NameCheap and Name.com are well-known competitors in the domain registration field, but you may not know that they also compete with each other fiercely in web hosting.
To enrich their product range, the two companies have been offering shared hosting for several years, and during the time, they have adopted some of the same things like cPanel, PHP, MySQL and Python. These similarities make it confusing to make a decision if you don’t know more details.
But in fact, there are many big differences between them, such as the web hosting performance and pricing. In this comparison, we will present all the differences, as well as the similarities, clearly.
Rating
Price
Features
Uptime
Speed
Tech Support
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NameCheap Review
Name.com Review
What Do the Two Companies Have in Common?
When going with either NameCheap or Name.com, you can buy various TLDs at cheap prices, and get access to free cPanel and many other normal hosting features like PHP and MySQL. However, for technical support, neither of them provides live chat. Now learn more details in below.
Affordable domain registrations – Started as domain registrars, NameCheap and Name.com can offer almost any TLD that you want. Besides, they often allow discounts for the popular domains like .com, .net and .org. If you are lucky, the domain cost can be less than $10 per year.
cPanel – All the shared hosting plans from NameCheap and Name.com include free access to cPanel, the best Linux hosting control panel.
The widely used features – All the plans come with the latest PHP, Python, MySQL, SSI, and Cron Jobs. For the website backup, NameCheap performs it automatically twice a week, while Name.com provides nightly backups.
Lack of live chat support – The two companies both provide support via email and phone, but live chat, a convenient and efficient communication channel, is absent. This is not a piece of good news for those who need a quick way to get answers to simple questions.
There is one thing that needs to figure out. For phone support, NameCheap provides it on a 24×7 basis, while Name.com only makes it available during 8:00am-6:00pm (MT) from Monday to Friday.
What Are the Notable Differences?
The differences between NameCheap and Name.com lie in many important parts, such as the price, server resources, speed, and uptime. By analyzing those differences, however, we finally found that neither of the two companies is a great choice for shared hosting.
NameCheap provides cheaper plans & more resources
The most impressive things with NameCheap web hosting plans are the cheap prices for first-time customers. But at the same time, you have to know the renewal prices are much higher. Below is the price information about the 3 affordable plans.
Value: $0.82/mo for initial term, $3.24/mo for the renewal.
Professional: $1.66/mo for initial term, $6.57/mo for the renewal.
Ultimate: $2.49/mo for initial term, $10.82/mo for the renewal.
Name.com provides 3 web hosting plans which are now available from $4.99/mo, $7.99/mo and $12.99/mo. Since a discount is applied automatically for the initial term, the renewal prices are $6.99/mo, $10.99/mo and $16.99/mo. These prices are higher than those of NameCheap.
Besides the cheaper prices, NameCheap also provides more server resources in its web hosting plans. However, its cheap plans lack some developer features, which you can see in the following comparison.
Feature
Plan
Value
Startup
Website(s)
3
1
Disk Space
20 GB
10 GB
Bandwidth
Unlimited
100 GB
Sub-Domains
50
Unlimited
FTP Accounts
50
Unlimited
Email Accounts
50
100
MySQL Databases
50
10
PostgreSQL Databases
Ruby on Rails
Python
Git
The table above tells that neither of NameCheap and Name.com does great in the web hosting features. Many leading web hosts are much more generous than them. For example, BlueHost provides all the common scripting languages, MySQL/PostgreSQL, cPanel, 50 GB disk space and unlimited bandwidth at $2.95/mo only for orders placed through this exclusive link.
NameCheap has higher uptime
Both NameCheap and Name.com boast reliable web hosting services with 99.9% uptime, but only the former has kept the promise, according to our monitoring. NameCheap can provide 99.9% or higher percentage of uptime in most months. Below are some of the monitoring statistics.
For Name.com, however, the uptime is quite disappointing, because there are too many complaints against the reliability. One of the main complaints is the frequent downtime lasting for hours, and another is about the data loss due to unexpected internal errors. The actual uptime of Name.com web hosting services is about 99.85%.
NameCheap is faster
According to our constant monitoring, neither of NameCheap and Name.com delivers super fast hosting speed. However, when compared more carefully, NameCheap wins a little, because its server response time averages about 600ms, which is over 40% faster than that of its competitor.
But pay attention that NameCheap is still far from being great in speed. Many web hosting providers, including BlueHost, the one mentioned before, reduce the response time below 400ms. Here is a rough comparison.
Name.com offers longer refund period
NameCheap provides cheap plans to attract new users, but it doesn’t offer a reasonable refund guarantee. As most web hosts nowadays allow refunds within 30 days, NameCheap shortens the time to 14 days. Name.com, however, follows the trend and accepts refund requests for all accounts cancelled during the first 30 days.
Conclusion – Neither Is Good Enough
It seems the NameCheap possesses many advantages over Name.com, such as the better uptime, faster speed and cheaper prices, but in fact, we do think it is not good enough, either. The refund period is too short; the renewal costs are high, and the performance is not outstanding at all.
In this case, we suggest you take more web hosts into the comparison before settling down. If you are about to do this, the following companies are worth the consideration.