Rocket.net Review: Harness the Power of Cloudflare Enterprise

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What do you get when you cross a hosting company with a rocket?

A WordPress host that goes super-sonic!

All jokes aside, you’re probably considering hosting your site with Rocket.net for the same reason I was—Cloudflare Enterprise and Argo at a fair price.

Let’s not waste any more oxygen and get into this Rocket.net review.

Contents

Disclosure: You should always assume that pretty much every link on this site is an affiliate link, and if you click it and buy something you like, I’ll earn some money to help me buy a DeLorean, build a time machine, and travel back to the 90s so I can watch Hey Arnold! and eat Dunkaroos again.

Harness the power of Cloudflare Enterprise with Rocket.net.

What Is Rocket.net?

Rocket.net is a managed WordPress hosting platform that brings with it the power of Cloudflare Enterprise and Argo Smart Routing to provide users with SpaceX-level performance and security at a fair price—sorry Blue Origin.

Performance

With full-page caching on Cloudflare’s enterprise network and Argo, lighting-fast speeds are pretty much expected.

In fact, I would’ve been shocked if that turned out not to be the case.

Below are some tests I ran using PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom.

PageSpeed Insights

Rocket.net PageSpeed Insights results
Speed test: PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights Results

FCP0.9 s
LCP1.6 s
TTI1.1 s

GTmetrix

Rocket.net GTmetrix speed test
Speed test: GTmetrix

GTmetrix Results

TTFB57 ms
FCP172 ms
LCP196 ms
TTI218 ms

Pingdom

Rocket.net Pingdom speed test
Speed test: Pingdom

I was previously with NameHero and getting great speeds, not as great as with Rocket.net, but still great—using LiteSpeed Cache and QUIC.cloud CDN, of course.

However, one issue I was having was inconsistent TTFB with QUIC.cloud CDN. With Rocket.net, my TTFB is much lower and consistent.

Below are the results of testing TTFB from 10 locations using KeyCDN’s performance test.

Rocket.net TTFB test
TTFB test

Keep in mind that all of this is right out of the box. With NameHero, I had to spend some time configuring LiteSpeed Cache and QUIC.cloud CDN.

If you’re looking to speed up your site, you can check out my guide here.

Cloudflare Enterprise

Cloudflare Enterprise is a premium plan offered by Cloudflare that provides users with advanced security, performance, and reliability.

It sits right above their $200/month Business plan, but Rocket.net includes it at no additional costs for all websites hosted on their platform.

Cloudflare Enterprise vs. Free

Here are some advanced features included in Cloudflare Enterprise that you won’t find in their Free, Pro, or Business plan:

  • Premium PoPs – Other plans don’t include PoPs in premium locations like Australia and India. Enterprise allows routing and connectivity on all of Cloudflare’s premium PoPs.
  • Priority routing – Your traffic takes priority over all other Cloudflare traffic.
  • Full-page caching with cookie bypass – By default, the Enterprise CDN will cache all your static files—think images, CSS, and JavaScript—including HTML. This means there’s no waiting for database queries or PHP processing. Rocket.net is also configured to bypass the cache for dynamic sites like WooCommerce.
  • Argo Smart Routing with tiered caching – This allows you to reduce latency and cache misses by routing traffic across the fastest path—think Waze but for web traffic. Just as Waze can tell you which route to take when driving by seeing which roads are congested, Argo can make routing decisions based on real-time network conditions.
  • Image optimization and WebP conversion – On-the-fly image compression and WebP conversion via Cloudflare Polish.

What I Like About Rocket.net

Just like you’d expect from a managed WordPress hosting provider, you’ve got your basic features:

  • Free migrations
  • Free SSL
  • Staging environments
  • Backups
  • SSH, FTP, Git, phpMyAdmin

I’m not going to bore you with a long and detailed list of all their features since that’s available on the Rocket.net website.

Instead, I want to go over some of the things I believe set this host apart from others—besides Cloudflare Enterprise.

1. Active Founder

Having launched in 2020, I was wary about moving to Rocket.net.

After reading about Ben’s background (17 years in the industry, employee #10 at HostGator, launching cPanel and managed hosting at GoDaddy, and Chief Product Officer at StackPath), seeing competitors vouch for him, and seeing him interact with others on FB groups, I decided to look more into the platform.

