Namecheap Hosting Review – Best Cheap Hosting Ever?

Namecheap has been one of the best domain providers online. But what about its hosting?

Namecheap has also earned the reputation of being the cheapest shared hosting. It's easy to use and very ideal for WordPress users who need to create a website within minutes.

It offers excellent features at an affordable price, and also guarantees an almost 100% uptime for all of its shared hosting users.

But how good is its hosting? Should you use it or not? What are the different plans and features that Namecheap offers?

These are some of the questions that may pop up in your mind when you think of choosing Namecheap. In this Namecheap hosting review, I will try to answer most of your questions.

About Namecheap

Namecheap was founded in 2000 by Richard Kirkendall. They started basically with one purpose – to provide the cheapest domain names. That's from where its name Namecheap comes.

But by time Namecheap has added hosting, managed WordPress, VPNs, reseller and other cloud services to their portfolio.

Namecheap has emerged as one of the largest hosting & domain companies with more than 10 million customers all across the world.

This is one of the few hosting companies that do not belong to the Endurance International Group (EIG) – a company that runs BlueHost, Hostgator and other popular hosting brands.

Why should you use Namecheap hosting?

If you have been looking for a reliable, secure, and remarkably cheap shared hosting service to run your WordPress website, Namecheap can be the best place to host your website.

In the upcoming sections of this Namecheap hosting review, I will discuss all the pros and cons of using Namecheap along with the details of its pricing.

Before proceeding towards the actual review, let us understand what you stand to gain by subscribing to this hosting service.

Cheapest plans

It’s widely acknowledged that Namecheap presently offers the cheapest shared hosting plans in the market. As a matter of fact, their shared hosting plans cost even lesser than a domain name purchase. To adequately match the budget needs of a massive customer base, Namecheap offers an extensive range of shared hosting plans.

Along with great features and affordable prices, Namecheap also offers a website domain and WhoisGuard protection free of cost.

Its shared hosting plans begin at merely $18.44 per year and go up to $57.88 per year for even its ultimate hosting plan – Stellar Business. This plan gives you access to advanced hosting features such as faster speeds and superior security.

Most importantly, Namecheap’s basic shared hosting plan allows you to install up to three domains.

Even the so-called cheapest hosting companies such as Hostinger, JustHost, HostGator, and Bluehost cannot match the present offers provided by Namecheap.

Free hosting migration

If you wish to migrate your website from another hosting service to Namecheap shared hosting, then you’ll be delighted to know that Namecheap offers free site migration services. Everyone knows how challenging it is to migrate all your site files to another hosting platform without losing files. In this regard, Namecheap’s well-trained migration team will help you migrate your website to their hosting servers for no additional cost whatsoever.

Free migration services offered by Namecheap include:

• cPanel website migration
• Website without cPanel migration (like Managed Hosting services)
• Email transfers
• Transfers to a dedicated server or VPS

cPanel

A control panel or cPanel gives you a user-friendly interface where you can easily manage and maintain everything related to your website, such as databases, emails, website backups, domain parking, and so on.

With Namecheap’s cPanel, you can access everything from domains and email accounts to the file manager in one place. It also allows you to modify your files and database information, create new tables, or delete them if needed. Even beginners can conveniently manage their cPanel account from Namecheap.

24×7 customer support

Support team availability is an important factor to consider when choosing a shared hosting platform. In this regard, Namecheap offers a not-so-great, 24×7 support assistance to all its hosting users and allows you to connect with them in three different ways:

• Knowledgebase
• Submit a Ticket
• Live Chat

I haven't liked how they handle the chat. They are very slow in responding to queries and finding out resolutions.

But nevertheless, this is one of the downsides of a cheaper product.

To access Namecheap chat support, you just need to log into your cPanel account by entering your username and password.

Users who haven’t registered with Namecheap yet can just use its “Submit a Ticket” page to clear their doubts regarding the hosting or domain registration.

Let us now discuss each of the above three customer support options in detail.

