Namecheap is an ICANN-accredited, privately-owned domain registrar founded in the year 2000. There are many reviews online about Namecheap as a domain name registration company. In 2019, it wasn’t so easy to find a comprehensive review of Namecheap.
They’re one of the biggest domain registrars in the industry today. People don’t seem to know a lot about them. They don’t only offer domain name registration services; they also provide their customers with hosting services.
Features and Advantages of Using Namecheap
Let’s take a close look at some of the core features that make Namecheap a choice hosting service provider.
Users will find a lot of advantages when using Namecheap Hosting plans. Before making a final decision, you’ll see that there are a few reviews available across the Internet. Most reviews are either based on personal ordeals or user-generated tales. While this is not an issue from my own viewpoint, there’s no such thing as a web host that’s considered “the best” in comparison to the rest.
When deciding the “best,” you’re looking at which one will fit your project’s budget, goals and expertise most.
Namecheap Hosting Costs
One of the benefits of Namecheap is that its pricing is cheap. One of the most crucial parts of this review is determining the arrangement of the hosting pricing.
When consumers visit different hosting companies, they will notice that they offer similar services. However, each company offers a variety of bonuses, different plans and caps, differing renewal prices, and therefore, it’s often necessary to break down the different parts to determine what their values are for the money.
When a user enters your website URL in the address bar, the primary purpose of a hosting company is to serve website files each time this occurs.
Domains are names that point to the hosting account of the owner. For those who want to have numerous websites; they will need to have many domain names. Users must ensure they have adequate email addresses for their website.
Namecheap Pricing Breakdown
Namecheap offers four pricing tiers, which includes the following:
- Value renews: $38.88 yearly
- Business Pro renews: $17.98 per month
- Professional renews: $78.88 yearly
- Ultimate renews: $129.88 yearly
Any of these plans is accessible with a very low introductory rate, including $9.88 yearly for the Value Plan.
What is the Hitch?
Any of the plans has a cap of two of the “3D’s,” including other plan caps. We’ll emphasize that when discussing the disadvantages of Namecheap. However, let’s see how these plans are held up.
Value renews: This is limited to only 3 domains, 20 GB disk space, 50 email accounts and 50 databases.
Professional renews: This is limited to just 10 domains, 50 GB disk space, 100 email accounts, and 100 databases.
Ultimate renews: This is limited to only 50 domains.
Business Pro renews: This has no domain limits, disk space = 20 GB, and 5000 GB of bandwidth.
Due to the fact that Namecheap has some limitations, it’s a bit difficult to compare them directly to other hosting providers.
No matter what options the consumers decide to go with, Namecheap offers a significant advantage regarding pricing.
Namecheap Values and Branding
Just like we mentioned, Namecheap is an independent and privately-owned hosting company.
It’s neither a positive or negative thing for Namecheap to be private and independently owned. However, being held by a large firm isn’t a negative thing for hosting providers.
One outstanding reason Namecheap excels as an independent company throughout the industry is because of its transparency and how their brand values are defined.
One of the most positive features of this hosting company is that they remain transparent regarding all their pricing and services. They also have a list of hosting features that are expandable.
Namecheap Onboarding and Account Managing
Signing up for a new web host involves a mix of feelings ranging from daunting to fascinating.
One of the features of using Namecheap is that you will move from the onboarding procedure, which includes signing up for a new account, to the guided tutorial. Once you attain the tutorial, you can move on to your new dashboard without any difficulty.
Once new customers complete their signup process, they will receive a welcome mail, directing them to navigate around their dashboards.
Users can install WordPress software and use a clean version without any extra themes or plugins.
Data Center and Backup Choices
Namecheap does well with their bonus features. Whenever new users sign up, they make their preferred choices between the US and UK data centers. By doing this, it gives users who are servicing visitors near the UK the opportunity to cater for them better.
Namecheap backups also occur twice every week for hosting accounts. It’s important for users to do backups alone while the company is also performing them as well. This is a great safety feature. Namecheap includes all backups without any extra charges unlike in most competitors; HostGator and internet Hosting Hub can charge for this as a restricted bonus feature
Namecheap Disadvantages
There are disadvantages to using Namecheap just like in any other web hosting company.
Plan Limitations
As stated in the Pricing section, there are areas where caps occur across Namecheap’s database, disk space, domains, and email addresses.
For those managing one or two websites and have no plan of including more, Namecheap is going to be an excellent choice. However, for those who are managing numerous websites, the problem doesn’t occur with the caps, but rather with the fact that the caps overlap.
Under most conditions, a hosting service provider will have their plans tiered out. In cases like these, they’ll place priority on one or two caps to help keep their plans separated.
