Namecheap launched in the year 2000 by a man named Richard Kirkendall (it celebrated its 15th birthday last year), with their shared hosting service following seven years later in 2007. Namecheap is a lead voice in the campaign for internet freedom, and a staunch supporter of the EFF, and anti-SOPA movements. You can see a great insight into the mind of CEO, Richard Kirkendall, by reading his Reddit IAMA here.
Namecheap has its headquarters in Los Angeles, United States. Richard Kirkendall remains as its CEO, even after 15 years since its launch. The hosting division was set up by its vice president, Matthew Russell, in 2007. While the hosting division is considerably smaller than their domain name counterpart, overall the company is vast, with currently around 2 million customers.
Despite Namecheap’s reputation being primarily for their domain hosting, many of the management team have extensive experience when it comes to providing web hosting services. Matthew Russell, for instance, is the co-founder of the web hosting company Webhostingbuzz. Furthermore, for some time, many of the senior staff at Webhostingbuzz had cross over roles at Namecheap. Looking at some of the senior staff’s LinkedIn profiles (i.e. Wayne Reavill) more recently, though, the two companies appear to be now more distanced.
Namecheap key points
Top considerations
CloudFlare Railgun, Dynamic Caching, Not EIG Owned, SSD Hosting
Platform
Linux
Control Panel
cPanel
Server Location
Europe, US
Developer features
Ruby on Rails
Namecheap Shared Hosting Review
Namecheap Shared Hosting Plans allow a choice between Linux and Windows.
Namecheap offers three standard shared hosting plans and one premium business plan.
| Value Plan | Professsional Plan | Ultimate Plan | Business SSD Plan | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Space | 20 GB | 50 GB | Unlimited | 20GB SSD |
| Transfer | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | 5000 GB |
| Websites | 3 | 10 | 50 | Unlimited |
| Free Domain | .website domain | .website domain | .website domain | .website domain |
| Free SSL | No | No | No | No |
| PCI Compliant | No | No | No | Yes |
| CloudFlare Railgun | No | No | No | Yes |
| eAccelerator | No | No | No | Yes |
| xCache | No | No | No | Yes |
| Priority Support | No | No | No | Yes |
| Discounted Price | $9.88 per year | $19.88 per year | $29.88 per year | $215.78 per year |
| Renewal Price | $38.88 per year | $78.88 per year | $129.88 per year | $215.78 per year |
Value Plan and Professional Plan — Great introductory pricing
The two primary Namecheap plans are all identical apart from the amount of disk space and the number of websites allowed. The Value plan is excellent value, especially with the initial discount.
If you only have a couple of websites to host, then the Value Plan should be sufficient. With resources limited on a per account basis, rather than a per website basis, it may be more beneficial to buy two Value Plans rather than upgrade to the Professional Plan, as this gives you twice the amount of resources.
Resource Limits
- Maximum number of concurrent web server requests: 20
- Maximum amount of RAM all client's processes can use: 4Gb Virtual Memory (1GB Physical) (we comment on this below)
- Maximum percentage of CPU time: 100% Burstable (20% sustained)
Features:
- Shared Hosting for less than the cost of a domain name
- Accelerated SSD Technology (caching of frequently accessed files on SSD storage)
- 100% Uptime SLA
- cPanel Control Panel
- One-Click Installs of WordPress and other popular apps via Softaculous
- Live Chat and Ticket Support
- Daily backups
Ultimate Plan — Great introductory pricing
The Ultimate Plan is three times the cost of the Value Plan and allows unlimited SSD-Accelerated disk space, and up to 50 websites.
The Ultimate Plan also give more resources such as CPU, and Ram, but only 50% more than the Value and Professional Plan. This is good if you have a busier website, and do not wish to upgrade to a VPS or Cloud hosting plan.
