Do NameCheap offer good hosting?
NameCheap’s plan;
(No longer a plan) NameCheap offers one plan for WordPress. This plan is remarkably cheap, costing just $8.88 a year. Yes, you heard that right, $8.88 A YEAR. You can’t get much better than that. There is also a renewal price at $48.88 a year which is still an outstanding price. With this plan, users get to access to one WordPress website and 5GB of storage. This does not seem much and you would be right. I personally believe that this plan is only suitable for very small sites/blogs as there is no option to increase the storage size and to up the number of WordPress sites allowed with this plan. Although in saying that, these plans allow for an unlimited amount of visitors per day/month and E-Commerce plugins do work with your sites. To find this information out I had to go onto their live chat and ask as it’s not advertised within their plan. You also gain many security and support features with this plan.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, support 24/7, backups, database access, a free 30 days money-back guarantee and access to one WordPress website install.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 50000 visitors per month. To make this plan even better, the cost is only £3.10/$3.87 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 is over and the plan is renewed the cost will be the original price of only £23.90/$29.84 a year.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 for a single website this plan allows for up to 200000 monthly visitors and up to 50GB of SSD storage, all for £6.30 a month. When also purchasing this plan, the first month is a small £1.60/$2. If you would wish to be billed annually, the cost of this plan is £35.90/$44.82 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 next year will cost the user the original price of £55.10/$68.80.EasyWP Supersonic
The final Managed WordPress Hosting Plan is the Supersonic Plan. This is the largest of the managed plans offered by NameCheap. The cost of this plan is only £9.50/$11.86 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. Just 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 it will the orginal price of the plan will be billed.WordPress Shared Hosting Plans
NameCheap also offer WordPress shared hosting plans in addition to the managed hosting. These plans are generally cheaper as shared hosting generally is. 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 to note that there is a cost for whichever data centre you wish your shared hosting to be located. 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. Including 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 chaper if you were to prefer to be billed annually. When billed annually this plan will set you back £1.15/$1.44 a month which is a saving of 50% as 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 price to renew 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. This plan again is very cheap compared to the Managed plans. This plan 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 the last shared hsoting plan offered by NameCheap. This plan is ideal for businesses or agencys who 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 amazing 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 with this plan include 50GB of storage, Unlimited websites and an AutoBackup Tool.Do NameCheap provide good support?
Support, it’s one of the biggest features within WordPress hosting. Whether you have a problem or you’re interested in learning something new, NameCheap will have you covered. NameCheap has many different forms of support, including live chat, email, articles, FAQ’s, a support centre, ticketing system and status update for NameCheap themselves. Let’s start off will the types of support which offer you help with your problems. One of these is their live chat. Their live chat is active 24/7/365 and I, myself even have a small bit of experience with it. Workers are very knowledgeable and take their time to reply to your questions and queries promptly and accurately. This is so you’re not waiting about all day for a simple answer. This is true because I got an answer to the questions I had in just over three minutes. Amazing right? You’re also able to submit a ticket if you can’t find the answer to any questions within their knowledge base, which I will talk about next. Within the knowledgebase offered by NameCheap, there are hundreds upon 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 your answer. There are fourteen specific sections within the knowledge base all the articles are separated into. This makes it easy to pinpoint the certain type 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 also. Users can ask questions within the comments of articles about the topic in questions. 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, workers of NameCheap usually respond to any question directly and quickly. Other users are also able to reply to questions in the comments, taking all of the pressure of the NameCheap workers. Absolutely unbelievable service, I think anyway! NameCheap also have 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 some unique questions and also learn more about NameCheap. Also within the support centre, NameCheap has a status update, which is also regularly updated. This feature is great as it allows users to find out important information about scheduled maintenance and it could be the difference between you contacting them or not about your site being down due to maintenance. There is also an FAQ’s section within NameCheap’s website another great place to find answers to some questions and query’s you may have.What kind of security do NameCheap 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 was to happen during updates, and your site loses data, you are able to head back to a previous version of your site. It also means if you 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 greatly advise purchasing an SSL for your site, as it means all data within your site is encrypted. Its also essential for any personal information such as your name, address and card number being entered into your site, as this encrypts all the data. This will greatly ease users of your sites peace of mind. There are many SSL certificates you can choose from to protect your site with. 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 set you back almost £120 a year. This certificate would be great for e-commerce and larger domains with many subdomains. There are another eleven SSL certificates you can choose from 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 nor to receive any spam phone calls and emails from other marketing firms and spammers.NameCheap’s performance, what’s it like?
