Are you looking for cheap hosting and domain services?
Namecheap is a company that lives up to its name, offering cheap hosting and domain services. It’s great for beginners, as it requires little investment to get your website up and running.
Since it began operating in 2000, it has hosted more than 17 million domains, making it one of the leading companies in the sector.
But why is it so popular? Does it offer competitive features in its price range? If so, how does it stack up against its competitors?
After testing it out, in this article we’ll discuss what makes Namecheap stand out and what areas we think could be improved.
Here is a table of contents to help you navigate the post:
- Overview
- What does Namecheap offer?
- Support and documentation
- Prices
- Alternatives to Namecheap
- Final verdict
Overview: Namecheap
Namecheap is a company that primarily focuses on domain and hosting services. However, over the years, it has expanded its services to become one of the most dominant companies in the market.
Namecheap now offers WordPress hosting, VPN hosting, shared hosting, email hosting, and dedicated hosting. They also offer website builders, marketing tools, and advanced security features, just to name a few.
Pros:
- Cheap Domain and Hosting Plans
- Free domain for the first year of the hosting plan
- 24/7 Support
- Low cost renewal jump
- Free SSL Certificate
- Great uptime
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Cons:
- No phone support
- The basic plan comes with limited features
- The interface can be complex for beginners
Now that we have a brief understanding of Namecheap, let’s dive into the details.
What does Namecheap offer?
Here’s what we’ll cover in this section:
- Domain Registration
- Web Hosting
- Website migration
- Website Builder
- Marketing
Domain Registration
When you purchase a hosting plan with Namecheap, you’ll also automatically receive a free domain. But there’s a catch: you won’t receive a level 1 domain, like a ‘.com’. Instead, you’ll receive domain names like ‘.fun’, ‘.site’, or ‘.online’.
The type of free domain you get depends on the type of hosting you subscribe to.
However, if you don’t want to use the provided free domain, you can still buy a .com domain or any other domain from Namecheap at highly discounted prices. For example, the price of a .com domain starts at $5.98, which is still affordable.
Plus, you’ll get 2 months of free professional business email hosting and lifetime WhoIs protection .
However, you will need to renew the domain at the end of the billing cycle, which can end up increasing your overall costs.
Web Hosting
Web hosting with Namecheap is one of the cheapest on the market.
Shared hosting, for example, starts at $1.98 per month for the Stellar plan. That’s less than $50 for a two-year term. To put it in perspective, that’s about the same amount of money you’ll spend with other popular hosting providers in a year.
To sweeten the deal, you can host up to 3 domains on this plan, which is great as most other hosting providers only allow 1 domain to be hosted on their lowest shared hosting plan.
Additionally, all shared hosting plans come with SSD storage, offering faster data processing speeds, better performance, and data security.
In addition to shared hosting, Namecheap also offers other types of hosting plans. Here are two of the most popular ones.
- EasyWP Hosting (WordPress Hosting): Namecheap offers a no-obligation, 30-day free trial for any EasyWP WordPress hosting plan. These packages include cloud storage, automatic backups, and one-click backups.
- Dedicated Hosting: This is usually one of the most expensive plans for most hosting providers, and Namecheap is no exception. But again, we see that Namecheap’s dedicated hosting is still cheaper and offers great features. Some features you can expect from the basic dedicated hosting plan are 8 GB DDR3, two 1 TB HDDs, and 100 TB of bandwidth per month.
Website migration
Namecheap can help you migrate your hosting, domain, or website to their platform easily and efficiently, ensuring a smooth transition.
- Hosting Transfer: This process ensures that you stay online throughout the setup process, with very little downtime for your website. The remaining domain registration time is added to your 1-year renewal, so you don’t lose any of the time you’ve already paid for.
- Domain Transfer: All you need to do is enter your domain name in the search bar provided to check its transfer eligibility. Then, check if it meets the transfer requirements and obtain your authorization code if necessary. The price to transfer a domain starts at $10.48 for .com domains and $17.98 for .info domains.
- Website Transfer: They guarantee that your website will be migrated within 24 hours, with no more than 15 minutes of downtime. If this is not met, your first year will be free. For a website transfer, you will have to ask the team for help by opening a support ticket and providing your hosting details, credentials, and requirements.
However, no matter how efficiently a hosting company transfers a website to their platform, it’s important to protect your data. One of the best ways to do this is to create a backup locally or in a cloud solution.
