The service that they offer is affordable. They offer a basic and advanced plan for $7/month where you will receive 10GB of storage with just the basic features or 20GB if you want to use all their included web hosting tools in addition to their site builder (called The Loop).
It is somewhat strange that most of Namecheap’s reviews are about domain name registration and management. This is one of the largest registrars in the world, but it also offers the full range of Linux hosting solutions: shared, managed, virtual, and dedicated WordPress servers.
However, finding a comprehensive Namecheap review of the company’s hosting solutions is surprisingly difficult in 2019.
That’s why I signed up for the medium shared hosting plan the company has, created a basic WordPress site, and connected it to monitoring tools to measure its performance over time.
Accurate and regular metrics can reveal the true qualities of a web host and answer any questions. However, most of them boil down to a simple query:
The essentials: uptime, speed, and Namecheap support
A host is only as good as its servers and its support team.
By far, an essential quality of any worthwhile web host is availability. Customers pay to have their web pages accessible; that’s what web hosting is all about.
When a site is offline, visitors and revenue are lost regardless of the underlying reason for the outage.
This is why all the major website hosting providers promise an uptime of 99.9% or more.
Namecheap was the only company other than DreamHost to guarantee 100% uptime and offer rewards every time the promise is broken. Recently, the promise was changed to the more realistic 99.9%.
Unlike many other Namecheap hosting reviews that I saw online, I rely on real-time data to monitor my test sites. My monitoring tool is StatusCake, and it is configured to poll my WordPress site from three separate servers before announcing that it is inaccessible.
At first, the little site I have on Namecheap went down several times.
“In recent months, Namecheap has inevitably delivered the promised uptime.”
It was disappointing to see an average availability of 99.82% in 2018.
However, since February 2019, uptime has never fallen below 99.9%, and the strong performance continues through 2023
Reasonable speed
Quick response time - 0.36s (5th)
OK Fully charged time - 0.98s (8th)
Slow under load - 1.25s (13 °)
Note: If you run speed tests on my domain, the results may fluctuate slightly. Two tests would usually show somewhat different results, even from the same test platform. My Namecheap site is hosted in Arizona, so I tested it in US locations. All plugins and server-side caching were disabled.
Website speed is becoming more and more important. For many end-users, it is even more important than uptime.
If you visit a site you know offline once, it is not that important since it will be available the next time you check it. However, visiting a slow and unresponsive site generally means you will never type your URL again.
The statistics show so much.
Since I wanted to create the most detailed and honest Namecheap shared hosting review, I had to run my site through three-speed checkers.
The average speed was not great. While the time it takes for the first byte to send from the server isn’t that bad, the page fully loads in a full second.
Now, this is not The Truth slow, but a basic installation of WordPress without plugins or meaningful content is not so quick, especially compared to the best hosting providers.
Namecheap’s hosting speed seems to be right in the middle of the hosting provider’s pack here at the Hosting Court.
THE RESULTS WERE ALSO AVERAGE when I tested how the Namecheap shared server handles incoming traffic.
Fifty concurrent users brought the average response time to about a full second. Again this is on a site with very few basic pages and no plugins. Only InMotion Hosting and HostGator Cloud had a slower performance.
Average response time 2018 – 0.38s
Average response time 2019:
- January – 0.32s
- February – 0.33s
- March – 0.32s
- April – 0.39s
- May – 0.32s
- June – 0.37s
- July – 0.32s
- August – 0.36s
- September – 0.33s
- October – 0.29s
- November – 0.39s
- December – 0.40s
Average response time 2020:
- January – 0.34s
- February – 0.39s
Page fully loaded 2018 – 1.05s
Fully loaded page 2019:
- January – 0.76s
- February – 1.16s
- March – 0.81s
- April – 1.00s
- May – 0.94s
- June – 0.83s
- July – 1.03s
- August – 1.01s
- September – 1.09s
- October – 0.91s
- November – 1.00 s
- December – 1.03s
Fully loaded page 2020:
- January – 0.88s
- February – 0.87s
Response under load 2018 – 0.99s
Response under load 2019:
- January – 2.07s
- February – 1.23s
- March – 0.95s
- April – 0.89s
- May – 1.87s
- June – 1.59s
- July – 2.30s
- August – 1.45s
- September – 1.14s
- October – 1.28s
- November – 0.96s
- December – 1.15s
Response under load 2020:
- January – 0.93s
- February – 0.99s
Namecheap Hosting Review
At the beginning of this review, I promised to answer the question: is Namecheap hosting good? Well, these are the things that make this host a worthy place to host your site.
You can find more information on Namecheap’s hosting plans below, but I want to make it clear that the company’s most minor plan is a real gem. It can cost as little as $ 2.88 per month and allows the hosting of three websites.
Most of the other companies I have reviewed design suitable starter plans for a single website and nothing else, making Namecheap a unique and valuable offering.
Considering all the features that the smaller Namecheap plan includes, I must say that it is an excellent opportunity for people who want to host two or three small or medium sites.
Namecheap offers site migration for free. If you have a cPanel website elsewhere and decide to move to Namecheap, the steps are simple, straightforward, and require very little input on your behalf.
