Namecheap web hosting review 2024

Namecheap is a popular domain registrar and web hosting provider known for its affordability, user-friendly interface, and advanced security features. Catering to both beginners and experienced users, Namecheap offers a range of services including domain registration, web hosting, and a website builder.

In this review, I will delve into the pros and cons of Namecheap, its pricing compared to other providers and the plans. I will also review the ease of use of its hosting management, and its performance metrics such as speed and uptime. Together with the research team we also examined the security measures, domain services, and provided a comprehensive control panel review, concluding with a final verdict and FAQs

Namecheap hosting review: overview

Namecheap is widely known not only for its domain registration services but also for its range of hosting solutions. These services include shared hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting, dedicated servers, and reseller hosting. Namecheap hosting is a solid choice for individuals and small businesses seeking affordable, reliable, and user-friendly hosting solutions. However, those with more demanding hosting requirements, such as high-traffic websites, large e-commerce platforms, or enterprise-level operations, may need to explore more advanced hosting options.

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Pros and cons of Namecheap

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Namecheap pricing

Namecheap is one of the most affordable hosting providers available, with its cheapest shared hosting plan priced at $1.58/month. In comparison, Bluehost offers shared hosting starting at $1.99/month, while HostGator's plans begin at $3.75/month.

However, Namecheap VPS hosting begins at $6.88/month, significantly higher than IONOS starting price of $1.00/month.

It’s good to know that the provider has many options, and all of them are fairly cheaply priced. However, shared hosting is what we'll be focusing on in this review as it’s usually the most popular option among the general public.

For shared hosting, Namecheap has 3 plans, all of which come with unmetered bandwidth, free domain registration and privacy protection, access to a free website builder, and a free SSL certificate.

Of course, all plans have plenty of differences, too:

Check Namecheap pricing

All of Namecheap’s plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee. This means you won’t have to instantly commit for the longest term. Here are all the things you need to know before getting a NameCheap subscription:

• There’s a 30-day money-back guarantee.
• Refunds are not applicable if you pay with cryptocurrency.
• In case of subscription refunding, the standard price of the free domain name that you received and registered will be deducted from the amount.
• Services are not eligible for more than one refund.

Even though the initial payment is very nicely priced, the renewal price is double that. But that's nothing unusual, in fact, that's one of the lowest rates we've seen.

• Check out all available Namecheap promo codes to get the best deal!

Overall, Namecheap is called cheap for a reason. The cheapest prices are less than 2 dollars and you get 30 days to decide whether the service is for you.

Namecheap hosting management – is it easy to use?

Namecheap makes everything straightforward – it’s effortless to use both as a domain registrar and a hosting service. It uses a very common mix of native account management panel and cPanel. Both of them are very intuitive and functional, so you won’t have any trouble figuring it out.

Getting started with Namecheap

The native Namecheap’s dashboard is pretty simple, and everything you need is easily accessible. It mostly works as a navigation to reach cPanel or your owned domain management tools. Also, this is where you contact support.

This dashboard is where you can manage your domain list, hosting, emails, and other tools or apps. I found it very intuitive as everything is lined up neatly in the left-side navigation bar.

I also found it noteworthy that Namecheap offers free migration services with a guarantee that your website will be migrated within 24 hours, experiencing no more than 15 minutes of downtime. According to their website, if they fail to meet this guarantee or if you are dissatisfied with how your migration was handled, they will credit your account with the value of your first purchase of shared hosting with Namecheap. It's important to note that this guarantee does not apply to promotional packages.

Namecheap control panel review

Namecheap uses the typical cPanel. There are no tweaks, no flashy skins, no nothing. It’s basically a naked cPanel. However, it’s common knowledge that even without the flashy skins, cPanel is easy to use. Whether you’re an experienced user or a beginner, you need no Codex to decipher cPanel.

All the most needed settings can be easily found in the cPanel as it’s really well organized.

So, what will you be using cPanel for?

