NameCheap Hosting was founded in 2000 to deliver cheap and valued domains to the people of the web. Since then, NameCheap has become a leading name in domain registering, with over two million valued customers and five million registered domains under its belt. They have also started to venture into the world of web hosting and strive for net neutrality and freedom on the internet. Something has been talked about recently with new net neutrality laws in the US. NameCheap has fought for internet freedom by establishing a day every year called ‘Move your domain day’, which allows users to move over to their hosting for a reduced rate.

From that, you can tell that people on the internet are NameCheap’s primary focus. With that in mind, their goal is to offer affordable domains and products for all. NameCheap has many data centres spread over North America and a data centre within the UK. Overall, NameCheap offers shared, reseller, VPS, dedicated, and WordPress hosting.

(Since this article was written, NameCheap has updated its WordPress Plans. Before, there was only one plan, but now, as of November 2023, there are three Managed WordPress and three Shared Hosting Plans.)

Do NameCheap Hosting offer good hosting?

Managed WordPress Hosting

All NameCheap Managed WordPress Plans include the same features apart from the amount of storage and visits per month.

These features include a free domain, 24/7 support, backups, database access, a free 30-day money-back guarantee, and access to one WordPress website install.

NameCheap Hosting: WordPress Pricing Comparison

EasyWP Starter

The Starter Plan is a plan ideal for a smaller single website for the likes of a blogger or small shop website. With this plan users have access to all the features spoken about above, 10GB of SSD storage and up to 50,000 visitors per month.

To make this plan even better, the cost is only $6.88 a month, with the first month for only 80p (£0.80/$1). If billed annually, it would be £18.30/$22.85 due to a savings of 23% from the original £23.90/$29.84 a year. This works out slightly cheaper than paying monthly.

Once the year ends and the plan is renewed, the original price will be only £23.90/$29.84 yearly.

EasyWP Turbo

The Turbo plan is very similar to the Starter Plan, the only difference is the size of the plan. All features mentioned above are the same apart from the size of the SSD storage and the number of monthly visits.

Overall, this plan allows for up to 200,000 monthly visitors and up to 50GB of SSD storage for a single website, all for $12.88 a month. When also purchasing this plan, the first month is a small £1.60/$2. If you wish to be billed annually, the cost of this plan is £35.90/$44.82 per year, with a savings of 35% due to the original price being £55.10/$68.80.

Again, once this plan is ready for renewal, the user will pay the original price of £55.10/$68.80 for the next year.

EasyWP Supersonic

The final Managed WordPress Hosting Plan is the Supersonic Plan. This is the largest of the managed plans offered by NameCheap. This plan costs only $19.88 a month, with the first month costing a small £2.40/$3. If you wish to be billed annually for this plan, you will save 50% on the first year as it will only cost £39.90/$49.82, with the original price being £79.10/$98.76.

Like the Starter and the Turbo managed plans, all features mentioned above, such as the free domain and 24/7 support.

Once this plan is renewed, the original price of the plan will be billed.

WordPress Shared Hosting Plans

NameCheap also offers WordPress shared hosting plans in addition to managed hosting. These plans are generally cheaper than shared hosting. With each shared hosting plan, each user gets access to unmetered bandwidth, a free website builder, a free domain with domain protection, SSL Certificates, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Check out all the plans below.

It is worth noting that there is a cost for whichever data centre you wish your shared hosting to be located in. The US data centre is free of charge, but for your shared hosting to be in the UK, there is a charge of 80p (£0.80/$1) a month or £9.60/$11.99 a year. This is on top of the plan itself.

Stellar Plan;

The first shared hosting WordPress plan offered by NameCheap is the Stellar plan. In addition to the features mentioned above, users get access to 20GB of storage and three website installs. All this comes in at a very cheap £2.30/$2.87 a month. It also gets even cheaper if you prefer to be billed annually.