• Knowledgebase – This is a large database that contains numerous articles, video tutorials, and answers to all the prominent questions pertaining to everything related to hosting.
• Submit a Ticket – This system serves to handle users’ issues when they are unable to find an answer or solution to their issues or queries on the Namecheap Knowledgebase. You simply need to enter your cPanel details and attach the files or images (if any) before submitting to resolve any issues related to web hosting.
• Live Chat – With Namecheap’s Live Chat feature, you just need to choose a category related to the problem you’re facing (such as billing, hosting, domain, and so on) and enter your queries to start a conversation with the support team.

Secure servers

You must be aware of the fact that website hacking has become an alarmingly common phenomenon nowadays. It leads to thousands of websites getting compromised each and every day, leading to an enormous loss in sales.

To prevent such security breaches, you must choose a dedicated and reliable hosting service that prioritizes the security of its websites and hosting environment.

Namecheap fulfills these criteria by providing its hosting servers with WhoisGuard, SSL certificates, incredible OS and data servers.

It provides both WhoisGuard features and SSL certificates to every customer free of cost.

In case you don’t know, WhoisGuard keeps each domain owner’s contact information safe and out of the public Whois database, while SSL certificates protect your website’s customers against identity theft.

They especially come in handy for online transactions.

Premium DNS

A Domain Name Server or DNS has a direct impact on your website security and performance, including:

• Redundancy
• Speed of queries
• Security

Users running an e-commerce store/digital media agency or dealing with high-traffic websites require a high-performance premium DNS instead of ordinary or free DNS. Namecheap comes with premium DNS for website security enhancements, powered by Verisign.

To get access and avail of various useful benefits, apart from 100% uptime and full security, you need to pay a meager fee of $5 per year.

By comparison, other domain registrants such as GoDaddy tend to charge pretty high fees for premium DNS services.

Free SSL

When you use Namecheap for hosting and domain registration, it installs SSL certificates for all new domains, subdomains, and addon domains. As a result, you get enhanced security for all your domains and websites.

Secure Sockets Layer or SSL certificates provide protection in three different layers, as shown below:

• Encryption prevents your website users’ activity from being tracked.
• Data integrity prevents your website files from getting corrupted when they’re being transferred.
• Authentication safeguards your website from all kinds of hackers.

You might be wondering what the qualifications for free SSL certificates from Namecheap shared hosting are. Basically, you can qualify if you:

1. Have created a new shared hosting account with Namecheap.
2. Are using a shared hosting plan with your newly created account.
3. Are adding new domain names or addon domains to your existing hosting account with a Namecheap shared hosting plan.

Note that you will receive a free SSL for every unique domain and subdomain from Namecheap hosting.

Every cPanel account can have a maximum of 50 free SSLs.

Performance

Regardless of the hosting platform, you prefer to use, you require a secure and faster website performance to keep your website safe from hackers and other security threats.

In this regard, Namecheap offers a truly amazing shared hosting environment for all its users. It uses the best infield Cloud-based Linux servers that enhance the reliability and website performance of all the shared hosting servers.

Benefits of Namecheap’s shared hosting OS include:

1. It aids in securing the hosting environment servers from slowing down due to clients’ activities.
2. It segregates all of its shared hosting server users and provides bulletproof security to each of them in order to limit security breaches.
3. It usually limits the malware and viruses within any client’s website whose files are stored in their databases and servers.

Also, each of their hosting servers has at least:

• Two processors
• 16 GB of RAM
• Four hard drives with RAID protection

To sum up, Namecheap’s shared hosting servers are all located in a faster, better, and safer OS environment that protects your website from various security threats such as malware, brute force attacks, DDoS attacks, and so on.

100% uptime

Namecheap offers an excellent monthly uptime guarantee of 100%. Users who get any downtime issues can readily claim for their uptime guarantee.

They will then be eligible for a Service cycle prolongation for the time for which the service was unreachable (a maximum of one month of free hosting from Namecheap).

When it comes to non-scheduled maintenance and downtime issues, Namecheap offers a one-day service cycle prolongation for every hour of downtime experienced.

