If you’re looking for no-frills and reliable web hosting, NameCheap is a good option. They have a surprisingly strong uptime score for shared hosting (see below), and even with the most basic plan you can have up to 3 websites hosted on your account. They don’t feature any sort of website-builder, however you have the option to install several content management systems such as WordPress, so you don’t have to be a programmer to set up your website.
NameCheap was founded in the year 2000 by Richard Kirkendall, giving customers a value-for-money based option for their blogging and business endeavours. Today, NameCheap is an ICANN-accredited domain registrar/hosting company serving over 3 million customers and manages over 7 million domains. They have two datacenters—one in the US and the other in the UK.
Their mission to provide top shelf service, security and pricing is a tall order they’re proud to stand by. The believe the internet is for everyone. Whether you’re a complete beginner or hardened veteran you deserve a hosting company that is honest, straightforward, friendly and helpful.
With multiple full-featured hosting packages, WhoisGuard privacy protection, secure SSL certificates, and more, NameCheap is here to help you on your journey.
The Bottom Line:
Outstanding uptime scores
Host 3 to unlimited websites
No drag & drop website builder – not for novices
Possibility to upgrade to VPS or Dedicated Server hosting
No monthly billing, annual only
Private email hosting can be purchased separately
Our Uptime Scores:
100% – excellent
What is uptime? It’s the amount of time that your website will properly load and the server responds when pinged. Most shared hosting servers have uptime of about 98 to 99.99% which is very fair for the prices they are being offered at. We tracked a few sites hosted on NameCheap and they actually showed an uptime score of 100% which is outstanding. Servers at NameCheap are clearly maintained and secured well.
The Types of Hosting That NameCheap Offers:
NameCheap brings you the latest in SSD technology and the latest hardware, ensuring your website stays ahead of competitors. They boast that their Shared Hosting is 50% faster than other companies.
The first thing we noticed about NameCheap when signing up for Shared Hosting is that they do not offer month-to-month payments. Instead they offer annual rates with a discounted introductory price for the first year with each new sign-up.
Though there are four different tiers to their Shared Hosting packages, the most popular is the Professional plan. This plan gives you 50GB SSD accelerated disk space, unlimited bandwidth, and up to ten websites. Automated backups occur twice a week, so you’ll be left in charge of daily backup measures.
The other choices for Shared Hosting are the Value, Ultimate, and Business SSD packages. While they are all affordable, one thing we found odd was that the Business package (the most expensive) provides you with 5000GB of bandwidth instead of unlimited. The same goes for disk space—you are limited to 20GB SSD.
If you’re using WordPress, NameCheap’s Softaculous app installer will make installing software a breeze, and that goes for all open source applications—not just WordPress.
NameCheap offers robust VPS Server features that utilize the XEN virtualization platform. If you need full route access, an integrated control panel and a choice of operating systems then you should give these guys a shot.
They offer three different types of VPS management—self managed, managed, or fully managed. If you choose self managed or managed, you’ll have root access. If you want to let NameCheap do the work then choose the fully managed option, allowing their technical team to handle all the server operations. However, if you choose NOT to self-manage it’s going to cost you.
There are four VPS plans to choose from, the VPS 1 – Xen being the recommended option. You may choose between four different pay intervals as well—monthly, 3 months, 6 months, and annually. The VPS 1 plan gets you 1GB+1GB Burst, 1 CPU Core, 30 GB SSD (SAS RAID10) and 250GB of bandwidth. The VPS Lite, VPS 2, and VPS 3 plans are there for you just in case you need a little more or a little less.
Dedicated Servers need to be reliable, and offer the latest in high performance hardware. NameCheap gives you this and more with same-day setups under four hours and 100% network uptime guarantee.
There are numerous options to choose from regarding NameCheap’s dedicated servers—far too many to mention here, so we’ll cover the technical aspects in order to give you a good overview.
All of NameCheap’s servers are hosted in their Phoenix datacenter. Their datacenter is equipped with a fully-redundant power network and security systems, making it a more than suitable environment for housing servers.
The servers themselves are rack based, featuring Intel processors, hot swap drive bays, enterprise-edition hard drives and ECC RAM, enabling them to perform in constant high-performance states.
NameCheap’s network is powered by Cisco/Brocade and they have connectivity to Level3, Highlands, HE, Cogent and Integra. What does this mean? In layman’s terms, NameCheap has optimal connectivity to their wide range of servers.
As with the VPS Server plans, their Dedicated Servers give you the choice of server management—self-managed, managed or fully managed. Again, if you choose anything other than self-managed you’re going to be forking over extra cash.
Finally, NameCheap offers four levels of Reseller packages. You have the choice of five different payment intervals this time—monthly, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, and 2 years. The first package, Reseller 1, gets you 25 resold accounts, 25 GB disk space, 1000 GB Bandwidth, and FREE cPanel/WHM. Reseller 2 adds unlimited resold accounts, 75GB disk space, and 2000GB bandwidth. Reseller 3 adds 150GB disk space and unlimited bandwidth. Lastly, Reseller 4 adds 300GB disk space.
Email:
Depending on the package you purchase through NameCheap, you’re going to receive anywhere from 100 email addresses to unlimited. However, if you need private email hosting then they’ve got you covered.
There are three professional email plans, all of which run on a private, secure cloud. They also come with an integrated webmail interface that makes email management a breeze, and it supports all mobile devices. In addition, you’ll have the option to choose a free two month trial. You may also choose to pay annually or biannually if you decide to use the service.
NOTE: According to their website, “you are eligible to receive 60 days’ free subscription for Private plan only once for the lifetime of a domain and for other plans only once per user account.”
Security and Other Included Freebies:
Unfortunately, NameCheap doesn’t offer free SSL Certificates with their hosting packages. You’re going to have to pay extra for those, and depending on your needs, you have the options of Single, Wildcard, or Multi-Domain.
They also offer WhoisGuard. Whois is a database that is accessible to anyone on the internet, providing whoever with your personal information. WhoisGuard is there to make sure this doesn’t happen. NameCheap offers WhoisGuard service in 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5+ year commitments. Currently (January 2017) the price of WhoisGuard is $3.87US per year.
NameCheap also offers PremiumDNS service for less than $5USD per year. Their PremiumDNS comes with 100% service level agreement for DNS resolution, and can be used with any domain name you register. It’s cost efficient, too. Furthermore, NameCheap provides a compensatory credit up to 30 days per year if their PremiumDNS fails to deliver its promises.
As far as freebies go, NameCheap doesn’t offer a whole bunch. You get what’s included in your plan, but most—if not all—of the extras are going to cost you from a few bucks to a lot of bucks.
Customer Service:
NameCheap have a solid customer service base. They offer regular status updates, API Docs, and a Blog. They also have a knowledgebase, ticket system, and a live chat where you can text a customer service representative. If you’re old school, they’ve got a toll-free number you can reach them at, too. Hold times will vary depending on call volume—as with any web hosting company—but you should be through within 15 minutes or less.
Conclusion:
NameCheap is a good option for somebody who builds websites as their business, or is beyond needing a single website for a small business or hobby. I wouldn’t recommend this host for the total novice, but if you have at least a little bit of tech-savvy, this is a very reliable host that won’t try to sell you on features that you don’t need (drag & drop website builders for example). You can easily scale up to more expensive/inclusive packages as your business needs grow.
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