When billed annually, this plan will set you back £1.15/$1.44 a month, which is a 50% savings compared to its original price of £2.26/$2.82 a month. Overall, that works out to £13.82/$17.26 for the first year, when the original price should be £27.10/$33.84.

After the first year, the renewal price is the original price of £27.10/$33.84 a year.

Stellar Plus;

The Stellar Plus Plan is the second Shared Hosting Plan. This plan includes all the same features of the Stellar Plan apart it has an unlimited amount of storage and an unlimited amount of website installs.

Again, this plan is very cheap compared to the Managed plans. It costs £3.90/$4.87 a month, and if you wish to be billed annually, you will save 50% on your first year, only costing you £23.42/$29.24 for the first year. This works out at £1.95/$2.43 a month.

After the first year, the plan will renew at its original price of £46.30/$46.30 a year, which works out at around £3.86/$4.82 a month.

Stellar Business

The Stellar Business is NameCheap’s last shared hosting plan. It is ideal for businesses or agencies that wish to offer shared hosting. Once again, all the features of the two other Stellar plans are within this plan.

Overall, this plan will set you back either £6.30/$7.87 a month or £3.06/$3.82 a month if you pay annually, which is an impressive 50% off. That means the final cost of paying annually would be £36.70/$45.82. This plan renews after the first year at its original price of £75.10/$93.77.

Additional features of this plan include 50GB of storage, unlimited websites, and an AutoBackup Tool.

comparison table contrasting Namecheap Hosting shared hosting plan features and pricing against top competitors Bluehost and Hostinger:

Host	Storage	Bandwidth	Websites	Price Per Month	Free Domain	Money Back Guarantee
Namecheap	Unmetered	Unmetered	20	$8.88 year 1	No	7 days
Bluehost	50GB	Unmetered	1	$2.75	1 Year	30 days
Hostinger	Unmetered	Unmetered	100	$1.39	No	30 days

Key things that stand out:

• Namecheap is more expensive initially
• But allows significantly more sites
• Bluehost includes 1 free domain registration
• Hostinger offers the lowest monthly rates

Does NameCheap Hosting provide good support?

Support is one of the most prominent features of WordPress hosting. Whether you have a problem or you’re interested in learning something new, NameCheap has you covered. NameCheap offers many different forms of support, including live chat, email, articles, FAQs, a support centre, a ticketing system, and status updates for NameCheap itself.

Let’s start with the types of support that offer help with your problems. One of these is their live chat. Their live chat is active 24/7/365, and I even have a tiny bit of experience with it. Workers are very knowledgeable and take the time to reply to your questions and queries promptly and accurately.

This is so you’re not waiting all day for a simple answer. This is true because I got an answer to my questions in just over three minutes. Amazing right? You can also submit a ticket if you can’t find the answer to any questions within their knowledge base, which I will discuss next.

Within the knowledge base offered by NameCheap, there are hundreds of articles. All these articles can help users find answers to their questions easily and without directly needing to go to NameCheap to get their answers. The knowledge base has fourteen specific sections, and all the articles are separated into.

This makes it easy to pinpoint the certain types of articles you need to read to help you find an answer. You can also use the search bar provided to search for specific topics, such as WordPress hosting, which would probably be within the hosting section of the knowledge base. Hosting is one of the fourteen sections.

The knowledge base is run like a forum. Users can ask questions in the comments of articles about the topic. They even have a warning saying off-topic questions will get deleted, so don’t worry, the comments will not be spammed.

Within these comments, NameCheap workers usually respond to any question directly and quickly. Other users can also reply to questions in the comments, taking all of the pressure off the NameCheap workers. This is absolutely unbelievable service, I think, anyway!

NameCheap also has a blog. This has been operating since September 2008 and is regularly updated with new posts. Every post now comes with an image, which is fun to see. Here users can find answers to unique questions and learn more about NameCheap. Also, within the support centre, NameCheap has a status update, which is also regularly updated.