Resource Limits
- Maximum number of concurrent web server requests: 30
- Maximum amount of RAM all client's processes can use: 6Gb Virtual Memory (Physical Memory unknown)
- Maximum percentage of CPU time: 200% Burstable (unknown sustained)
Features:
- Shared Hosting for less than the cost of a domain name
- Accelerated SSD Technology (caching of frequently accessed files on SSD storage)
- 100% Uptime SLA
- cPanel Control Panel
- One-Click Installs of WordPress and other popular apps via Softaculous
- Live Chat and Ticket Support
- Daily backups
Business SSD Plan — Powerful Business Hosting with great features
The SSD Hosting Plan is called the “Business SSD.” It is significantly more expensive than the other hosting plans but comes with some very cool features and considerably more resources.
The Business SSD Plan is faster due to SSD Storage but also has twice the limits on concurrent web requests, twice the RAM, and four times the amount of CPU that the Value Plan. It also has xCache available which allows RAM-based caching, which is particularly effective with E-Commerce websites and even WordPress.
Resource Limits
- Maximum number of concurrent web server requests: 40
- Maximum amount of RAM all client's processes can use: 8Gb Virtual Memory (Physical Memory unknown)
- Maximum percentage of CPU time: 400%Burstable (unknown sustained)
Features:
As per the standard plans above, plus:
- Pure SSD Storage
- CloudFlare Rail gun
- PCI Compliant
- Twice Daily + Weekly Backups
- xCache & eAcccelerator for dynamic caching
- Priority Support
A Closer Look at the Resource Limits at Namecheap
With Namecheap, it is tough to see exactly what resources you have at your disposal, as on first look they appear to be extremely generous, but their knowledge base and Acceptable Use Policy indicates a slightly differing story.
For instance, we don’t know of any other shared hosting plan for around $40 per year that offers 4GB RAM. As you will see from our commentary on their Control Panels below, it is very clear that Namecheap does not distinguish between Virtual Memory and Physical Memory in their advertising, nor do they point out the terms of their Acceptable Use Policy that only allow max CPU usage for limited periods, and that sustained usage is just 20% of that. That being said, even after looking beyond the artistic advertising, they still have very respectable resource allowances, especially on their Ultimate and Business SSD plans.
Namecheap use CloudLinux to manage their hosting resources between accounts. CloudLinux not only isolates each cPanel account for greater security, but it allows a host to set usage limits on RAM and CPU. This ensures no one account can bring the server to a standstill due a bad script, or simply overuse. The video below gives a brief overview of CloudLinux:
Also, we believe the knowledgebase specifying what hardware they use is slightly out of date, as a recent blog post seems to make much of their new Dell M1000E BladeCenter Chassis with M620 Dell servers with E5 CPU’s, not the E3 CPU’s listed above.
With regard the CPU time, we suspect each 100% relates to one core of CPU. When an account reaches the limit of their CPU usages, the server throttles the usage. A higher CPU setting can make larger or busier websites feel more responsive. Of course, this is a shared hosting server, so you won’t be entitled to use that amount of CPU all the time, and the acceptable usage policy should be read.
The Control Panel
When you manage your services you will find that there are a mix of different systems used to manage your account. This was somewhat made a little complicated when the website redesign happened, and you have the domain management still being on their old design, a somewhat more recently modified Hosting dashboard (which seems to incorporate Invoices and billing) and their Support department using the excellent Kayako support system. To be honest it does feel a little muddily, but it does seem they are still in the process of updating it all so we won't dwell too much about it at this stage. These things do take time to roll out.
You can see a screenshot below of a hosting account we got cheap that we use as a backup hosting for this website (we have never needed to use it though). At $9.88 for the year, you can't go wrong!
The actual Hosting Management Control Panel is cPanel. They have not modified the actual branding or cPanel interface, nor have they disabled any of its functionality. Some hosts will limit backup functionality, so it is good to know that they do not do this. You can see a screenshot of the cPanel dashboard below:
Support
They offer support via Live Chat and Ticket. Unfortunately, there appears to be no telephone support available. It very much comes down to personal choice what type of support people prefer, and for us, phone support is not that important. They also have a very busy community forum which typically receive helpful support from staff within about 3-4 hours. Also, you will find a representative (Matthew Russell) ready to help with any issues on popular web hosting forums such as Webhostingtalk.
They use a fairly sophisticated third party support system called Kayako, which for the amount of customers they service is a must. This helps them keep wait times low, as well as prioritize, follow up and monitor their response times.