I then had a short exchange with him on Messenger and asked him a few questions about Rocket.net.

Overall, Ben seems like a nice guy who’s going all-in on his venture.

If you’re familiar with Tom Usborne from GeneratePress, Ben gives off a similar helpful/chill vibe.

If you go through Rocket.net’s website, you’ll see that the majority of blog posts and documentation were written by Ben, you see him answering support tickets, replying to Facebook comments, and on Slack with customers.

It’s like the dude is an unstoppable productivity machine—definitely someone to admire.

2. WAF and Imunify360 Security

Security is best done at the server level, not at the PHP level with plugins that can slow your site.

So naturally, I was drawn to their global web application firewall (WAF) powered by Cloudflare and their local firewall powered by Imunify360.

WAF and Imunify360
Source: Rocket.net

Cloudflare Enterprise sits at the edge and scans every request to your site.

If it finds anything suspicious, it will block it and prevent it from ever reaching your server, so you won’t have to process any of that.

This is a great way to secure your site and improve performance at the same time.

All the traffic that checks out will be allowed into Rocket.net’s servers where it receives a second inspection by Imunify360.

This will provide protection from attacks like:

  • Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)
  • SQL injections
  • Cross-site scripting (XSS)
  • Malicious file upload
  • Directory traversal
  • And more

3. Easy-to-Use Control Panel

I appreciate their uncluttered and streamlined control panel that’s cleverly named “Mission Control.”

In their dashboard, you’ll be able to:

  • Upgrade your plan
  • See how many visitors you’ve had
  • Check your disk and bandwidth usage
  • Contact support via chat or tickets
  • Manage your site
Rocket.net control panel dashboard
Control panel dashboard

Once you click on the site you want to manage, you’ll be able to:

  • Create staging sites
  • Clear cache
  • Update and deactivate plugins and themes
  • Create and restore manual backups
  • Restore from automated backups
  • View CDN and WAF reports
  • Upgrade PHP version
  • Manage your database via phpMyAdmin
  • Set automatic updates
  • Manage your site via SSH
  • Add cron jobs
Control panel
Control panel

4. Feature Requests

As mentioned earlier, Rocket.net is still pretty new, so they’ll be rolling out many more features as time goes by.

One thing I found cool is that they have a section where you can recommend features, see what others have recommended, upvote features, and see what’s planned/in progress.

Feature requests
Feature requests

There are definitely some great things in the works and was excited to see that they’re working on adding an easy way to set redirects.

Support

Just like NASA did with Apollo 11, they provide 24/7 support to make sure that your journey into cyberspace will be as smooth as possible.

You have access to them via phone, live chat, and email.

To be honest, aside from the migration that took about 12 minutes on a Friday night, I haven’t really dealt with their support.

However, I’ve seen several people mention how great and responsive they are.

Migration support
Migration support

Cons

No review is complete without some cons, and this Rocket.net review is no exception.

Here are some things that might be off-putting to some people:

  • They’re fairly new – Jumping into something new can be risky. However, Ben and his team have definetely invested a lot of time, effort, and money into the company. They’ve partenered with Cloudflare and currently have 20+ support techs. If I wasn’t confident about the Rocket.net’s future, I would’ve not made the switch.
  • Lacking features – As mentioned above, there are features like redirect rule management and enabling/disabling redis caching that are not available yet but are in the works, so you’ll have to be patient.
  • Pricey – Rocket.net is in the premium hosting category, so they’re definitely more expensive than your typicall shared web host. I’d say that the price is worth it, though, considering that you get Cloudflare Enterprise with it.
  • No email hosting – Like most managed hosts, Rocket.net doesn’t provide email hosting, so you’d have to use something like Google Workspace. That said, you shouldn’t keep your email and website on the same server anyway.

Rocket.net Reviews

Below are some comments from other Rocket.net users.

Rocket.net reviews

Pricing

They currently have four plans—Starter, Pro, Business, and Agency—all of which come with a 30-day money-back guarantee and the features mentioned above, including Cloudflare Enterprise.

