NameCheap is an independent. It’s an ICANN-accredited domain name registrar founded in 2000. In addition to domain registration, they offer a complementary spectrum of hosting services.NameCheap also provides email, website builder, SSL, and various services with 24-hour support and a 30-day money back guarantee.Contents [hide]
1) Pricing:Web hosting companies are all selling the same thing – a home for your website – but they all have different plans with different caps, different bonuses, and different renewal prices. For most, figuring out their true value requires a breakdown into different parts.Core hosting features are the “3 D’s” – domains, databases and disk space. The core purpose of a hosting server is to serve website files when someone types in your domain name.For better or worse, NameCheap’s plans have so many limits that it’s really hard to compare them directly to other company’s hosting plans. But here’s how it concludes –If you plan on staying under those caps – NameCheap is almost always cheaper than the plan you would choose at another hosting company.If you are not sure, then you will likely get more total value from a web hosting company with fewer individual caps such as InMotion, Web Hosting Hub, HostGator – or even SiteGround.2) Company Brands and Values:NameCheap is a privately-owned independent hosting company. That’s a rarity in a world where a handful of corporations own nearly all hosting brands.Being private & independent is not necessarily a good thing, and being owned by a large corporation is not necessarily a bad thing.However, where NameCheap excels as an independent company is defining their brand values and going for transparency in a notoriously confusing industry.3) Onboarding and Account Management:The process of getting a new customer up and running is a critical part of removing the daunting part and adding to the excitement. In other words, the process is called “onboarding.” And there’s nothing that will create regret like a confusing onboarding process.Ideally, after signing up for a hosting plan, you’d immediately get your sign in credentials and be able to either go to a guided tutorial or be able to log in directly to your new dashboard.Their account backends are cleaned and there are no flashing banners or hard upsells. It’s a service where beginners are looking for a super cheap but straight forward web hosting company.4) Backup and Data Center Choices:At sign up, they offer a choice between their US data center or UK data center. It makes them a great choice for non-US customers who are serving web visitors closer to the UK than the US.NameCheap also does 2x weekly backups of your hosting account. While you should do backups yourself, it’s a great safety net to have. And backups are included for free with NameCheap. Usually it’s a paid or limited bonus feature at competitors like Web Hosting Hub, Dreamhost or HostGator.
1) Performance:Unexpected website issues are annoying at best, and can seriously damage your business in extreme cases, so it’s important that your hosting company’s support system delivers when you need. Namecheap’s support begins with a searchable knowledge base. This is neatly organized into sensible categories and covers everything from beginner-type FAQs (‘how can I renew my domain?’) to more expert-level issues (‘managing DNSSEC for domains pointed to by custom DNS’).Most of these articles are lengthy and detailed. Unusually, Namecheap customers can add comments to the support documents and see the messages left by others. This is often used to ask questions about some issue within the article – Namecheap staff then post replies, and having these answers publicly visible clarifies the document for everyone. (Non-customers can read the articles at the link above but won’t see any comments.)Namecheap’s service status page tries to keep you up-to-date with major issues, but it’s presented poorly. Each item is a blog post with only the first few lines open, which leaves you clicking ‘Continue reading…’ to find out exactly what it covers. And when we checked the items weren’t even in chronological order, which seems, well, stupid.There’s no phone support, but Namecheap does have live chat and a support ticket system. We tried this out with a simple question and had an accurate reply within 30 minutes. There’s no way to tell what might happen in more complicated, real-world situations, but Namecheap performed better than most.2) Customer Support:Customer support is notoriously hard to judge. It’s hard to know what is really going on behind the scenes, and whether a company will be helpful when you contact them.3) Namecheap Don’t specialize in Hosting:Namecheap is domain registrar company. Hosting companies that offer domain registration usually overprice them and make domain management a pain. Domain companies usually don’t have the expertise or resources to run a world-class hosting infrastructure.
Namecheap Hosting and GoDaddy Hosting:GoDaddy has one of the most recognized brands in the industry due to their TV, offline and everywhere advertising. Though they’ve improved in the past couple years, GoDaddy has a reputation for upsells, confusing backend and poor performance.Namecheap is cheaper than GoDaddy and GoDaddy doesn’t make any difference with better performance or customer support.Namecheap is better option to go with.Namecheap and HostGator: HostGator is a very well-known brand in the hosting industry. They are also owned by Endurance International, which makes them another sister brand to Bluehost/iPage. They are one of Endurance International’s main brands and have a solid balance between cheap long-term pricing, good support, and good performance.HostGator has fewer plan limitations and about the same level of performance and support.If you are running a single small website than Namecheap is a better option and If you are building a several or more substantial website than Hostgator is good to go with.Namecheap Hosting and InMotion Hosting:InMotion Hosting is one of the largest and fastest growing independents (ie, owned by employees, not a large corporate holding company) hosting companies. This site uses a VPS server with InMotion.InMotion has better customer support, better performance and better plans features than NameCheap. They are more expensive than NameCheap across the board
Namecheap offers great value in terms of general hosting but beware of the limits in the starter plans. Namecheap doesn’t have as many specialist plans as some hosts, but if you’re looking for general hosting – or can handle any site-building tasks yourself – it offers real value and some helpful extras.