This excellent feature allows users to find out crucial information about scheduled maintenance. It could be the difference between contacting them or not about your site being down due to maintenance.

There is also an FAQ section within NameCheap’s website, another great place to find answers to any questions or queries you may have.

What kind of security do NameCheap Hosting provide?

One of the only security features you get with the WordPress plan on NameCheap is backups. Having backups is one of the best features you can ever have on your site. This is because if something drastic were to happen during updates and your site lost data, you could go back to a previous version of your site. It also means that if your site crashes, data loss can be prevented as you can go back to the previous backup.

Many other features, such as an SSL and WhoIsGuard, need to be purchased and added to your plan yourself. I would remarkably advise purchasing an SSL for your site, as it means all data within your site is encrypted.

It’s also essential for any personal information, such as your name, address, and card number, to be entered into your site, as this encrypts all the data. This will greatly ease users’ peace of mind.

You can choose from many SSL certificates to protect your site. The cheapest certificate will cost you £6.36 for a year or £5.64 for two years. This certificate is great for personal websites such as blogs. The most expensive SSL cost sets you back almost £120 a year. This certificate would be great for e-commerce and larger domains with many subdomains. You can choose from another eleven SSL certificates ranging from £10.66 a year up to £120.

WhoIsGuard is a feature that protects your personal information linked with your domain. It is basically a domain privacy feature that blocks your personal information, such as your name, address, phone number, and email, from being in public view. This will help you not receive spam phone calls and emails from other marketing firms and spammers.

NameCheap Hosting‘s performance, what’s it like?

Like many hosting companies, NameCheap offers an uptime guarantee. Although most have a guarantee, very few guarantee 100% airtime. I will always say this is impossible because sites need to be updated and maintained, and staff can go wrong. A guarantee of 99.99% is offered with reseller and VPS hosting.

If any of these guarantees are broken, users will be reimbursed with free days for every hour their site is down.

You can also get a Premium DNS with your plan. DNS stands for Domain Name System. A DNS acts like a host, connecting your site to search results through IP addresses. Without this, users would receive a site that can’t reach the page, so it is essential to have at least a simple DNS.

A premium DNS will undoubtedly improve your website’s performance, as it will improve your site’s speed and uptime. In terms of their performance, NameCheap doesn’t give a lot away.

Does NameCheap Hosting have any other or unique features?

NameCheap has a number of other features, which are not necessarily unique to it. One of these features is the money-back guarantee. Up to fourteen days of money-back guarantee are available for everyone who chooses to host with NameCheap. This is great for anyone who is experimenting with NameCheap and trying to figure out if it is right for them.

NameCheap uses a custom control panel with its WordPress plan, unlike many other hosts who use cPanel. This panel is called Easy WP Dashboard. Here, you can name your site and create backups.

Positives of NameCheap Hosting;

NameCheap has many positive aspects, many of which surround its support and site setup. As I have mentioned, NameCheap has an amazing support network for its users. They offer various ways to get in contact with them and have many other features that can help and support you with problems.

One of the best positives of their support is their live chat; it is easy to use, and the staff you talk to are very knowledgeable and respond quickly. I have personal experience with this feature, and the quickness of the staff helps relieve any waiting stress. The knowledge base is also fantastic, as it has hundreds, maybe even thousands, of articles on different problems, which can help you figure problems out. Staff and other members of NameCheap can comment within the articles if you have any further questions about any of the articles.

Another positive of NameCheap is that they don’t place restrictions on many features. These features include the number of visitors a month, the plugins you’re using, and your themes. Many hosts place restrictions on using some plugins, but NameCheap doesn’t. NameCheap allows you to use whatever plugin you would like. If the plugin causes problems, they will try their hardest to fix the problem without cutting off the plugin itself.

