This NameCheap review is targeted at explaining everything about NameCheap, Inc. and its services; what you get by purchasing one of its managed or shared WordPress Hosting plans for your website/blog.
Searching for a good WordPress hosting company for your site may, sometimes, become a complicated task. Who wouldn’t get confused? There are literally thousands of web hosting companies out there — offering the same thing: a home for your website.
Although they all offer the same thing, not all the deals you get out there are fair deals. Some hosting pricing is overly hiked while some are insanely cheap.
However, not all cheap WordPress hosting companies are worth your time, trust me. Many of them limit so many functionalities to make up for the low pricing they offer.
Is that the case with NameCheap? Let’s find out.
Page Contents
What is NameCheap all about?
NameCheap is an ICANN-accredited registrar founded by Richard Kirkendall in 2000. And since then has grown to become, according to most polls conducted, the best domain name registration company in the World.
NameCheap is popularly known for domain name registration services; however, it offers much more than just domain name registrations. It is also a web hosting company.
Other services provided on NameCheap apart from domain name registration include:
- Managed WordPress Hosting
- Shared WordPress Hosting
- Reseller Hosting
- VPS Hosting
- Dedicated Servers
- Private Email Hosting
- Whois
- PremiumDNS, etc.
Its headquarters is located in Los Angeles, California, United States. And has data centers in both the US and the UK. During registration, a customer has the option to choose either the US or the UK datacenter. This provides an ideal option for customers outside the US or situated in a location closer to the UK.
NameCheap Hosting Plans
If you are interested in building a small niche site for Amazon or AdSense, then there’s no point in purchasing the same hosting plan as Forbes that gets around 50 million monthly visitors.
That’s why NameCheap has a wide range of Shared hosting plans to choose from and their own version of an unusually cheap managed WordPress hosting.
Even if you intend to grow your website to reach millions of monthly visitors, you may not need to purchase one of the most expensive plans just yet. The stellar plan, I believe, will do just fine while you’re working on building your traffic. There’s always room for an upgrade when you need to access more resources and functionalities.
1. Managed WordPress hosting
If you plan on building a WordPress website, then it’s your lucky day. NameCheap recently introduced its own version of Managed WordPress hosting ‘Easy WP BETA’.
With EasyWP BETA, you can launch a WordPress website in 30 seconds. Super fast, don’t you think?
Easy WP is the best for startups; a good place to start while working on building your presence on the web. Additionally, your website will be hosted on NameCheap’s high-performance servers and maintained by WordPress experts – so you won’t have to worry about optimization and other tech-related stuff.
Here are the features you get for just $8.88/yr:
- Quick WordPress setup
- WordPress website
- 5GB of SSD Storage
- Easy backups
- Security
- 24/7/365 Support from Namecheap’s Customer Service Team
What’s WordPress setup?
Setting up a WordPress website requires that you install the WordPress software. And with NameCheap, you don’t have to manually install WordPress. All it takes is just one click.
What’s SSD Storage?
Your SSD storage is the space allocated to you for uploading videos, adding images and any other data that consumes disk space. NameCheap offers 5GB of SSD Storage for EasyWP BETA.
What are Backups?
Webmasters make mistakes a few times but get themselves back on track by restoring saved database and media backups. With NameCheap Managed Hosting plans, you get automatic backups twice a week.
What’s the security for?
WordPress is the most popular CMS blogging platform and often targeted by hackers. Since your website will be managed by NameCheap experts, you won’t have to worry about hackers. If you’ve ever had your website hacked, I am sure you know by now why website security is of the essence.
NameCheap EasyWP BETA was recently introduced and hasn’t gained much popularity. Maybe because many people are unaware of the existence of such a cheap managed WordPress hosting plan.
Expect to see people troop in for this offer as soon as they realize what they’re missing out on. That’s why you need to grab this huge discount as soon as possible. You never can tell; things may change.
And for the pricing, it’s a welcome to NameCheap price. Renewal price is set at $29.88/year.
What I’ve observed with Namecheap inc. though is that they always have stable pricing and maintain transparency in all of its services, before you purchase a hosting plan, Namecheap always makes sure you are aware of what the cost of renewal would be — so don’t expect to see a sudden hike in the pricing of EasyWP BETA anytime soon.
What you must take note of, however, is that EasyWP still carries the BETA tag. It simply means it’s still in its BETA state — but has been ongoing that way for a long time now.
In the future, we expect to see Namecheap release other managed WordPress hosting plans. But for now, it’s just EasyWP BETA and nothing else.
Who should purchase NameCheap managed WordPress hosting?
NameCheap managed WordPress hosting service is best suited for both businesses and small website owners who are not interested in wasting any time on-site optimization and just want someone to handle the security and optimization aspect of managing a website while they go on with publishing.
