Namecheap Review

Namecheap was founded all the way back in 2000 by Richard Kirkendall.

Over the past 18 years, they’ve reportedly racked up three million customers.

Domain names are the name of Namecheap’s game (sorry, couldn’t resist), with over seven million under their control.

But here’s the thing:

We’ve seen this story before; Hosting A is good at X, so they leverage their brand name and deep pockets to muscle into new service Y. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re any good at it.

So what’s the deal with Namecheap?

Have they been able to replicate their domain name success in a new arena? Or are they simply trading on their name alone? (Pun definitely intended.)

We signed up for their hosting service, purchased the least expensive plan, and set up a test website to track performance stats like uptime and speed.

Is Namecheap good enough to get our recommendation?

Read on to find out.

General Info & Hosting Overview

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.

Kinda, sorta. We’ll come back to this in the Cons section below.

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%.

Last 12-month average uptime:

• January 2021: 99.98%
• December 2020: 100%
• November 2020: 99.89%
• October 2020: 100%
• September 2020: 99.93%
• August 2020: 99.91%
• July 2020:99.99%
• June 2020: 99.99%
• May 2020:99.98%
• April 2020: 100%
• March 2020: 99.99%
• February 2020: 99.99%

3. Decent Load Time

After the uptime, the second most important criteria 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:

1. We want to be able to base these reviews on real data and performance figures.
2. 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.

Cons of Using Namecheap Hosting

There are three major categories we look at when considering a new web host:

1. Uptime: Can this host keep my site live the vast majority of the time?
2. Speed: Can this host deliver a good experience for visitors so they’ll want to come back?
3. Support: And can this host help me when things spin out of control?

Unfortunately, Namecheap dropped the ball in one of the three areas.

Take a look for yourself.

1. Inconsistent Customer Support

Namecheap has a pretty good knowledge base platform. It contains detailed answers that should help solve the most common problems you run into.

We also like to try out live chats to get a feel for their service.

Things started well enough, with a quick connection from a friendly support rep, and our question regarding free domain name was replied to within a few minutes.

However, when we asked about site migrations, we were instructed to contact a concierge department by submitting a ticket which took us more time than we wanted.

Namecheap Pricing, Hosting Plans & Quick Facts

Here’s a quick overview of the hosting plans offered by Namecheap:

Quick Facts

• Free domain?: Yes, the first year is free.
• Ease of Signup: Easy signup process.
• Money-Back: 30-days money-back guarantee.
• Payment Methods: Credit cards, PayPal, Dwolla, and Bitcoin.
• Hidden Fees and Clauses: There are two important disclaimers to keep in mind:
  • “This offer is available for new hosting purchases only. The promotional price is valid for the first 12 months on annual payments, after which the hosting service will renew at the regular rate as indicated in the package specs. Upgrades/downgrades will be performed at the full renewal price.”
  • “Unmetered disk space is offered with our Ultimate package. This disk space is solely intended for your website and not for other storage purposes. This space must be used in accordance with our AUP, particularly paragraph 10.2.”
• Upsells: A few upsells along the way.
• Account Activation: Fast account activation.
• Control Panel and Dashboard Experience: cPanel.
• Installation of Apps and CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): 1-click installation tool to easily install popular apps and CMSs.

Do We Recommend Namecheap?

Yes, we do.

They started out pretty well. Existing customers seem to like them, and the fact that their cheapest plan compares favorably to most other company’s upper-tier ones looks promising.

We also like their improved uptime and speed results that make Namecheap a reliable host.

However, we wish that customer support would be better.

Overall, Namecheap is definitely a good host, but there are some better options available.

Visit www.Namecheap.com

Do you have any positive or negative experiences with Namecheap’s hosting? If so, please leave us an honest, transparent review!