, again Rochen offers 1 click WordPress installation. You can start with a preinstalled version after checkout or you can use the 1-click installer at any time after checkout
Automatic Updates
Rochen has automatic WordPress Updates
WordPress custom server setup
WordPress server-level features
- WP-CLI ready
- SFTP, SSH, and Git Pre-Installed
- HTTP/2 and PHP 7.4 for performance
- Web Application Firewall with WordPress specific WAF rules
Server Level Caching
Rochen offers server-level caching with LiteSpeed LSCache on all shared hosting plans. This can be used with a free LiteSpeed Cache WordPress Plugin. The two elements combine to provide a better page load experience through advanced Caching abilities.
LiteSpeed: Lightning fast performance with LiteSpeed Enterprise Web Server. WordPress users can also install the LiteSpeed cache plugin for WordPress for improved overall performance and finite control over caching right from the WP dashboard.
Allow WordPress to talk directly to the server-level smart caching for purges and more. Recommended all WordPress users at Rochen install.
WordPress Staging Servers
Clone a WordPress site into a staging subdomain and test out themes, plugins, code changes, etc, without affecting the live site. Option to then clone updated site back over to the live domain.
You can also password protect the staging server to avoid anyone else seeing the staging site and more importantly keeping Google from indexing it and any duplicate content penalties.
Company Details
- Headquarters: Dundee, UK
- Data Centers: London, UK, and Dallas, Texas, USA
- Currencies: USD, GBP, and Euros (coming soon)
- Privately owned and Operated since 2000
Data Center Details
Data Center Locations
Rochen has data centers in two locations, Dallas, TX, United States, and London, England, United Kingdom.
Data Center Details
Rochen has its own private suite within the data centers where they own all of the servers, directly attached network infrastructure and even the server racks themselves.
This gives Rochen an unprecedented level of control over the service it provides compared to hosts who simply rent servers from a larger provider or public cloud provider.
The US data center is SSAE 18 SOC 2 Type II certified and the UK data center has been awarded the prestigious UK Police flagship ‘Secured by Design‘ certification as well as being ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certified.
All facilities are staffed 24/7 by both security and technical personnel.
Operating System Level Software
Rochen's platform is built on top of VMware. Every server Rochen deploys these days is a virtualized VMware instance. The underlying VMware ESXi hypervisor hosting each virtual instance is served by redundant network connections from diverse network switches.
Redundant Power
Additionally, redundant power connections from diverse Power Distribution Units (PDUs) are fed from diverse Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) units and diesel generator plants.
Redundant Internet Connection
The data centers have redundant fiber-optic connections to the public internet that enter the facilities through physically separate areas of the building.
By building in full redundancy at all layers of the platform, Rochen aims to provide the highest levels of uptime and service.
30 Day Refund Policy
Rochen offers a 30-day money-back guaranteed for Premium web hosting and Managed Cloud servers. To get the refund you must be a new customer with a new account.
Third-party and additional services may not be refundable including add-ons, domain add-ons, any third party services, or renewals of existing services.
Domain name registration is not refundable and if you have the name set to automatically renew you must cancel the renewal 30 days prior to the renewal date.
To get your refund login to your account and open a cancellation and refund request with the billing department.
Summary
WordPress Hosting Expert
What you need to know about Rochen:
If you have a WordPress blog and speed and reliability are big requirements for you Rochen is one of the first hosts to consider. If you give Rochen a chance we do not think you will be disappointed.
4.3 / 5.0
Editor review
1 review
For those not familiar with Rochen they host the main Joomla.org website, true it is not WordPress but it is one of the other very popular opensource content management systems. They do an excellent job supporting the Joomla community these qualities are extended to all the WordPress Sites that they host. Additionally, if they can support such a high traffic site just think what they can do for your blog.
Reviewer Info
User reviews
3 reviews
Reviewer Info
Pros and Cons
But I stick with Rochen. Unlimited bandwidth means if unfortunately your site is placed with a few high traffic sites, your site will be very very very slow. I have hosted with another popular hosts before and I have problems accessing my site hosted there.
The customer service is excellent, and reply to you very quickly even if you just send in a “normal” ticket to them.
Highly recommended, and you will never look back.
Reviewer Info
My site was hacked and there were some Perl script running that caused Rochen concern with their server security. I can of course understand this. But they were arrogant with me in the support thread (my only way to communicate with them). They took my site down twice and both times left me hanging for hours upon hours. There was nothing I could do, as I was entirely at their mercy. Trust me, you do not want to be at Rochen’s mercy, period. To say they have a terrible ‘bedside manner’ with non-developers is an understatement. I am in customer service and if I ever treated a client the way they treated me…. well, my boss would hear about it – that much I am certain.
It is my recommendation that you stay clear of Rochen if you are a non-developer.
