Namecheap was first established in the year 2000 by its current CEO, Richard Kirkendall.
According to reports, they have amassed more than 11 million registered members over the course of more than 20 years.
Over seven million domain names are now under Namecheap’s management (sorry, couldn’t resist), making domain names the company’s primary focus.
On the other hand, here’s the thing:
This is not the first time we’ve heard this tale: Hosting Company A excels in X, and as a result, they use their well-known brand and large money to break into Company Y’s market. It does not necessarily indicate that they are any good at it even if they have done it before.
So, what exactly is going on with Namecheap?
Have they been able to translate the success they’ve had with their domain name into another field? Or are they doing business based only on the value of their name? (The pun was very certainly meant.)
We registered for their web hosting service, chose the most affordable plan, and created a test website so that we could monitor performance statistics such as the website’s uptime and its speed.
Is Namecheap a service that we would feel comfortable recommending to others?
Continue reading to discover out.
General Info & Hosting Overview
Pros of Using Namecheap Hosting
Namecheap gets off to a good start by providing customers with a free domain name, as well as fast and reliable service, seamless transfers, and additional plan options like as backups.
The whole information is as follows:
1. Free Domain and Migration
Namecheap is exceptional when it comes to domain names. If you sign up for their hosting plan, they will gladly provide you with one as a bonus, since it makes perfect sense for them to do so. However, there is no charge for the first year of membership. After that, you will be responsible for making the payment necessary to renew the domain. For instance, the annual cost of a.com domain is $7.98.
If you already have a website set up elsewhere, they will also assist you transfer the service to their platform for free if you already have a website built up elsewhere. Namecheap ensures that a full cPanel migration will be completed in less than 24 hours, and that there will be no more than 15 minutes of downtime throughout the process. They will reimburse your account with the amount of your initial purchase of shared hosting if they are unable to successfully migrate your site (or if you are not totally pleased with how the migration proceeded).
2. Fast Loading Time 315 ms
Following the uptime as the most significant factor, speed is the next most important criterion. The fact that wait times are short has been shown to have a significant impact on the overall satisfaction of site visitors.
Recent research conducted by Google shows that if your web pages take up to six seconds to load, the likelihood of someone leaving your site jumps to over one hundred percent.
Therefore, it is necessary for you to maintain your website. If the website in question loads slowly, then it is nearly just as awful. People are going to abandon your website in such large numbers that you may as well just shut it down.
Namecheap has been able to produce an average page speed of 315 milliseconds over the course of the previous six months, which clearly places them in the top 10 quickest hosts that we have evaluated.
3. 30-day Money-Back Guarantee
Namecheap does provide a rock-solid money-back guarantee for a period of thirty days. You have one full month to evaluate their service and determine whether or not it meets your needs. In any other case, you still have time to change your mind and try something different.
4. Fully-Loaded Value Plan
To this point, we have examined a large number of hosts.
And for every one of them, we normally register for the simplest plan available so that we may put up our test website.
There are two reasons for this:
These evaluations need to be able to be based on actual performance data and data from other sources.
The majority of each hosting company’s entry-level packages are rather comparable to one another.
To put it another way, we can now compare apples to apples thanks to this (for the most part). Each shared offer is pretty comparable to the other, with many of the same features being made available on each.
However, Namecheap was a pleasant surprise.
To begin, even with their most basic package, they provided unmetered bandwidth. They also provide you access to typical tools and applications, like as the cPanel control panel and WordPress.
Additionally, a free SSL certificate for the first year is included with the purchase of their most affordable plan.
You will also get backups on a biweekly basis, just in case anything goes wrong while you are upgrading your new website.
The fact that you receive fifty MySQL databases as part of their most affordable package is easily the nicest feature of this deal (which is way more than what most companies offer on a similar tier).
Additionally, you have the ability to create up to three websites with this package. The majority of hosting plans at the beginning levels only let you to host a single website. If you maintain several websites, such as a company and a personal one, you may save a lot of money with this offer.
In addition to that, right from the start, they will provide you with somewhere between 10 and 30 email addresses.
This has the potential to result in significant cost reductions over time.
5. Third-Party Reviews Are Excellent
To ensure that each review isn’t only based on our own singular experience, we make it a point to regularly poll our current clientele for feedback.
We’ll admit:
Some of the evaluations left by customers on the website took us by surprise, and it was in a good way.
For example, they have an impressive rating of 4.7 stars out of 5 on Shopper Reviewed. That is supposedly based on more than a million different reviews.
6. Good Customer Support
Both a ticketing system and a live chat are available for customers to use for assistance when they need it. In addition to that, they have a comprehensive assistance centre where you can search through their knowledge base, blog, and a variety of tutorials and videos.
Live chats are another great way for us to get a sense of a company and the services they provide.
The customer service representative was educated and responded quickly to our concerns concerning the shared hosting plans and site migrations that were offered by the company.
When taking everything into consideration, we are able to claim that Namecheap offers prompt and expert help.
Cons of Using Namecheap Hosting
When searching for a new web server, our primary concerns fall into one of these three categories:
Uptime: Can this host guarantee that my website will be accessible online the great majority of the time?
Quickness: Is it possible for this host to provide a positive experience for guests, encouraging them to return in the future?
Help: In the event that things go out of hand, is this host able to provide any assistance?
And if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably noticed that one of the categories is missing from this list thus far.
Let’s take a more in-depth look, shall we?
1. Lack of Datacenters
Namecheap operates data centres in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and now even throughout Europe.
Their shared, virtual private server, and reseller hosting are all housed in their data centres in Phoenix, Arizona, while the UK data centres are situated in Nottingham.
That isn’t very much. Especially when contrasted with other hosts, some of whom have over 20 data centres located throughout the globe.
In addition, selecting the data centre that serves the UK and Europe will result in an additional charge of one dollar per month.
2. Poor Uptime – 99.89%
Testing a host’s uptime is one of the most crucial things we do since it’s one of the most significant factors to look for in a host.
During the last half year, Namecheap only managed to maintain an unsatisfactory uptime of 99.89 percent. It nearly meets the minimal requirement of having an uptime between 99.91% and 99.93%, but for the time being, we will have to continue to include them under our disadvantages.
Last 6-month average uptime:
- August 2022: 99.90%
- July 2022: 100%
- June 2022: 99.78%
- May 2022: 99.99%
- April 2022: 99.77%
- March 2022: 99.87%
Namecheap Pricing, Hosting Plans & Quick Facts
Here’s a quick overview of the hosting plans offered by Namecheap:
When you sign up with Namecheap for a period of two years, these pricing will apply. If you choose the yearly plan, the monthly price will be $1.48, however selecting the monthly option would result in a higher monthly cost of $4.48.
Do We Recommend Namecheap?
Yes, we do.
They got off to a good start overall. Existing customers seem to have a positive opinion of the company, and the fact that their most affordable plan competes successfully with the majority of other firms’ premium offerings is encouraging.
We also enjoy how quickly their findings come back, which contributes to Namecheap’s reputation as a trustworthy host.
However, we wish they had a greater selection of data centres to pick from, and the uptime is a little too inconsistent for our liking.
In general, Namecheap is without a doubt a solid host, however there are some other solutions out there that are much better.