It is always difficult to assess how good, or bad, a web hosting company's support is unless you have used them for a long time. Fortunately, in their case we have been a customer for many years. Of course, our primary dealings have been with domain registration and SSL certificates, but over the last 4-5 months, we have also had a Shared Hosting Account with them.
Take one example. We recently had a very quick query relating to our hosting account login URL and login details. Within 6 minutes of needing help, we had requested live support, had our question dealt with and finished the live chat conversation. Having an effective means to get quick answers is incredibly valuable, and they appear to tick all the boxes in how they deal with that. Our experience with their ticket support has sometimes kept us waiting for 5-6 hours, but equally, we have queries resolved within the hour. Overall, those kind of response times for ticket support are adequate, and a certainly over the many years we have dealt with them, we have never had any problems.
We had a quick search on the web for some third party Namecheap Reviews (avoiding fake review websites). This report on the Warrior Forum, for example, gives a glowing review of their Support, saying that WordPress help was forthcoming within 3-4 hours.
Overall, though, there were not many independent sources around the web that mainly commented on their shared hosting. There were many positive comments relating to their domain business, though, particular concerning the domain prices, support and interface. As a large company you would expect many negative reviews (people are more likely to post reviews due to a negative experience), but indeed, these were similarly lacking in presence. They have of course like any host had a few issues, but their community representatives are quick to follow up and assist on public third party forums, and the issues are minor and of a limited nature.
Features
As far as features go, they offer pretty standard hosting unless you go to their Business plan (when you get full SSD and xCache opcode caching (see our W3 Total Cache Tutorial on why xCache is so good, and it is the reason we use it on this website). There is nothing wrong with that if they do it well, which they do, but you won't find anything particularly unique that makes you go "wow." Of course, introductory pricing excepted. There are, however, several more standard features which are worthy of comment:
- Softaculous — This is our favorite one-click installer, and allows over 100 applications to be installed in just a couple of clicks.
- Daily Backups — While many hosts now do daily backups, their Business plan backs up twice a day with weekly backups available as well. Like all hosts, you shouldn't rely on the backups from a host, but you will also find a link in the cPanel to CodeGuard. Of course, anyone can sign up with CodeGuard, but we are a big fan of hosts who promote third-party backups. It is all too often people lose their data due to not backing up their data away from their host.
- CloudFlare integration — We love CloudFlare for speeding up websites. Just check out our W3TC and CloudFlare tutorial.
- Google Apps integration — If you are a Google Apps fan (for business), then they allow easy integration with automatic configuration tools for email, documents and calendar. Check out the screenshot below:
Uptime
Uptime is probably one of the most important things when it comes to choosing a web host. The problem is, is that it is tough to ascertain how reliable a host is. Sure, you will see the Uptime Guarantee's, but all that does is guarantee a few dollars if your website is down for the day. We would rather see actual uptime figures over guarantees. The problem with this though is that larger hosts will always be prone to issues, and you may have some servers that never go offline and some that do, so it can be very hit and miss just monitoring one particular server as an example.
So, instead, we think it is much better to look on the web for complaints about websites being down, as well as looking at how they deal with problems when they occur. It is much better to see them resolving problematic servers within 5-10 minutes than seeing a smaller host have fewer problems but take hours or even days to fix the issue.
So with that in mind, how do they Fair?
For a host of their size, we do not see that many problems of downtime. Of course, there has been isolated incidents, and they have been the subject of some DDoS attacks the last year, but overall our opinion is relatively confident about their uptime figures. To get a sense, and to make up your mind about this, you can check their Status page, as well as their Twitter account (where they are very active in dealing with any issues). The fact that they are actively reaching out to customers to try and resolve issues is a very positive sign. Just check out the example below, where a problem was responded to and subsequently resolved in minutes, all via Twitter:
@namecheap Thanks, speedies! /@soundsarenoisy @magikal_jonfish
— Stephen Peasley (@stephenpeasley) January 1, 2015
Value
Well, $9.88 for a year of hosting, it is incredible value.