• WordPress installation. For all application installations, Namecheap uses the standard Softaculous app installer. You can find all Softaculous installations at the bottom of your cPanel under the Software category.
• Activating SSL certificate. Namecheap uses its own tool called Namecheap SSL, which didn’t work during our tests, leaving us to contact customer support.
• Setting up a professional email address. For that, you’ll need to find the Email category and use the Email Accounts module. Very straightforward process, but this email service will only be good for sending a few messages. As the reputation is shared with the whole shared hosting server on which your site is hosted, you might be flagged as spam.
• Other standard web hosting management tasks such as database management, accessing file manager, creating subdomains, and so on.

I liked the fact that cPanel is very organized and you can find everything on the main window. However, we’ve encountered much more user-friendly alternatives, such as Hostinger’s hPanel, which is more suitable for first-time hosting users. Unlike Namecheap, Hostinger’s panel includes explanations or recommendations under many buttons or sections. This makes the learning process even more effortless.

Namecheap website builder

No matter which type of hosting plan you purchase, Namecheap grants you access to a drag-and-drop website builder. This allows you to not only host your site but also build one with a single subscription.

Starting from templates, you shouldn’t expect very modern designs. There are over 200 templates available for different niches and topics, but they lack originality and won’t make your site stand out.

Meanwhile, the editor works like a drag-and-drop one. You can add different widgets, including image galleries, a blog, forms, payment buttons, and so on. However, the editor is quite restrictive, so you won’t have much design flexibility.

The editor is functional and easy to use. But it’s also quite old school. Hostinger’s website builder allows much more flexibility and has over 150 templates that are professionally crafted by designers. So if a high-quality website builder is a high priority for you, consider examining Hostinger plans.

Namecheap also offers a paid website builder that creates the site for you. It’s called Visual and all you need to do is answer a few of its questions, choose a color scheme and that’s it. You get a website designed for you and can further edit your site from there. So you can definitely craft a decent-looking website in no time.

Overall, Namecheap is very easy to use. It wants to satisfy both veterans and newbies, and I have to say that it succeeds. With a clean dashboard and cPanel, this provider removed all challenges from every hosting-related process. The website builder is also simple and intuitive yet quite restrictive and old-fashioned.

Namecheap design features

Namecheap has some design features in its app market. For example, there’s a free logo maker and a free font generator, a paid business card maker and an image creation tool named Stencil.

In terms of the logo maker, I found that it doesn’t even begin to compare to what a professional logo designer can do. You’re asked to give preferences on font style and color scheme, choose an icon, and you get a logo.

The choices are very generic, but that’s what you can expect from a free tool. In fact, very few “logo makers” even allow you to download the files if you don’t pay a hefty price.

Namecheap’s font generator is a handy tool for creating custom fonts that make digital and print designs look better and more consistent. However, it probably doesn’t have extensive integrations with various third-party services (e.g., email marketing, e-commerce platforms, analytics).

Another design feature that Namecheap offers is Stencil. By creating a free account, you can save up to 10 free images every month. And having a Pro plan, you can explore their library of over 5 million royalty-free photos, over 3 million premium icons and graphics, and over 1350 premium templates to choose the style that best aligns with your brand. Is a good design tool for creating social media images, captivating ads, and vibrant graphics in minutes.

The business card maker, on the other hand, is not free. You’ll have to pay $18.88 for 100 business cards. It’s not expensive, but it won’t look as if they have been made by a professional designer either.

To create a business card, you have to do pretty much the same thing as when designing a logo. There are a few pre-designed templates, and you can play around with a few elements. The good news is that the shipping is free in 50 countries on all continents, so you have that going for you, which is nice.

I found Namecheap’s design features useful for webmasters who are trying to create a brand. Plus, if you don’t have the resources to pay a designer or you’re just experimenting with some ideas, Namecheap is a good alternative in that manner.

Performance – is Namecheap fast?

