Let’s answer the question of whether Namecheap hosting is good or not?
Can it offer good performance? What about support? Let’s find that out together. Make sure to keep company till the end, there are some interesting things we found. But first we wanted to test the performance
Performance
Since this is a cheap provider and they aren’t usually known for great loading times. After a few GTmetrix tests, Namecheap’s Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP, was 1.1 seconds. That’s 1.4 seconds faster than the 2.5 industry standard. LCP doesn’t mean your site loaded completely, just that the bulk of it is loaded and your visitors can interact with your content and just FYI, As for full load time, it was just 1.3 seconds. So no problems with loading time so far.
Uptime
Let’s look at uptime, since Namecheap guarantees you 100% uptime on all shared hosting plans, even the cheapest one. It turns out our website was online 99.87% of the time during the three months of testing. That’s one hour a month of downtime.
Not great, not great at all, considering that the industry standard uptime is 9.9%.
Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t the worst thing ever. But it’s definitely not great
when you fail to meet industry standards and your own promises. Next let’s turn up the heat and stress test this baby. First I sent 50 virtual users to my website
to see how Namecheap handles large traffic spikes. Keep in mind, 50 users at the same time is a lot of users.
Some large well-known websites only get 30 to 40 users browsing simultaneously max. So after 10 minutes resulted in 3,000 HTTP failures
and a pretty unstable response timeline. So, Namecheap’s cheapest plan is not meant for large traffic spikes.
Let’s test a bit more realistic scenario.
This time, the same test, but with 25 users. There were 51 failed HTTP requests
and the average response time was smoother. It’s still not perfect, but decent.
So it can handle a bit more traffic, but it’s mostly for small sites.
Usability
Gonna be honest. Namecheap’s custom control panel works fine, but it won’t win any prizes for UX design. For server control and more complex tasks, you use cPanel. If you don’t wanna use WordPress, you can use the website builder tool.
It has a good selection of templates and its drag and drop capabilities make it relatively easy to use. It’s nothing to write home about, but it will work just fine for beginners.
Support
With Namecheap you can expect 24/7 customer support via live chat and tickets. It’s not bad, but it has a few flaws. With live chat you get a quick response, but agents tend to regurgitate what’s already written in the knowledge base. So I would suggest Namecheap to users that don’t need support that often and mostly do things on their own. Overall, Namecheap support is responsive, but their responses aren’t perfect.
Features
It’s an industry standard by now to offer a free domain name for a year with more expensive shared hosting plans. While Namecheap does that, it also offers less attractive .site or .online domain names with even the cheapest plan. Sick of providers limiting you to only one website?
Well, Namecheap allows you to host up to three websites on their most affordable plan. All Namecheap plans come with unmetered bandwidth. So Namecheap won’t charge you for increased traffic.
Storage space
As for the storage space, the plans come with 20 gigabytes unlimited and 50 gigabytes SSD respectively. Now, you might be wondering, “Wait. Why does the most expensive plan come with a limitation while the previous plan was unlimited?”
Well, it’s because of Inodes. It’s always because of Inodes. The two cheapest plans have a hard limit of 300,000 Inodes, but the last plan comes with a 600,000 Inode limit. Still, the Inode limit is good and the unlimited SSD sounds nice.
Well, there’s a final restriction. You can’t have more than 10 gigabytes of media.
This includes videos, images, gifs, databases, or ISO files. So if you were expecting to upload hundreds of high-quality photos to your channel, you might wanna look for a different provider.
Price
When it comes to pricing, Namecheap lives up to its name. Shared hosting starts at $1.58 a month, and you can also buy a managed WordPress hosting, called EasyWP.
Many hosting providers try to lure you in with rock bottom prices for your initial purchase and then jack the prices up three or four times.
Namecheap renewal prices are around two times higher than the original price.
So that’s a minimal increase compared to their competitors.
Data centres
Okay, so there’s one last weird thing. You get to choose from three datacenters before you buy their hosting services. Nothing strange so far, but oddly enough, the datacenter you choose will affect both the price and features available.
Yeah, it’s not just about performance or your audience. Like, the US datacenter is normally priced, but the UK and EU plans are $1 more expensive. I believe this increase is likely due to stricter privacy rules in Europe, but there’s no clear statement from Namecheap.
Even weirder is the cloud storage feature. If you choose the US datacenter,
you’ll only get this feature with their Stellar Business plan. The EU datacenter includes it in all their plans, and there is no cloud storage in any of the UK plans.
It’s just weird and confusing, seemingly for no reason.
Is Namecheap a good Hosting?
So we learned a few things. First, Namecheap is, well, cheap. You can get hosting plans for less than $2 a month. In terms of performance, usability, and features,
Namecheap does well, but it’s nothing truly impressive. You can get similar or better packages with Hostinger or Bluehost.
On the downside, there is a price increase on data centres, quite a lot of restrictions,
and not the best overall hosting quality.
Recommendation
Use Namecheap only for small or personal projects, and it will work like a charm. I like to think of using Namecheap like using 2-in-1 shampoo and shower gel.
It works all right, but it isn’t great quality shampoo and it’s not the best shower gel.