Of course, make sure you check the renewal prices, as the introductory pricing is only for one year. But, what we particularly like about them is the upsell (it feels odd to applaud upselling) of their SSL certificates when you purchase either hosting or domain. They always seem to have an offer for SSL for just $1.99, and of course, their domain prices are some of the lowest around (with free Whois for one year). Unlike other hosts, they won't charge you a fortune for helping you install your SSL on their hosting either!
The change to their aggressive introductory pricing only occurred in the last quarter of 2015 and had rapidly in our view made them one of the cheapest and best budget hosting providers out there. That being said, we wouldn't class these guys as a budget host as their service is way above that.
Namecheap Review — Summary
Pros
- Reliable web hosting services — As far as we can see when problems occur they work hard to resolve the issues and are very proactive in reaching out to people in the community who are experiencing issues.
- CPanel — They use the standard cPanel, which is extremely user-friendly, and has all the tools and features that make managing your website very easy.
- Great Upsells — Fantastic pricing on SSL certificates and domains.
- Excellent customer support — Their support staff know what they are doing. They have been around for a while, and you won’t find much bad about them precisely because their support is so good.
- Experienced Domain Registrar — This used to be their core business (and we guess still is). They have developed a comprehensive interface to manage your domains that you will find easy to use. After using them, you won’t ever want to leave.
- Integrated CloudFlare — We are a big fan of CloudFlare in combination with shared hosting. CloudFlare can increase your site's performance, while reducing the strain on your server, which for shared hosting matters. We particularly like it when CloudFlare can be setup via a one-click install solution via the cPanel. CloudFlare is one of the first things we recommend to implement when hosting providers try to get you to upgrade to a VPS due to CPU over usage.
- CloudLinux — Added security and stability due to isolation and limiting of hosting accounts.
- XCache — On their Business plan you can use xCache for Opcode Caching, which if you see our example W3 Total Cache settings and guide will make your WordPress installation fly.
- SSD's with Business Plan — Again, their Premium Business plan is where it is all at, and why they got such a high recommendation from us. You can read about the benefits of SSD Web Hosting here.
Cons
- Short Money Back Guarantee — They only offer a 14-day money back guarantee which is far less than many other hosts. We don't think that you can honestly evaluate a host in just 14 days, and if this were a less well-known brand, we would certainly advise you to proceed with caution. They are, however, are well established, and extremely well known for their domain registration services, so we don't think you need to be overly worried about this. We have used them for domain registration for years.
- Value Plan limitations — Be sure to check all the specifications of each shared hosting plan to ensure to get all the features you might expect from a cPanel host. Their Value plan has several limitations that are worth checking.
Editor's Expert Opinion
They are a well-renowned company with a rock solid reputation. You cannot go wrong hosting with this company, and we even use them ourselves for domain name registration. Their support is great, and you will find their online chat support staff very knowledgeable. They don't offer anything spectacular, or innovative, but, they seem to be fairly reliable, and they offer superb value.
While our Namecheap review sounds very positive, we would be hesitant to say WOW, you must host with them unless you go for their Business plan which has full SSD, xCache, and Rail gun. Equally, though, we would find it very hard to say anything bad about them, and if you are looking, for reliable and secure hosting, then this should be on the list of hosts to consider.
For more opinions check out what our readers have to say in the user Namecheap reviews below in the comments.
As a final point, we currently have some exclusive Coupons giving not only discounts on their domain names but up to 40% off their hosting plans. You will find all our offers here.
Namecheap Frequently Asked Questions
No, Namecheap only offers Linux hosting at this time.
Yes, all their plans allow for the hosting of multiple websites. Their Value package allows three domains to be hosted, their Professional plan up to 10 domains and their Ultimate plan up to 50 domains. Both their business and reseller plans allow for unlimited domains.
They use the cPanel control panel, which is one of the most popular control panels in use, and allows you to control all aspects of your hosting account, including taking offline backups.
Namecheap’s business plan offers greater speed and reliability. It uses SSD storage for greater speed, as well as xCache. They backup twice a day instead of once per day on other plans. The business plan is also PCI compliant which is essential if you intend to store credit card details on your server.
The base SSD Business plan comes with 20GB SSD storage, but there are upgrades available to increase this to 40GB or 60GB at additional cost.