Namecheap’s performance isn’t widely approved by other reviewers, so our team put it to a test to find it out ourselves. Our team held multiple performance-oriented tests and examined Namecheap’s reliability, speed, and traffic handling capabilities with our own fully-built site. They performed all tests on a page performance monitoring tool called GTMetrix for two weeks. Continue reading to find all of the results.

Namecheap uptime and response time

In terms of Namecheap uptime, during the testing period, the site had 16 outages, which resulted in 31 minutes of downtime. This left Namecheap’s uptime at an all-time low of 99.82%.

An uptime like that is a below average result, especially considering that Namecheap has a 100% SLA uptime guarantee.

According to Namecheap’s terms of service, you may receive up to one month of free hosting if the customer support agents confirm that there was indeed a downtime.

Moving on to the response time, GTMetrix showed an average of 1.05 seconds. Considering that the shared hosting market’s average is around 600ms, Namecheap’s result is disappointing. Such providers as Hostinger average at 511ms, while Bluehost even reaches 361ms. So there are certainly more reliable providers in terms of performance.

Namecheap speed

Namecheap has servers in the US, UK, and Netherlands. During our tests, together with a research I hosted the site in the US data center. So there’s no surprise that the best results were in the US. The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) was 912ms.

The hosting market has definitely seen better, but it’s not the worst either. For example, Hostinger’s LCP was only 479ms – this ensures even better performance for people around the world. Meanwhile, Bluehost showed an even worse result than Namecheap’s – 920ms. So we can say that Namecheap’s performance is rather average.

Like all other performance tests, our team tested the LCP of Namecheap with GTMetrix. Naturally, the further we went from the origin server, the more the LCP increased. In the UK, the LCP was a whopping 1.4s, while India shot up to 2.1s. So the results from other locations are not shocking and much expected.

LCP is important because it’s one of the measures Google takes into account when ranking websites on the search result page. And as long as the time is under 2.5s, your chances to rank higher are greater. Or at least you will not lose chances to rank at all.

So when you take that into consideration, Namecheap is doing pretty okay. No gold medal, but still.

When testing a fully built site, the LCP was 2.3s, which is pretty borderline. A tight fit to squeeze into the suggested 2.5s for sure.

With a fully built website, LCP isn’t the only measure you should be concerned with. You should also pay attention to the Fully Loaded Time, which in this case is 2.7 seconds. Simply put, it could be better. Site visitors don’t really feel the difference in loading time between 1-2.5 seconds. However, anything above 3 seconds adds to the bounce-off rates.

Overall, while 2.7 seconds is not ideal for a fully loaded time, it’s not disastrous either. And while the LCP isn’t impressive either, you shouldn’t have much trouble if the data center is close to your audience.

Namecheap stress testing

To begin with, we’ve sent 50 virtual visitors to our site. 50 visitors is quite a big number – they are on the website at the same time, sending numerous requests to it. This puts a lot of pressure on, which could possibly slow down the server or overwhelm it entirely.

And it looks like 50 visitors were just a tad bit too much for Namecheap to handle. Although the response time (blue line) was great, quite a lot of requests have failed. 440 of them, to be precise, as indicated by the bumpy red line.

While 50 visitors didn’t work out, I weas curious to know how many Namecheap can handle. So we decreased the number of visitors by five and ran the test again until we succeeded.

The first pass our team got was with 30 visitors.

The result isn’t too bad – 30 is still a relatively big number. If the site gets 30 visitors each minute for a month, that’s some decent traffic. Usually, that’s what you can expect from a popular local blog or small business website.

Although I must note, even though Namecheap did pass the test, there are still 83 requests that have failed. Also, the response time went slightly crazy at the end. All of that could mean that this is just about the maximum pressure the provider can handle.

All in all, Namecheap is pretty lacking when it comes to performance. The provider promised 100% uptime and then delivered only 99.82% is just as sad. If it promised 99.9%, we wouldn’t be this upset. It’s the arrogance that bothered us. Moreover, the loading speed and the maximum handled traffic on the site was nothing to be amazed over.