We recommend you use Duplicator for your local and cloud backup needs . It can help you create scheduled backups and implement full site migrations without even installing WordPress on the new destination. Follow our tutorial: How to Backup Your WordPress Site Easily (Step by Step) .
Website Builder
Another area worth looking into is Namecheap’s website builder. Just like its standard dashboard, the default website builder feels a bit outdated. While it does offer a drag-and-drop website builder , it still feels a bit static.
One thing to keep in mind is that website templates are limited. Some look outdated and are not mobile responsive.
Third-party integration with tools outside of the Namecheap ecosystem can also be challenging.
However, Namecheap also offers a more advanced website builder called Visual. It requires no coding experience and provides step-by-step guides to ensure you’re online in no time.
Additionally, it can help you create visually stunning mobile-friendly websites with a drag-and-drop format.
Namecheap Visual also comes with a free SSL certificate , analytics, and unlimited visitors. While Visual offers a 14-day free trial, you’ll have to pay $3.88/month for the personal plan and $8.88/month for the business plan.
Marketing
Like most hosting providers, Namecheap also offers basic marketing tools. Here are some that you can take advantage of:
- RelateSocial: Helps you manage social media by offering AI-generated social posts, AI-powered custom images, and a free media library. Additionally, you can schedule your posts through a social media calendar. Namecheap also offers basic social media keyword tracking.
- RelateReviews: Helps you manage and monitor your reviews, respond to reviews with templates, monitor mentions, request reviews, and track reviews using AI insights.
- RelateSEO: Get a personalized list of SEO tasks with step-by-step implementation guides. Helps with basic competitor analysis and finding the right keywords.
- Free Logo Design: Browse hundreds of high-quality logo templates. These templates are fully customizable through Namecheap’s design tool and are easy to import into your website builder.
However, since Namecheap’s marketing features can be limited, it’s always important to explore other options to add to what you have at your disposal in the Namecheap dashboard.
Check out AIOSEO , the best SEO plugin for WordPress. It can help you improve your Google rankings so that you get more visitors to your website. At the same time, this SEO plugin can help you improve your content structure so that visitors will actually enjoy reading the posts on your website.
Additional Resources
Control Panel: You can access your account, domain list, hosting list, email services, renewal management, and support from the Namecheap dashboard.
However, the control panel is one area where Namecheap could improve its ease of use. Its dashboard feels a bit outdated and complicated, which leads to a learning curve.
For example, to install WordPress on your website with Namecheap, you will need to use Softaculous. Installing WordPress with Softaculous can be tricky as it requires extra steps to complete the task.
While this script installer was popular in the past, most other hosting providers have since abandoned it. They now incorporate simple, custom WordPress installation processes .
While Namecheap’s default control panel may seem outdated, its EasyWP control panel is one of the best and is considered a good cPanel replacement tool.
Automated Backups: It also offers one-click learn how to use special fragments to improve your seo positioning backups and automated backups.
Domain Privacy: One of the best features you’ll get with Namecheap is Whois Protection. When you register a domain, your personal information is exposed to everyone, which can lead to people sending you spam or trying to scam you, or even other serious crimes like fraud. Through a partnership with Withheld for Privacy, Namecheap offers Lifetime Domain Privacy with the purchase of a domain. So, whenever someone tries to view your personal information, they’ll see “Namecheap” instead of your details.
Email Spam Protection: You can check email addresses, the email messages themselves, and attachments to make sure they’re not spam or a virus risk. The best part is that you can adjust the filters to make sure they target more specific emails and let through those you consider more trustworthy.
To ensure you’re always on top of your website metrics and have Google Analytics at your fingertips, we recommend installing MonsterInsights.
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It can help you break down complex data into simpler, more actionable insights. It can be an additional tool you use to gather website insights alongside Namecheap’s cPanel analytics features. Learn more here: MonsterInsights Review: Is It the Best Google Analytics Plugin?
Support and documentation
Namecheap appears to have significantly improved its support over the past few years.
There are currently two ways to contact the support team: live chat or ticketing.
Live chat seems to be the most convenient sms to data way as an agent will contact you within minutes of sending the message.
While they are quick to respond and often give a great answer, some of their answers may not be very detailed.
Additionally, they may also send you links that direct you to help pages for a better answer, rather than providing a detailed answer on the spot. This can leave you feeling dissatisfied with their support.