What people are saying
Find out what people are saying about Namecheap below, or alternatively, if you have experience with them yourself, feel free to leave your review.
James
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: No
I am on the school board of a small school, and use this company for hosting. Their service is terrible. You cannot call anyone ... no live support, even if you want to pay. We have had one minor issue, which is still not resolved after weeks and weeks. They keep sending vague requests for more information, and with each step, you have to wait days or weeks for the next response to them. Every email we receive starts with the statement "We are sorry for the delay in responding," almost as though it's auto text. This is the worst customer service I have seen with any company, of any kind. I personally believe no one should use this company.
Aamir Mursleen
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
The ultimate package is pretty good, and as a user of 8 months I can see myself staying with them. My website loads in udner 2 seconds, and while I have seen some downtime they didn't last long.
The average reply for help on their live chat is less than a minute, and they were very helpful. The hosting is great, but it is their premium plan so don't know much about the other plans.
Bill Parsons
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: No
We got this account thru a third party and it was managed by a partner who recently passed away.
We tried to get some help via a third party to manage the website, settings passwords and email, but they have been having a lot of problems with Namecheap support. Over 3 months of emails with Namecheap f (Tatyana Kozhushko-Customer Support), (Olya B-Risk Management), and (Nikita P - Risk Management) with requests for information regarding ownership. Every response takes weeks for them to deal with, and this has been going on since november 2016. This is terrible.
Tim
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
I used Namecheap as a replacement for GoDaddy because they had special pricing over the holidays. Despite a fantastic price I am not happy with their recommendation to use canvas website builder. I tried to remove canvas so I can add other services but it does not work. I have tried to contact them, but it has been two weeks without a response.
I wish I had stayed at Godaddy as I could always get help fast. If you are unsure with what you are doing then I wouldn't choose namecheap.
Chris Silverthorne
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: No
Normally, I have have received good service from Namecheap. Virtually nothing to complain about. But just recently, one of my email addresses has been spoofed and no end of tinkering and changing security measures has stopped this. I also cannot received emails from Namecheap sent to another email address on my domain name. I have checked both email address and both are working normally otherwise.
There is something seriously wrong at Namecheap.
John
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: No
They run unpatched cPanel and don’t care about the published root exploits. DO NOT HOST HERE.
As of December 2016, they’re running v52. That means this entire list of vulnerabilities:
https://forums.cpanel.net/threads/cpanel-tsr-2016-0006-full-disclosure.585082/
… affects Namecheap’s servers.
DO NOT HOST HERE.
Mike Aitken
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: No
1st time I registered I had countless problems so cancelled within 14 days, refund OK.
After I went to iPage where I encountered more problems & paid much more money. The 1 advantage of iPage they have telephone contact for cost of normal call.
Then I decided to return to Namecheap to try again, OK for 8 months but s soon as I transferred another Domain into same account as an add-on recently I found the add-on functions but not original site!
It has been out of action for 2 weeks, during this time I’ve spent half my life dealing with umpteen help people, all ask for repetitive information, screenshots etc. Eventually they offered 2 months free hosting, what’s the point if you can’t use the account?
I’m seeking a new host now, any suggestions for a reasonable price?
+ PROS: Cheap & cheerful
- CONS: HELP depends who you get, no continuity. For uploading problems I got replies from 4 different people, all asked the information/screenshots etc so downtime over 2 weeks.
Dane Gomez
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: No
they suspend my account. i dont know for what reason. i have opened ticket about 24 hours ago but you didn’t solved yet. open my account so that i can copy my files and move to another provider. you peoples have no idea about business.
this is not request its warning. open my account otherwise i will go to court. because my websites are down from 24 hours & i am in big loss.
Barry
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: No
The absolute WORST customer service anywhere!!!
Flyingel
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
Support was amazing and very helpful. I've used them for several years, but I'm transferring away now because their website is completely unresponsive. Luckily, it wasn't difficult at all and I had no trouble transferring from them.