Namecheap security

Namecheap is considered a secure hosting provider. They implement several security measures to protect their users, including:

• Free Positive SSL with one-click activation is available – I activated the SSL in a matter of seconds, so it’s perfect if you’re rushing to get your site up and running.
• WHOIS Domain Privacy Protection – free for all clients who are getting a domain name from Namecheap. It protects your personal privacy, prevents spam, identity theft, and unwanted solicitation.
• DDoS protection – basic DDoS protection through Supersonic CDN is free, but you have to turn it on yourself.
• Firewall – ModSecurity is the basic traffic filtering option that NameCheap offers. If you’d like more protection, an advanced Web Application Firewall is available through Supersonic CDN paid version.
• Automatic backups – the Stellar plan offers backups twice a week, but that is not guaranteed. Stellar Plus and Stellar Business come with daily automatic backups. For these plans, you’re given access to 6 daily, 3 weekly, and 11 monthly backups. It’s up to you which one you choose.
• Two-factor authentication – Namecheap allows you to use U2F or TOTP authentication methods. While the former uses USB or NFC devices, the latter lets you choose from Google Authenticator, Authy, LastPass Authenticator, and more.
• SiteLock – Namecheap offers scans for malware and other threats at an additional cost. It has two plans. The Protect plan offers 2GB of website backup, while the Protect Plus plan comes with 5GB. The latter stands out with vulnerability patching.

I found that Namecheap offers all the essentials needed for strong security. From backups in case you lose your data, to DDoS protection which is useful for preventing service disruptions caused by malicious traffic, you’re guaranteed that your website is always secured with the highest standards.

Namecheap domains

Namecheap stands out as an affordable and versatile domain registrar, offering a wide range of top-level domains (TLDs) including popular choices like .com, .net, and .org, alongside country-code and specialty TLDs such as .tech, .shop, and .photography. These specialty TLDs provide individuals and businesses with more options to craft distinctive and relevant web addresses that enhance their online presence.

Additionally, Namecheap prioritizes user privacy by including free WHOIS privacy protection with most domain registrations. This service replaces the registrant's personal information with proxy details, shielding their identity from public access and safeguarding against potential spam or unwanted solicitations.

Namecheap customer support

Namecheap offers a variety of customer support options, emphasizing professionalism, promptness, and effectiveness.

For starters, if you’re in need of quick help, you can make use of the 24/7 live chat option or ticketing system. There’s no phone or email support, but the round-the-clock live chat option makes up for it.

Speaking of the live chat, I found that it doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes for agents to respond. I tried contacting Namecheap regarding our issue when trying to activate the SSL certificate. The agent was very helpful and jumped to solve the problem right away. He kept us informed on what the issue was and what he was doing to fix it.

So our experience with customer support was very good. The agent was very kind and helpful, and the issue got resolved in very little time.

Alongside the live chat option, Namecheap has a very detailed knowledge base. There I found articles and guides with many step-by-step instructions, which come in handy if you’re a beginner.

Overall, I found that Namecheap’s customer support is great. The live chat experience was positive and professional, while the knowledge base had loads of information suitable for beginners.

Namecheap video review

Namecheap review – the final verdict

Throughout this review, I found that Namecheap is a decent hosting service with its upsides and places to improve. The subscriptions are very cheap yet they’re not as filled with resources as some other providers, like Hostinger. Namecheap offers excellent security measures yet lacks storage and has a low website allowance with the cheapest plan as well as terrible performance. Here are all of the findings summed up:

So who do I recommend Namecheap to?

We’d only recommend Namecheap for a small personal blog and definitely not one that you are planning to monetize. Also, it might be good for testing your skills in website creation. It’s cheap and easy for personal stuff, but performance is lagging behind. Better use it for cheap domains – that’s what the provider is really good at. However, if you’re running a high-traffic website or an e-commerce site that requires top-notch performance and reliability, Namecheap may not meet your needs. Its performance may not be sufficient for demanding applications, and its focus on affordability and simplicity may not align with the scalability and robustness required for business-critical operations.

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