NameCheap’s main service is domain registration, but they also provide good quality website hosting as well. They have been in business since at least 2001 and have a fairly good reputation for all their services. They don’t seem to put a lot of information up on their site about the company itself, which is unfortunate, but since they are a larger company in this industry it is not hard to learn more about them if you want to.
They offer a wide range of hosting options to choose from as well as other features. If you’re looking for a good company that can help you with every aspect of your website, this is certainly one to consider.
NAMECHEAP OVERVIEW
Namecheap was founded in 2001 by Richard Kirkendall, the company’s current CEO. As you may have been able to tell from the name, they started as a domain registration provider, but they now offer many other services as well.
The company is based in Phoenix, Arizona, where a team of more than 1,000 employees provides their customers with low-cost domain registration, hosting, SSL certificates, and more.
Namecheap is also a strong supporter of net neutrality and has donated more than $300,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight for the Future, two non-profits dedicated to defending civil liberties in the digital world.
WHAT ARE NAMECHEAP’S MAIN FEATURES?
Namecheap hosting comes complete with a number of distinct features. Below we will take a look at some of the main features included with this host.
- 100% uptime service level agreement (SLA). (You’ll receive credits if this isn’t achieved.)
- Namecheap uses the latest server technology from brands like Dell, HP, and Supermicro.
- Every component has multiple redundancies, whether it’s the power source, the network card, or the high speed of the servers.
- Pages load extremely fast, a necessity for any business.
- cPanel is used. This is the most commonly used control panel in the world and it makes life easier for users.
- The Softaculous installer enables you to use WordPress or other apps with just a few clicks. You can update and maintain your applications with great ease.
- Easy to upgrade your hosting package if your business grows too big for the current package.
- All of their shared hosting plans have unmetered bandwidth.
- Twice a week backups for all plans, plus auto backup for free with Stellar Plus and Stellar Business.
- 100+ single-click apps.
- Single contact point for billing and support.
- No contracts.
- Free migration of sites from other hosting providers
- Free email accounts with all hosting plans — 30 email accounts for Stellar, unlimited email accounts for Stellar Plus, and Stellar Business.
Whether you are looking for a cheap way to host your personal website or want to start a white label hosting company, Namecheap has a plan for you.
Let’s take a look at all the hosting plans they have to offer:
When it comes to shared hosting, which involves a number of sites sharing one server, Namecheap has several options to choose from.
They offer three plans, starting at $1.58 per month.
The Stellar plan is their most affordable option. It offers 20 GB of disk space, unmetered bandwidth, access to Namecheap’s website builder, and the choice of either a US or UK datacenter (you’ll need to pay $1 more per month for a UK datacenter).
The Stellar Plus plan touted as their most popular option offers unlimited disk space and websites.
Stellar Business is advertised as the top option for e-commerce sites, and this plan offers 50 GB of disk space. Namecheap’s servers are also PCI-compliant, so you won’t need to worry about that.
But if you want to use Stellar Business for e-commerce, you’ll need to purchase an SSL certificate, as this is not included with the plan.
Namecheap offers three hosting plans for WordPress, starting at under $4 per month. I really like the way they break down these plans based on site traffic. For the less tech-savvy, this provides an easy-to-understand reference point.
These WordPress plans also offer:
- One-click backups
- SSL certificates
- Pre-installed WordPress
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- Looking to host dozens of websites or even start your own hosting company? Namecheap offers three reseller packages, starting at $19.88 per month. The cost of the plans vary based on the number of reseller accounts and disk space.
- All reseller plans include:
- Reseller control panel
- Security features
- WHMCS billing platform
- SSL reseller program
- White label marketing tools
- Dell PowerEdge with 24-core Xeon CPUs
- 32+ GB RAM and RAID 10 hard drives
- Unmetered bandwidth
- 14-day money-back guarantee
- When people outgrow shared hosting, they normally move up to a virtual private server (VPS). Although these are not physical devices, they do provide you with a dedicated amount of resources.
Namecheap’s VPS plans start at $9.88 per month for 2 CPU cores, 2 GB of RAM, and 40 GB storage.
For the absolute best performance and security, you’ll need to use your own dedicated physical server.
Namecheap offers three different dedicated hosting plans, starting at $48.88 per month. Their base plan includes:
CPU: 4 Cores @ 3.4 GHz
RAM: 8 GB
Hard Drive: 480 GB SSD
All dedicated servers use US-based datacenters.
Pros of Using Namecheap Hosting
Namecheap starts strong with a free domain name, speed, uptime, migrations, and extra plan features like backups.
Here are the full details:
1. FREE Domain and Migration
Namecheap excels at domain names. So it only makes sense that they’ll happily throw one in if you sign up for their hosting plan.
If you already have a website set up somewhere else, they’ll also help you migrate the service for free
2. Good Uptime – 99.97%
Namecheap delivered a stellar 100% uptime the first month we signed up. That gave us plenty of excitement to see what was to come.
Even though Namecheap had some problematic months during 2018 and 2019, we’re still happy to say that they managed to deliver decent uptime during the last 12 months, coming at an average of 99.97%.
3. Decent Load Time
After the uptime, the second most important criterion is speed. The reason it’s so important is that speed has been directly correlated with visitor happiness.
Google recently found that the probability of someone bouncing increases over 100% if your pages take up to six seconds to load.
So yes, you need your site to stay alive. If that site is slow, then it’s almost as bad. Your site might as well be down because people will be leaving in droves.
Namecheap has been able to post an average page speed of 458 ms over the past 12 months, which easily gets a thumbs up from our side. Moreover, they are steadily improving their loading times from month to month.
4. 30-day Money-Back Guarantee
Namecheap does offer a rock-solid 30-day money-back guarantee. You’ve got a full month to see if their service is right for you. Otherwise, it’s not too late to back out and try something else.
5. Fully-Loaded Value Plan
We’ve reviewed over 40 web hosts to date.
And for each one, we typically sign up for the most basic plan to set up our test website.
The reason is twofold:
We want to be able to base these reviews on real data and performance figures.
Most ‘base-level’ plans at each hosting company are pretty similar.
In other words – this allows us to compare apples to apples (for the most part). Each shared offer is fairly similar, with the same features offered on each.
Namecheap surprised us, though.
First, they offered unmetered bandwidth on their cheapest plan. They also give you access to standard features like cPanel access and apps like WordPress.
Their cheapest plan also includes a free SSL certificate for the first year. (Read: After that year’s up, you’ll have to pay.)
You also get twice-a-week backups, just in case things go haywire while updating your new site.
The best part about their cheapest offer is that you get 50 MySQL databases (which is way more than what most companies offer on a similar tier).
Plus, you can set up three websites on this plan. Most base-level hosting plans only allow you to host one single website. This is a great value if you have several sites, like a business and a personal one.
They also give you up to 50 email addresses right out of the gate, too.
This can add up to huge cost savings over time.
6. Third-Party Reviews Are Excellent
We always like to get a pulse from existing customers to make sure each review isn’t just based on our own isolated experience.
We’ll admit:
We were pleasantly surprised at some of the customer reviews online.
For instance, they have a solid 4.7-star rating on Shopper Reviewed. Supposedly that’s based on over a million reviews.
PROS AND CONS OF NAMECHEAP
Before we go into more detail, let’s review the main advantages and disadvantages to using Namecheap:
Pros:
- Wide range of inexpensive plans
- 2-factor authentication
- Managed WordPress plans
Cons:
- Below-average uptime and response time
- No Cloudflare on shared plans
- No free SSL certificates on shared plans