However, with the 5GB of SSD storage offered, it is most suitable for building small niche sites and personal blogs. If you run a massive website that will require a lot of images and video uploads, the 5GB of SSD storage will get exhausted in no time.
But for the price offered, it’s more than a fair deal.
In other hosting companies, managed WordPress hosting is always the most expensive; because you pay for the optimization and other services you get from experts.
Take Kinsta which is one of the more expensive managed WordPress Hosting company for instance. The least Managed WordPress Hosting plan you can get there is priced at $100 monthly. And you only get 50GB of SSD storage. Now, if you weigh both properly, you’ll see that you are getting an insanely cheap deal from Namecheap.
$8.88 for the first year is outrageously cheap. Under normal circumstances, you can’t even purchase a .com domain name with that.
And for the renewal price set at $29.88, it’s still an incredible deal. No other deal out there beats that. So it’s safe to conclude that Namecheap EasyWP BETA is the cheapest managed WordPress hosting deal you can ever find on the web.
2. Shared Hosting plans
Depending on your needs, NameCheap offers basically three shared hosting pricing tiers: Stellar, Stellar Plus, and Stellar Business. All priced at: $24,88/yr, $46.88/yr and $88.88/yr respectively.
Let’s have an overview of how each shared hosting plan works, so you can have an idea of what plan will be most suitable for your business.
Stellar |
Stellar plus |
Stellar business |
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Unlimited bandwidth is common to all the shared hosting plans. Visit NameCheap to see many more features that can’t be listed here.
Who should buy a shared hosting plan?
In the case of managed WordPress hosting, Namecheap experts are in charge of your website optimization. On the other hand, anyone subscribed to a shared hosting plan is responsible for his/her website optimization and speed — based on the resources allocated to your site.
So, if you have experience with managing websites, feel free to buy a shared hosting plan. Even if you don’t have experience the Namecheap support team will be there for you.
What shared hosting plan should you buy?
Each shared hosting plan comes with different features and adds on; depending on your needs or the size of your website. If you are building a new website, you can buy the stellar plan. There’s always room for an upgrade when you feel like accessing more features/functionalities.
If you have a large website and want to import all of your media contents into your new hosting servers, then you may need to buy either the stellar plus or the stellar business plan — depending on how large your website is.
3. Reseller Hosting
Ever thought of starting your own hosting business and don’t know how to go about it? Namecheap offers reseller hosting services at very affordable rates.
You could either make use of that service to host multiple websites of yours or sell hosting packages to your own customer base.
Once your hosting account has been activated, you can go ahead and start setting up your reseller business. You will set up your hosting plans based on the resources your reseller account was allocated to.
It is completely up to you to decide on the prices and fees for the services you will be offering; based on your marketing strategies or how much profit you intend to make.
You will be in full control of your reseller hosting account. Your clients will not find any Namecheap logo or reference to Namecheap in their hosting accounts.
NameCheap Review: pros and cons
Like I said earlier, this post is targeted at offering a sincere NameCheap review — as per what I have experienced while using its services on some of my projects.
As you’ve noticed from the title of this blog post, “NameCheap review – cheapest WordPress shared hosting and more”, I chose my words carefully.
Being very cheap doesn’t make it the best web hosting company, neither does it being ridiculously cheap makes it a mediocre web hosting company. Yeah, I know, it’s 80% of times like that. Most web hosting companies reduce so many functionalities to make up for offering very cheap pricing plans; but that not the case with NameCheap.
Often times, though, every service you get on the internet comes with its upsides and downsides; pros and cons. It is our duty to properly weigh up both sides. Do the pros outwit the cons or vice versa?
Let’s find out…
Pros of using NameCheap
1. Insanely cheap
Compared to other web hosting sites, Namecheap hosting plans are way, way cheaper, whichever way you weigh it. In other words, what they offer is what you can’t find anywhere else.
Many web hosting providers claim to be the cheapest – but if the plans are truly compared, no other hosting company gets anywhere near what Namecheap offers.
Its pricing is, somehow, an eyebrow-raiser. People find it hard to believe that a WordPress hosting plan could be so cheap – so they start to doubt its credibility.
But I want to make it clear that NameCheap gives you so many functionalities even with its most basic plan, ‘Stellar‘. So much value for money that you can find nowhere else.
When you surf the net in search of the best web hosting companies, you may discover that NameCheap doesn’t get featured in the list of most sites. Majorly due to the fact that the affiliate commission rate is quite smaller compared to sites like BlueHost, Hostgator, etc.
In my opinion, writing articles like best WordPress hosting is just for the sake of providing answers to search queries. The best hosting company for your website is relative to your needs, pocket and aims.
2. So many freebies
Namecheap is popularly known for offering a lot of freebies when it comes to luring existing customers of other hosting providers; to the point that they offer to move your website for free if you have it hosted somewhere else before.
This feature comes in handy for anyone not interested in involving themselves with all the techy, techy involved with transferring a website from one hosting provider to another.