Having better uptime gives you the following benefits:

1. Better user experience
2. Better user retention rate
3. Your website will run smoothly without any crashing or lagging issues

Useful apps

Namecheap readily integrates with more than 100 amazing apps – including everything from website building to productivity apps. Some notable ones are:

• Uptime monitoring from Namecheap – Using this free app, you can monitor your website’s uptime, track and report your downtime issues, and view your website’s overall uptime activity.
• Canvas – It is an excellent website builder that is completely free for Namecheap users. You can use it to build visually dazzling websites, including splendid image galleries.
• Strikingly – It is a paid app (normally priced at $10 per month) that allows you to easily turn your regular website into a highly mobile-responsive one. Since it is supported by Namecheap, you can easily access it from your cPanel dashboard.

Why you shouldn't use Namecheap hosting?

We’ve extensively discussed the positives of using Namecheap shared hosting to run your WordPress website(s) at an economical price.

When it comes to the negatives, my primary grouse is that Namecheap charges extra fees for website backups.

It gets somewhat expensive after a year of your hosting renewal, although it’s still much cheaper compared to other hosting services.

Also, average website loading speeds leave something to be desired.

I have already talked about how I didn't like their slow customer support, didn't I?

Pricing

Obviously, a proper review of Namecheap shared hosting cannot be complete without a detailed discussion about the cost of its hosting plans. As of now, Namecheap offers the following plans in its shared hosting environment:

1. Stellar
2. Stellar Plus
3. Stellar Business

Let us now discuss the features and pricing of each of these plans in detail.

1. Stellar

Stellar is Namecheap’s starter shared hosting plan. Priced at just $18.44 for the first year, it is also the cheapest plan available. It is a great choice for beginners who are looking for the most affordable option. Unfortunately, it only allows you to host up to three websites in a hosting account. Other features of this plan include:

• 100% uptime guaranteed
• 20 GB of SSD disk space
• Access to more than 100 free apps with one-click installs
• Backups twice a week
• Create up to 50 email accounts, autoresponders and forwarders
• Create up to 50 FTP users
• Hosting up to 3 domains (and adding up to 50 subdomains)
• Manage up to fifty MySQL databases
• Three free SSL certificates
• Unlimited parking domains
• Unmetered bandwidth

After a year, you will have to pay a renewal fee of $33.88 for another year.

2. Stellar Plus

Stellar Plus is for users who want a more feature-laden shared hosting plan at a reasonable price. It costs just $31.84 for the first year and lets you install unlimited websites on the same hosting account.

Along with all the features of the Stellar plan, the Stellar Plus plan gives you access to:

• Unmetered SSD disk space
• Hosting unlimited websites on the same hosting account
• Create unlimited email accounts, autoresponders and forwarders
• Create unlimited FTP users
• Free SSL certificates included
• Adding unlimited domains
• Unlimited MySQL databases

The renewal fee for this plan is $57.88 for one year.

3. Stellar Business

This is undoubtedly Namecheap’s most recommendable plan. It gives you access to a wide range of excellent hosting features, such as priority support and daily backups. You need to pay just $57.88 for the first year and will be able to install an unlimited number of websites.

Along with all the features of Stellar Plus, you will get access to the following:

• 50 GB pure SSD disk space
• Adding unlimited subdomains
• Create unlimited FTP users
• Hosting unlimited domains
• 6 × daily + weekly backups

The renewal cost for the Stellar Business plan is $104.88 for one year.

Also, all of Namecheap’s shared hosting plans come with a 24×7 customer support live chat option. The Stellar Business plan gives you access to priority customer support as well.

FAQ

Namecheap Hosting Review

Having been in the domain and hosting business for three decades, it promises robust services as well as reliability.

It gives you access to amazing features such as 100% uptime, WordPress and cPanel with all of its plans.

Thus, you will be able to conveniently manage all your websites, databases, files, and emails in one place.

I hope this review aptly highlights the pros and cons of Namecheap and helps you make a wise decision regarding your purchase.

I rate Namecheap hosting 4.3 stars out of 5 and recommend this for most business sites and blogs.