Namecheap Review
Introduction
We have been using Namecheap for the last year for our domain registration, and have found their user interface and range of services to be by far the best we have seen. We have recently looked into their web hosting services with surprising results. They are actually pretty good.
Before we get onto the review, there are a few things we wanted to tell you about Namecheap. They have been around for around 13 years (since 2000). They claim to have nearly 1 million users, managing over 3 million domain names, and have repeatedly won awards and surveys for their domain registration services. Not only that, they are one of the cheapest around too. What's more, you can easily pick up a Namecheap Coupon to bring the cost down even further.
The upshot is that we highly recommend these guys.
Namecheap Hosting Plans
Namecheap offers three main shared hosting plans; Value, Professional and Ultimate.
Value Shared Hosting
Their value hosting has the following main specifications:
- 25 GB disk space
- Unlimited bandwidth
- 5 hosted domains
- cPanel control panel
- FREE email hosting
Professional Shared Hosting
- 100 GB disk space
- Unlimited bandwidth
- 26 hosted domains
- cPanel control panel
- FREE email hosting
Ultimate Shared Hosting
- Unlimited disk space
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited hosted domains
- cPanel control panel
- FREE email hosting
All the different hosting plans use the same hardware, so feel free to start off with the Value plan and upgrade as and when required. For most people with just a couple of sites, the Value plan should more than suffice.
Shared Hosting Features
Namecheap comes with all the main features that you might expect from a good quality web hosting provider.
cPanel Hosting
When looking for a host, having cPanel is one of our must haves. Not only is it an easy to use interface, but many hosts offer free cPanel to cPanel transfers for your site. This makes moving from one host to another super easy. Some hosting providers use their own interface to make it more difficult for you to move, and in some cases (GoDaddy) this has proven extremely successful. The wiser among us however, will always choose a host that uses cPanel.
Softaculous
This is another somewhat standard feature among web hosts these days, but then you will be surprised that a few hosts still don't use it. It makes installing websites such as WordPress super easy, as well as over a 100 other popular applications. Highly recommended.
Reliable Servers
Now, every host you talk to will boast of high uptimes, and the latest technology hardware. For many this is just bluster, because if you dig a little deeper there are many places that will indicate whether hosts are having problems. Many of the cheaper hosts for example, will oversell their servers and will be subject to many micro-downtimes that can actually be extremely annoying. We are pleased to report though, that Namecheap has an incredibly good reputation in this regard, so you can be sure that their typical server (8 x Xeon CPUs, 24GB DDR3 ECC RAM and WD RAID 10 HDDs) is reliable. One of the reasons for their incredibly uptime is also their Cloud Technology (see below).
Cloud Technology
Like all good hosts, they use a customized version of software such as Linux to increase stability and add other functionality. In Namecheap's case, they use a custom version of the Cloud Linux operating system, which reduces costs associated with cloud hosting as well as providing an optimized performance and uptime. Awesome.
Great Support
Now we have to be a bit honest here. Our experience with the speed of their support is not as good as other hosts, but the quality of the support when the ticket is responded to is pretty good. If you have a small simple query we highly recommend using their livechat, as this will significantly speed up the resolution of any issues.
Conclusion
Whilst we think there are some more innovative, and better hosting providers out there (see this Web Hosting Reviews table), we actually think Namecheap is a pretty good host, and we would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone looking for a good quality hosting provider.
Our only real criticism above was about slightly slow ticket response time, however, this really should not be as much as a concern than if you were at other hosts. The reason... you simple won't have as many problems or downtime's with Namecheap.
Do you use Namecheap? Tell us what you think
If you use \ have used Namecheap would you recommend it to other people?
Comments
I just have to add that I recently (yesterday) created two new domains and set them up to be served by a VPS elsewhere, and I'm stunned at the quality of support, KBs, and adminsitration features they offer.
To me, it's insane that they call themselves "namecheap", because nothing about this feels cheap (except the price!). The live support is super patient and helpful, and setting up SSL was frickin' easy! (And it cost me $2 the first year, $10 the next — beat that price with *anything* else out there!)
I had a slight issue with an SOA error on a .com domain, which was instantly fixed via live chat, and I ordered whois guard on a .in domain (but it's not supported on .in, so I was confused at first), but those are minor issues, especially since their support is so awesome.
I'm moving all my other domains from mydomain to namecheap, that's for sure!
