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To review Namecheap, we purchased their shared hosting plan and launched a test site. This is an in-depth review of the site as we monitored its parameters for the past year-long period.
What is Namecheap
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Namecheap was founded by Richard Kirkendall in 2000 and has been known for its domain name management services. They have reportedly managed to attract over 3 million customers and host over 7 million domains over the past decade or so.
Sometimes what really happens is that web hosting company X excels at business A, and then they use their brand and capital to invest in a new business B. But that doesn't necessarily mean they can make B as good as A. How did Namecheap do? Can they replicate the success they already have in the new arena? Or is it just a label with a brand on it?
To find out, we purchased their shared hosting service and set up a test site for long-term tracking. But first, let's focus on some of Namecheap's best attributes.
Advantages of Namecheap
Namecheap offers free domain names, migrations and backups, etc. Here are the full details.
- Free domain name and migration
Namecheap is very good at domain management and will happily commit to the whole business when you sign up for their hosting plan. If you already have a website set up elsewhere, they will provide you with a free migration service.
- 30-day money-back guarantee
You'll get a rock-solid money-back guarantee and have a full month to test whether Namecheap is really right for you. During this period, you can always opt out and try another colocation provider.
- Cost-effective hosting plan
To date, we have reviewed over 30 web hosting providers and for each company, we typically purchase the most basic shared hosting plan in order to launch a WordPress test site for two reasons.
- We want to obtain the most realistic test data.
- The introductory programs offered are very similar from company to company.
- For the most part, for each company's shared hosting plan, not only are the prices very close, but the features are basically the same, but Namecheap surprised us with.
- The cheapest hosting plans offering unlimited traffic and a variety of standard features such as cPanel and applications such as WordPress.
- The cheapest plan includes a free SSL certificate for one year, with payment starting in the second year.
- Automatic data backups twice a week in case of problems when updating the site.
- Up to 50 MySQL databases, more than most competitors.
- the cheapest plan allows you to launch 3 sites, most competitors' introductory plans allow only 1.
- Up to 50 email addresses.
- Over time, all these services can help you save a lot of money.
- Third-party reviews with good reputation
We always want to get some feedback from our existing customers to ensure that each review is not just based on our own isolated experiences.
In this regard, we were pleasantly surprised by some of our online customers' reviews. For example, Namecheap received a 4.6-star rating in Shopper reviews, a result obtained based on nearly one million reviews of.
We like all the extras that Namecheap offers for free and were happy to get the test site up and running to see real performance statistics. Unfortunately, however, the test results may not be as encouraging.
Disadvantages of Namecheap
When choosing shared hosting, we usually consider three main factors.
- Uptime: Will this hosting keep my website up and running all the time?
- Page load speed: Does the site provide a good browsing experience for visitors and entice them to come back?
- Customer Support: Can a customer service representative help me when things get out of control?
- Unfortunately, Namecheap is not as good as the best hosting companies in any of these three areas.
- Uptime
Namecheap achieved 100% uptime in the first month of registration, which got us very excited and looking forward to what would follow. But things started to go bad from there, hovering below the industry average for the next few months, with a final result of 99.88%, which doesn't look too bad, but keep in mind that this equates to over an hour of downtime per month.
What are the consequences of a downtime during a busy sales season? You could lose a lot of sales.
- page load time
Besides uptime, the second most important criterion is speed, which is so important because it is directly related to visitor happiness. google recently found that if your pages take up to 6 seconds to load, bounce rates can increase by more than 100%.
Over the past 12 months, Namecheap's average page load time was a whopping 855 milliseconds, a figure twice as slow as the most popular hosts like Hostinger and Bluehost. If it were just one or two bad months dragging down the average, then we could just ignore it, but that's not the case.
- Customer Support
Namecheap has a very good knowledge base containing detailed answers to a large number of frequently asked questions:.
To test the customer support service, we tried the live chat. It was good at first, the friendly support rep was able to respond quickly and even referred me to the Concierge department when she couldn't help me. Overall, we like that it's like a senior manager in a hotel, personally helping you with difficult and complex issues.
However, the second customer service representative basically just copied a knowledge base article, which left us feeling overwhelmed. For novice webmasters, this approach may not provide enough confidence that if there is a problem with the site, then you have to rely on their customer team to fix it, not a lengthy online document.
Namecheap's Pricing
The following are details of the shared hosting plans offered by Namecheap.
Stellar
$2.88/month
- 3 sites
- 20G SSD network space
- Unlimited Traffic
- Free website builder
- US or UK data center
- 2 backups per week
- 50 FTP accounts
- 30 email accounts
- 50 MySQL Databases
- View Details
- Stellar Plus
- $4.88/month
- Unlimited Sites
- Unlimited SSD Cyberspace
- Unlimited Traffic
- Free website builder
- US or UK data center
- 2 backups per week
- Unlimited FTP accounts
- Unlimited Email Accounts
- Unlimited MySQL Database
- View Details
- Stellar Business
- $8.88/month
- Unlimited Sites
- 50G high-speed SSD network space
- Unlimited Traffic
- Free website builder
- US or UK data center
- 6 daily backups and weekend backups
- Unlimited FTP accounts
- Unlimited Email Accounts
- Unlimited MySQL Database
- View Details
- Additional information.
- Free domain name: First year free
- Account registration: very easy
- Payment method.
- Hidden fees and terms: purchase on an annual basis to enjoy lower prices; unlimited disk space is limited to website use only and cannot be used for other storage purposes
- Account Activation: Quick Account Activation
- Control panel and dashboard: cPanel
Summary
Namecheap is a good colocation provider that existing customers seem to like a lot, and with the cheapest hosting plan being comparable to most competitors' high-end plans, this looks promising.
Nonetheless, renewal prices of over 300% can be overwhelming for many, especially when you consider less than perfect uptime, site load speeds, and rambunctious customer support.
There are many better options in the same (or lower) price range (such as Hostinger, which we really like). You can check out our recommendations for the best web hosts here to find a Namecheap alternative.
Advantages
- Domain name can be used for free for one year
- Free website migration service
- Cost-effective hosting plans
- Well-reputed third-party reviews
- 30-day money back guarantee
- Disadvantages
- Customer support is fast, but not professional enough
- Less than perfect uptime and page load speed
- Established: 2000
- Lowest price: $2.88/month
- Uptime: 99.88%
- Page load time: 855 milliseconds
- Hosting plans: web hosting, mail servers, WordPress hosting, VPS, reseller hosting, dedicated servers
- Customer Support: Live Chat, Tickets, Knowledge Base
- Control backend: cPanel
- Payment method.
- Money back guarantee: 30 days