The only thing that changes between plans is the number of websites and monthly visits you can have.

STARTERPROBUSINESSAGENCY
$30/mo$60/mo$100/mo$200/mo
1 website3 websites10 websites25 websites
250,000 visits1,000,000 visits2,500,000 visits5,000,000 visits

If you need more resources than their plans cover, you can contact them for special pricing.

They currently have a deal where you can get the first month for $1.

Harness the power of Cloudflare Enterprise with Rocket.net.

Rocket.net Infographic

Rocket.net infographic
Rocket.net infographic

FAQs

The next thing we’ll cover in this Rocket.net review is some frequently asked questions.

1. What’s used to separate websites?

They’re currently using Cloudlinux with CageFS on every server to completely isolate each site into its own virtual environment.

2. Can I get the same performance from Cloudflare APO?

No, while Cloudflare APO is great for improving performance, it doesn’t benefit from the same Enterprise PoPs and priority routing.

Their Argo Smart Routing makes cache misses significantly faster than APO because their servers are located in the same data centers as Cloudflare.

Plus, APO doesn’t provide WAF, which is crucial for security.

3. What is a visit?

Visits are the number of unique visits that reach your WordPress site. Visits that happen on the CDN do not count against your monthly allowance.

4. Does Rocket.net offer a free trial?

No, but you can take advantage of their 30-day money-back guarantee and their $1 for the first month offer.

5. Are there any banned plugins?

No, you can use any plugin you’d like on Rocket.net.

6. Do I need to use a caching plugin?

No, you don’t need a caching plugin to take advantage of their full-page caching since this is automatically handled by Cloudflare Enterprise.

However, you could still use one to reduce any PHP usage on cache misses.

How to Migrate to Rocket.net

To get started with Rocket.net, simply visit their website, choose a plan, and create an account.

Once you’re inside the dashboard, click on “Create Site.”

Create site

Next, enter your website’s name and select your desired location—this is the physical location where your data will be stored, so choose the one closest to your target audience.

Keep in mind that Cloudflare Enterprise will serve your site all over the world anyway, but still… just in case.

Enter site details
Enter site details

Now enter your WordPress information:

  • Install Path – You can leave this blank
  • Administrator Username – Username you’ll use to access WordPress
  • Administrator Password – Use a long and complex password—think 10+ characters
  • Administrator Email – Email where you’ll receive info regarding your account
  • Language – Your desired language
  • Additional Options – If you want to add Multisite Support or WooCommerce

Now you can contact support and request a migration.

To do this, go back to the dashboard, scroll down to the “Support” box and click “Create Ticket.”

Create ticket
Create ticket

Then click the drop-down menu, select “Migrations,” and provide the team with the following details:

  • WordPress URL
  • WordPress admin username
  • WordPress admin password
Migration request
Migration request

After the team has migrated your site, check that everything is working properly and take your site live by pointing your DNS to your Rocket.net URL.

To update your DNS, login to your Rocket.net dashboard and click the “Manage” button next to the site you want to take live.

Take site live
Take site live

Look for the “Ready to go live?” section and click “Get Started.”

Get started
Get started

Enter your domain name and click “Continue.”

Next, you’ll need to create TXT records on your DNS Zone to validate the SSL certificate.

To do this, login to your DNS provider, click on your domain name, add the TXT records provided by Rocket.net, and click “I’ve Added TXT Records, Continue.”

Create TXT records
Create TXT records

Still inside your DNS provider, find the APEX record that has yourdomain.com or @ as the name, add the value provided by Rocket.net, and save the changes.

If you’re also pointing the www version of your domain to Rocket.net, add the same value for the CNAME record that has www as the name and save the changes.

Lastly, go back to the Rocket.net dashboard and click “I’ve Updated My DNS.”

Now just wait until the DNS propagates and you’re all set!

Update DNS
Update DNS

Ready for Liftoff

Rocket.net is definitely a fast platform with a promising future.

If you’re on the market for something new and exciting that delivers excellent performance, Rocket.net might be worth trying out.

Chris

Christian Coulson

Christian is an industrial engineer who's used his knowledge and experience to grow 7Sigma Physiques—his fitness coaching business and blog with thousands of monthly readers.

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