You have to provide Namecheap web hosting technicians access to your current cPanel, and that’s it. They will work their magic without further involvement and probably without any downtime. Even if there is one, it will not exceed 15 minutes.
This is where it gets exciting. If your site downtime exceeds the fifteen-minute mark, you are entitled to free hosting equal to your initial purchase. In other words, if you buy hosting for a year and you are not satisfied with the way your site is migrated, you may end up with a full year of free hosting.
Unlike many other hosts who raise fees dramatically once it’s time to renew, Namecheap’s renewal price doesn’t go up. This strikes me as refreshingly honest, as some companies’ deficient fees are unrealistic in the long run.
Owning a website is not a short-term investment. It could be something that will pay for decades if the site works well. GoDaddy and HostGator love the tactic of the cheap introductory price and the considerably higher renewal fee. Even SiteGround, an open and transparent company, deploys this marketing approach.
All Namecheap plans include free backups. Only the largest enjoys daily backups, but even twice a week is respectable since there are no additional charges.
We live in a digital age that makes data loss an inevitable part of life. This is particularly true when it comes to websites, as many instances require the use of a healthy backup.
The most extensive plan includes daily backups, but even twice a week is sufficient.
Site updates, plugin malfunctions, and Tipss are the most popular reasons backups are impressive. Trust me; regular automatic backups are fantastic.
If you search for recent Namecheap reviews from 2019 without specifying that you are interested in web hosting, you will learn how good a registrar the company is. Without a doubt, it is.
Now, if you’re wondering, “Is Namecheap better than GoDaddy?” for domain registration, I can’t tell because I have never used the latter for this purpose. However, I can assure you that Namecheap is spectacular. Its clean interface, reasonable offers, and countless TLDs make it the best option for domain registration.
I like the Namecheap dashboard. It is very clean and tidy, yet it shows a lot of information at a glance.
All Namecheap customers expect a simple and functional design.
Navigating through the different options is quick and easy, and product management is very simple. There are virtually no upsells, and access to everything (billing, domain management, hosting management) is as easy as possible.
You can enhance the protection of your Namecheap login area with 2-factor authentication, ensuring your account’s integrity forever.
It’s very easy to see that Namecheap is down or has scheduled maintenance.
The status page is quite detailed and informative. There you can find maintenance announcements, service updates, server migrations, network status, emails, and domain services.
SSD-accelerated is a term I first heard when preparing this Namecheap review. Without the marketing composition, the hosting is not on SSD servers.
This could partially explain the unimpressive performance of my Stellar Plus plan, as SSDs are many times faster than older HDDs.
Both the smallest and largest plans have limited storage space.
20GB for three websites is small, while the 50GB of SSD space looks decent.
However, many competitors do not impose realistic limits on the space an account can use, as long as you do not violate the terms of service.
Namecheap doesn’t have much to offer in terms of hosting locations. The company owns a data centre in Phoenix, Arizona, and provides colocation servers in the UK. The latter costs more.
Most of the other significant hosts run at least two data centres, and several have servers on three continents.
For people looking to host their website in the US, this limitation isn’t all that revealing, but it could slightly degrade performance for everyone else. If the speed that Namecheap displays were better, it would hardly matter, but with service already slower than average, it doesn’t make much sense.
Do we recommend Namecheap Hosting?
Namecheap is a decent host in a specific context.
I recommend it for people who have a couple of small websites and a tight budget.
The main reason for this is that the Stellar plan is feature-rich, costs less than $ 16 per year when paid in advance, and the small sites don’t generate an incredible amount of traffic to handle. Lastly, with Namecheap’s questionable support, small sites generally have fewer things to break so it won’t be very reliable.
If you are looking for reliable and high-speed hosting where your online presence can grow and prosper, you will be better off with some of the top website hosting companies we have here. After all, there is a reason why most of Namecheap’s positive reviews concern domain name management.
NAMECHEAP HOSTING AT A GLANCE
- Support is somewhat slow and not too efficient. The most extensive plan receives priority support.
- A reasonably rich and accessible knowledge base.
- Namecheap has three shared hosting plans.
- Three domains for the small plan, unlimited for the other two.
- 50 MySQL databases for the smallest plant, unlimited MySQL and PostgreSQL otherwise.
- 30 accounts for the little ones, unlimited otherwise. Up to 2GB per mailbox.
- Complimentary backups twice a week; the most extensive plan receives daily and weekly service.
- 20GB for a minor plan, unmetered for the medium, and 50GB of SSD space for the largest.
- A reasonable number of supported applications.
- Secure data centres.
- Paid domain registrations.
- Free inbound migration.
- Yes, included in all areas.
- The 1-click installer enables various eCommerce tools, and the free SSL helps a lot.
- WordPress hosting is available.
- One data centre in Arizona, USA, and one in Midlands, UK.
- 100% uptime guarantee.
- Reasonable speed.
- Affordable plans when paid in advance, not so cheap renewal fees.
- Namecheap follows the industry standard policy of low introductory fees and fairly steep renewals.
- 30-day money-back guarantee.
- Free positive SSL for the first year.
- Easy to navigate site where all information is easily retrievable.