Even if you are a tech-savvy, you are most likely not used to the Namecheap cPanel, relaxing and letting them do the job of moving your website will be very helpful.
Namecheap’s free site migration offer covers a wide range, which includes:
- cPanel site migration
- A site without cPanel migration
- Email transfers
- VPS or dedicated server transfer, and much more.
So if you were doubting whether to make the switch or not, due to fears of ruining something, you need not panic. Your site migration will be handled by Namecheap.
Other freebies you get from Namecheap include:
- free .website domain name.
- free SSL certificates.
- free Whoisguard subscription.
All the above freebies are extremely important features nowadays. SSL certificates are considered very important in SEO. It’s one of Google’s ranking factors. Namecheap provides all of its hosting customers with 50 free Positive SSL certificates for one year.
Also, with so many scammers and hackers on the loose and terrorizing the internet, WhoisGuard comes in handy. Important information about you, like Home Address, Phone number, email address, etc., will be hidden from the public eye. Something you would have had to pay extra fees for, Namecheap offers for free.
3. 100% uptime guaranteed
Hard to believe right? I had my doubts too, not until I tested it myself. Hosting industries uptime best practices is set at 99%. It’s rare to see a hosting provider boast of 100% uptime.
Pingdom uptime reports on Namecheap for the last 6 months failed to fault that assertion. Namecheap had an uptime of 99.99%, with only a 5-minute outage for complete 6 months. That’s virtually 100% uptime. And that practically means your website will always be online.
If you run an e-commerce store, by now you should know how important your website uptime is. Even 10 minutes of downtime can cost you 1000s of dollars.
Besides the fact that you will most likely lose money with server downtime, you may end up losing potential leads and long term customers.
No one is ever happy to find it difficult to access their favorite websites. Having a stable website uptime is extremely important if you give cognizance to user experience and audience retention.
So the guaranteed uptime with Namecheap is a feature you must never overlook if you want a website that’s never offline. Now, that brings us to the question: who doesn’t want guaranteed uptime? I bet you do. So don’t waste any time.
Get started with Namecheap now.
4. User-friendly cPanel + WordPress integration
Namecheap claims to have the number #1 cPanel in the world, and rightly so. The user-friendliness of Namecheap’s control panel gives you full control of your website via your browser.
You can install WordPress or your app of choice in a matter of seconds with Softaculous app installer, which enables updating and maintaining open source applications complication-free.
The cPanel gives you easy and complete access to your website servers and other additional features. Even a newbie you will find it extremely easy to work with. You can manage all your websites, emails, subdomains, etc., right within your cPanel.
Under your cPanel statistics, on the right-hand side, you can keep track of important information regarding how much resources you’ve used up.
5. Excellent customer support
When choosing a hosting company, one important feature to look out for is how effective its customer support is; because you are bound to encounter technical difficulties one time or the other.
Namecheap provides all of its customers with customer support that works around the clock to resolve any issues or challenges you may face.
Under the knowledgebase, you can find answers to virtually all the questions new customers are likely to have. And whenever you encounter a problem not documented in the knowledge base, you can either submit a ticket or make use of the live chat feature.
The live chat, in my opinion, has an impressive wait time. You may have to wait for 5 minutes or less before you get attended to. I get attended to within 30 seconds sometimes. My highest wait time is approximately 5 minutes.
One thing is getting attended to by the support team; getting the support you were looking for is another. The support team at Namecheap are highly qualified WordPress and Namecheap cPanel experts. Whenever you get faced with an issue, don’t hesitate to contact them. You paid for it.
6. Moneyback guarantee
This is another important thing to look out for when purchasing a hosting plan from a web hosting company: do they offer a money-back guarantee? And if they do, is it real or a hoax?
Namecheap offers a money-back guarantee for any hosting plan you purchase. They offer a guarantee of quality, of which when not met, you can trigger your money back option.
If for any reason you are not completely satisfied with the services you get from Namecheap, a full refund will be issued to you within 30 days after your purchase, no questions asked.
Cons of using NameCheap
1. Cap for the Stellar Business plan
Did you notice it? The Stellar business is capped. In my opinion, it shouldn’t be. Websites that purchase the stellar plan are mostly larger websites, and 50GB SSD for a large website is extremely small and will be exhausted in a breeze.
However, if you still consider the pricing, it more than makes up for the cap.
Conclusive review
Namecheap hosting pricings are cheap to a fault; major reason it thrives as a soloist in the hosing business. It is a privately-owned independent hosting company. Unlike some other hosting companies run by a large group or corporation.
Major hosting companies you know, like Bluehost, Hostgator, etc., are owned by the same company, EIG (Endurance International Group).
So the cheap pricing you get from Namecheap is not proof of mediocrity but, rather, a marketing strategy to beat off stern competition from GoDaddy, in the domain name business, and EIG, in the web hosting business.