For instance, when you choose HostGator’s Hatchling Plan, you are allowed one domain. Though their Baby plan will allow you to have unlimited domains, you can see a very obvious difference. You will need to upgrade if you want to add another site.
Namecheap users have several triggers for upgrading. When you are operating one website that uses a lot of videos and images, you will be triggered for an upgrade, and also if you are managing many different domains for multiple projects, you may be triggered for an upgrade.
Performance and Allocations
As mentioned earlier, the main purpose of a web hosting company is to serve web files once a person searches for the user’s domain name. What’s missing from this scenario? If you assumed it to be like, “serve net files fast,” then you’re correct.
Because we’re living in an extreme mobile age, website speed is important. Though server speed isn’t the only issue to contemplate upon concerning the website’s overall speed, it’s an important issue.
What’s worse is users can be experiencing what’s referred to as “bottleneck” issue. What this implies is, despite how fast you speed or compress your website; it’ll only load as quickly as the server responds.
Measuring response and speed is difficult. NameCheap’s network engineers will give a definitive answer concerning what’s happening to the speed of the server. However, they promise that, under most circumstances, “Our Shared Hosting is 50% faster than that of the other guys.”
However, it’s viable for anyone to develop a ballpark measurement concerning the performance of a server.
This metric is called TTFB (Time to first Byte), and it displays how fast servers can deliver the first bit of information upon the receipt of a request.
Hosting Performance
Just like with the caps for plans, it’s not bad for server allocations to exist. For people who are running small websites that aren’t loaded down with pictures, you may not notice a distinction.
Customer Support
It’s sometimes difficult to place judgment on their consumer service. Furthermore, it holds true for knowing whether or not the company will be helpful when you have reasons to contact them.
When you browse the net for different user-supplied reviews, for any company for that matter, you’ll discover negative experiences that are exaggerated or positive ones online.
It’s recommended that users search for indications on whether or not the company treats their client service as investment or a cost. What this implies is that the company is trying to develop long-term, happy customer relationships, or are they making an attempt to maximize short-term profits?
Hosting Customer-Support through Namecheap
For people who are seeking immediate responses and accessibility, they will use the help desk and chat. Once the chat feature is used, the wait time wasn’t significant. However, after you’ve experienced a complicated technical issue, text-based support will become tedious.
Regarding DIY client support options and resources, NameCheap will provide knowledge base information. However, its focus is on providing information on domains. There wasn’t any data on hosting.
NameCheap is literally a Domain Registrar
In reality, though NameCheap provides hosting services, it is not a hosting company and doesn’t focus on these services. Instead, they are a website registrar. One of the reasons users choose this company for their hosting needs is as a result of ease of doing so once they have registered their domain.
If you think of the internet services industry in a broader sense, hosting and domains are a natural complement for the other. However, one company does appear to do both well.
When hosting companies provide domain registrations, it is not uncommon for them to feature costs that are too high. Under most conditions, domain companies do not have the resources or experience to supply first-class hosting infrastructures adequately.
I’m not saying that it’s not possible or that some companies aren’t making enough efforts. However, it appears like domains and hosting is like tea and cookies.
Bonus options
Even though NameCheap’s plans provide an entire set of selections, they do have exclusions for some of their bonus options.
For example, you will realize that the length of their refund guarantee is incredibly short. It’s only fourteen days for NameCheap. However, other competitors like HostGator, features forty-five-days money-back guarantee.
Other big competitors like InMotion, Net Hosting Hub, and DreamHost all feature a minimum of a ninety-day refund guarantee.
Another instance is that, most of their upgrades together with dedicated IP addresses that you need for the installation of SSL certificates are too expensive. Most companies either bundle it for free or charge close to $2.00, however, N
ameCheap charges $24.00 annually.
While neither of those points above should be considered as an obstacle for the company, there are actually things customers ought to know before making their decisions.
Conclusion
While this review is strictly for Namecheap – a popular domain registrar that also offers a free hosting service to customers, we’re not, by any means, affiliated to them.
We’re building our own websites using the Wealthy Affiliate hosting platform known as SiteRubix and would love to acknowledge that this platform will let you build up to 50 premium websites will all premium site protocols automatically installed at no extra cost to you.
Not only that, you are allowed to host all of these 50 websites for free for life exploring a managed hosting account that is worth more than the third tier $250 monthly hosting plan offered in similar other platforms.
If you do not have any cash on you at all, you can remain a free starter for as long as you want while you build out your site alongside using a free basic website which can be moved with the click of a button whenever you’re willing to customize it.
Registration is free and you can choose to remain a free user for life. But if you’re willing to start making money, you’d need to upgrade to the premium package and move your site from the free sub-domain to your own custom domain in a matter of seconds. Congratulations! You’ve just started a business of your own.
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