Pros: Great support
They don't hold your domain hostage
Cons: Unresponsive website
Ali reza
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
Great costumer service
Pros: Great Costumer service
Cons: Great costumer service
Fred
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
We have used namecheap for two years now. They have been reliable and helpful and their chat support has been quick and helpful
Gregory
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: No
Namecheap security rules are excessive and too demanding. It's excessive security is causing more harm to clients than actual good:
First, when I signed up for name cheap, the namecheap suspended my account for no apparent reason. I went through two weeks of hassle to prove my identity just to make a transaction of $17.25. It is ridiculous. I would rather choose someone to steal $17.25 from me instead of going through all that process and frustration. Simply it's not worth it. It comes a point where the investment in security becomes a greater burden than the risk of insecurity itself. I'm pretty sure namecheap surpassed that line, and I advised them to soften their rules and security aggressiveness for only 10%. The Namecheap will still maintain the positive image of security it has, but it will be less painful for it's sincere clients.
Secondly, last days their sms verification system is broken, and the sms never arrived in my phone, and there was no option to call my phone. I spoke with one of their online agents, and they asked 1) address 2) phone number 3) paypal account 4) paypal transaction ID 5) account email 6) order ID. I was able to provide everything except order ID, because when they suspended my account you refunded the money to paypal account and never sent me the order id in my email. Afterwards I was forced to contact namecheap to ask them to send the order id and receipt to my email, and they said login to your account and you will find your order id under the billing info. But how can I login in my account without sms code working, and how can I remove two steps authentication without order ID, and I cant read order ID without login in my account? This is nuts. I was stuck in circle at this point. After trying many times for two days I had luck finally receiving the sms code, because all their support system was useless and frustrating.
I have two other accounts in FatCow and I never had any of these complications there, and you know why, because they DON'T have all this "nazi" security. I'm arguing here that moderate security is better than excessive security, and I would rather transfer my Namecheap domain to Fatcow, instead than transfering Fatcow domains to Namecheap.
Pros: Good user interface.
Many features.
Cons: Their support is fast but not so helpful.
Excessive security that often complicate situations for no worthy reason.
Walter Jeffries
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: No
NameCheap has been one frustration after another for the year and a quarter that I've been a web hosting customer with them. Slow servers. Down time. Total crash of the server I was on and they hadn't done backups for two days. They reverted to the old backup but that took a day to happen. Meanwhile all my email and web sites were down and I was loosing money. Then a few days later they disabled my account for excess CPU usage but the problem really stems from the whole issue with the server crash and the CPU usage needed to get everything back online and make new backups. They're not at all helpful and delay things for five extra hours. There have been many problems and I'm not happy.
Pros: Cheap. But you get what you pay for I guess and with a name like NameCheap it's worse.
Cons: Down time.
No More a Customer
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: No
WORST OF THE WORST!!! First of off ALL communication is done by email or chat. You NEVER speak to a live person! Second, their customer service is non existant. STAY AWAY and go with a more respectable company with a phone number and live humans you can speak to.
Pros: NONE
Cons: Customer NO SERVICE! No human to speak with all communication is either email or chat on their website. Buyer be WARE!
Arun
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: No
They will suspend your account for no reason. Stay away if you don't want to lose your valuable traffic.
Pros: Cheap
Cons: You will not be able to use the account as right after you purchase it they will suspend your account without any warning.
Will
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
Staff very politely working on resolving my email issues and connection to gmail.
They will always keep my business for their support.
Pros: Helpful staff that is patient and fixed my issues connecting to gmail.
Cons: I was impatient.
Dave Mason
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: No
I can prove everything I say with emails, copies of chats and head to head email disussions as well as forum encounters.
They have:
lied to me
misdirected
talked down to me
mishandled my funds
Held me up on domain moves
They advertise 100% uptime - impossible
after the fact new hold backs(INODES)
I told them and will say it again. If they were the only way onto the internet, I would just not be on the internet.
I have proven them wrong on every side.
2 current complaints to Icann pending now. There will be more at the current rate.
I have removed several name accounts, all of my own hosting. Will remove 27 more over the next 248 days as they get close to expiring.
They were told in time to save and obviously preferred to keep with their crap.
I am very happy where I went and almost everything I asked for or had to fight for at namecheap was willingly taken care of or already done when I got there.
domain names are less, space is more, every thing is more except less price.