E-commerce plugins can be easily used with NameCheap. Users of this plan can also have an unlimited number of visitors per month, something not every host allows. This, of course, comes within reason and T&Cs. This means if your website becomes an overnight sensation, you will not be billed for having millions of visitors. Your site should also not experience any downtime. You can also install your themes.

NameCheap has many data centres, mainly in North America and the US. They also have a data centre in England. Users are able to choose which data centre they would like their site to be hosted in. This is positive, as websites with a great audience in Europe would perform much better if they were stored within the UK data centre, as the UK is in Europe.

Your WordPress site is easy to use, set up, and update with NameCheap. Updates and backups can be made with just a few simple clicks. NameCheap also installs WordPress itself, so you can have a new website set up within thirty seconds. They even say “we do the heavy lifting for you.” This is great for users with not very much experience of WordPress and hosting.

Negatives of NameCheap Hosting;

One of the most prominent features of NameCheap is that they plan to add many features to their WordPress plan. Some of the features they plan to add are a multi-site feature, PHPMyAdmin, CDN, dedicated IP address and FTP/SSH/SFTP access shortly. There are a lot of features they plan to add in the future. Competitors already have many features, which is a downfall for NameCheap.

NameCheap offers only one WordPress plan. This plan is great if you know what you’re looking for and is perfect for you. However, if you don’t know what you need, it doesn’t give you options to find what you need. The one plan also only allows one website.

As NameCheap uses its very own custom control panel, it does not use cPanel. cPanel is a control panel many customers would be familiar with and would like to have this control panel over the custom panel provided.

The fourteen-day money-back guarantee is also a negative for NameCheap. Many competitors offer a money-back guarantee of up to at least thirty days and some even ninety days. With only a fourteen-day money-back guarantee, users will not have a long time to use and get used to the control panel, which could cause a few problems.

My thoughts;

Overall, I would give NameCheap a good try if I were looking for WordPress hosting for a small personal website. However, I feel they are missing out on the bigger part of the WordPress market by only having the one EasyWP plan.

I have rated NameCheap three stars out of five, and it would be four if they had many of the features I mentioned in the negative section of the article above. If NameCheap had many of the features they don’t have at the moment, they could compete much better against some of the better WordPress hosts.

NameCheap Hosting FAQ

Still evaluating Namecheap’s web hosting services? Here are answers to key considerations:

Does Namecheap Hosting offer phone support?

No. Namecheap provides support only via live chat, knowledge-based articles, and support ticket emails.

Is Namecheap Hosting beginner-friendly?

While not overly complex, the minimal cPanel interface assumes some technical comfort in managing sites directly.

Can Namecheap Hosting handle high-traffic sites?

Namecheap claims capable of handling 500k monthly visits. However, limited resources may constrain more demanding workloads.

What is Namecheap Hosting’s uptime guarantee?

Namecheap commits to 99.9% uptime. Independent monitoring indicates they meet this well.

NameCheap Hosting Conclusion

With capable performance, rock-bottom pricing initially, and unrestricted bandwidth and storage, Namecheap presents quality hosting perfect for hobbyist websites or basic SMB sites anticipating limited growth. However, be prepared for more involved manual site management, given barebones dashboards. And factor in renewal sticker shock kicking in after year-one promotions expire.

This article was last updated on 21 November 2023

*ALL PRICING WITHIN THIS ARTICLE  WERE ACCURATE AT THE TIME OF WRITING. ALL STERLING (GBP) AND EURO (EUR) WERE CONVERTED FROM DOLLARS (USD) USING GOOGLE’S CONVERTER.

*ALL PLANS AND PACKAGES MADE BY NAMECHEAP ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE BY NAMECHEAP THEMSELVES.

Check out other hosting reviews; WP Engine | SiteGround | GoDaddy | HostGator | iPage | Flywheel | DigitalOcean | Bluehost | DreamHost | InMotion | NameCheap | 1&1| Site5 | 123Reg | A2 | Liquid Web

To find out more about NameCheap and what they offer, check out NameCheap