Like many hosting companies, NameCheap offers an uptime guarantee. Although most have a guarantee, very few have a guarantee of 100% airtime. I will always say this is impossible because sites need to be updated and maintained as well as staff can go wrong. A guarantee of 99.99% is offered with reseller and VPS hosting. If any of these guarantees are broken then 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 means Domain Name System. A DNS acts like a host which connects your site to search results through IP addresses. Without this users would receive a site can’t be reached the page, so it is essential to have at least a simple DNS. A premium DNS will certainly improve your website’s performance, as it will improve your sites speed and its uptime. In terms of their performance, NameCheap doesn’t give a lot away.Does NameCheap have any other or unique features?
NameCheap has a number of other features, they are not necessarily unique to them. One of these features is the money-back guarantee. A money-back guarantee of up to fourteen days is available for everyone who chooses to host with NameCheap. This is great for anyone who is experimenting with NameCheap and if they are trying to figure out if NameCheap is right for them. A custom control panel is used by NameCheap with their WordPress plan. Compared to many other hosts who use cPanel. This panel is called Easy WP Dashboard. Here you are able to name your site and create backups.Positives of NameCheap;
NameCheap has many positives to them. Many of the positive surround their support and setup of your site. As I have mentioned, NameCheap has an amazing support network for its users. They offer various different ways you can 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 who you talk to, are very knowledgeable and respond quickly. I have personal experiences of this feature and the quickness of the staff helps relieve any stress of waiting about. 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 a lot of features. These features include the number of visitors a month, the plugins you’re using, and your own themes. Many hosts place restrictions on using some plugins, NameCheap don’t. NameCheap allows you to use whatever plugin you would like, if the plugin causes problems then 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 amount of visitors per month, something not every host allows. This, of course, comes within reason and T&C’s. This means if your website becomes an overnight sensation, you will not be billed for having millions of visitors. Your site should not experience any downtime also. You can also install your own themes. NameCheap has many data centres, mostly in North America and in the US. They also have a datacenter in England. Users are able to choose which datacenter they would like their site to be hosted. This is positive as websites with a great audience in Europe would perform a lot better if it is stored within the UK datacenter as the UK is in Europe. Your WordPress site is easy to use, setup and update with NameCheap. Updates and backups can be made with just a few simple clicks. NameCheap also install WordPress themselves, so you could have a new website setup 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;
One of the biggest features of NameCheap is that they plan on adding a lot of features to their plan for WordPress. Some of the features they plan to add is a multi-site feature, PHPMyAdmin, CDN, dedicated IP address and FTP/SSH/SFTP access in the near future. There are a lot of features they plan to add in the future. Many of the features, competitors already have, so it is definitely a downfall on NameCheap’s part. There is only one WordPress plan offered by NameCheap. It great if you know what you’re looking for and the plan is perfect for you. If you don’t know what you need, it doesn’t give you options to find what you need. The one plan also just allows one website. As NameCheap use their very own custom control panel, they do 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 guarantee is also a negative to NameCheap. Many competitors offer a money-back guarantee of up to at least thirty days and some even ninety days. By having only a fourteen money-back guarantee users will not have a long time to use and get used to the control panel. This could cause a few problems.My thoughts;
Overall I would give NameCheap a good try if I was looking for WordPress hosting for a small personal website. I do 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 a four if they have many of the features I have talked about in the negatives part of the article above. If NameCheap has many of the features they don’t have at the moment they could compete a lot better against some of the better WordPress hosts.This article was last updated on 23rd September 2019
*ALL PRICING WITHIN THIS ARTICLE WERE ACCURATE AT TIME OF WRITING. ALL STERLING (GBP) AND EURO (EUR) WERE CONVERTED FROM DOLLARS (USD) USING GOOGLE’S OWN 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