Ahmed
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
Namecheap offers all the features needed for getting my WordPress website up and running. I didn't have any problems getting them to work with them, who is my web hosting service. Anytime I needed some technical help, they were always available via chat. It seemed like their chat support people were efficient, polite and knowledgeable. I thought they were a company I could rely on. They also had great prices. I discovered they was headquartered where I live, and that was another reason why I wanted to go with the company. As a domain name host, they were great overall.
Curt H
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: No
Bad Bad Bad SERVICE! We had downtime twice in the last 3 months, first time was over 3 hours, second time over 8 HOURS our business went down. No contact phone number only online Chat with people that don't understand language well. Highly NOT recommend this service!
marek
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: No
Their hosting isn't a hidden gem. In fact it is a nightmare ! STAY AWAY FROM IT. The reviewer has no idea what he's talking about. All he cares is the affiliate $$. Had he hosted his website with them he wouldn't be so positive. Worst review ever, worst hosting ever ! Period !
Patrick Eason
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
When I Used Them I Had A Mostly Good Experience
I have used a lot of web hosting services and that is why I need to be sure that I share my experience with them. This service is something a lot of people don't really know about, so I've decided to tell people what I have gone through when working with them.
When I started looking at the varying options out there, I noticed that they prided themselves on privacy and also the fact that they are behind freedom on the Internet. This is refreshing because a lot of those hosting services out there are all about making money and that's about it when you look at what their ads and the like show to people. I think that it's great to finally have a place that is good at showing me that they appreciate a free Internet and encourage it even.
There are a lot of prices that I found to be way more than other options. When I used their service, I wasn't able to use a coupon code or anything like that to help me to save money as a new customer. However, I wasn't too shocked at the amount that I had to pay, it just was something I was a little alarmed with because I'm always able to find discounts and the like with other services. They are good for the money, but they could do with having discounts now and again.
I did have to use their support page to help me to get my site back to running well again. There were too many times when I had to deal with other services and they weren't able to get back with me for a few days. Thankfully, when I used their support, they had someone come work with me in just a few hours online and that was awesome. They also provide phone service, but I dislike sitting there waiting on the phone so I always use an email service option and their has to be one of the easiest to work with I've used for a while.
Now that I have shared more about my experienceit's easier to see if you are going to enjoy their services. I like to be sure to help people decide so I can get more business to companies that deserve it. Overall they're decent, but there are still cons.
Brian Johnson
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: No
These guys have terrible support - absolutely horrible!
Their livechat support takes 5-10 minutes to chat too... they should really hire more support staff so you can always get hold of someone without waiting an entirety. But it gets worse! You finally get through to support and they are obviously juggling about 100 customers at the same time, as it takes them 5-10 minutes between each question. This means a quick chat takes an entirety. I mean how long does it take to follow up "What's your name" with "What domain are you referring to?". Come on, these are basic questions that doesn't necessitate a lengthy delay.
I highly recommend you don't use Namecheap if you want decent support. Absolutely horrible.
D Livesay
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: Yes
Simply great Customer support. I had a problem and quickly contacted their support to see what the problem was. They identified it and had my website back up in minutes. They were very friendly, and clearly knew what to look for and how to fix the issue without delay or spending 20 minutes consulting with colleagues.
Tony Adams
Review type: Shared Hosting
Overall review score
Recommended: No
You say in your review that "You cannot go wrong hosting with this company" ...well you are wrong... I have hostings at Godaddy, Host9, Hostgator, Crazy Domains and one other ...all are fantastic compared to Namecheap. I have just cancelled my account at the end of its term with them due to continued issues with hacking into their servers.
I have so many support tickets apologising for the poor customer service issues that I have lost count. Even management didn't reply to my messages of concern at my experiences.
Some to the support tickets were so unreadable, english was clearly their 3 language.
I should have listened to others posting warnings that NameCheap is a domain name company and hosting is out of their league...I am posting this to save others the heartache and financial loss I have experienced.
You are right, "Namecheap don’t offer anything spectacular, or innovative" and on the basis on my personal experience relative to other quality providers in the market place, the should be avoided.
Tony Adams
