Founded way back in 2000 by the current CEO, Richard Kirkendall, Namecheap is another well-established hosting company that deserves a top spot on this list for offering some of the best web hosting plans in the industry (especially when it comes to cheap hosting plans).
Recently recognized as one of America’s fastest-growing companies on the Inc 5,000 list and boasting of over 10 million domains registered on their servers, they’re definitely doing something right.
Performance
Namecheap first and foremost excels at helping you register domain names. Their foray into hosting plans, has been a smart (and much welcomed) move in more recent years, especially seeing that they offer an above average product in terms of the performance their plans pack. Speed-wise, third party tests showed an average load speed of 0.83s. Not the best, but still above industry average.
Uptime
Thanks to state-of-the-art shared infrastructure, Namecheap boasts a 100% uptime. And like with Dreamhost, if for some reason your website is offline due to a fault on their end, Namecheap promises compensation in the form of account credits.
Customer Support
For a company that’s been in business for close to 20 years, excellent customer support is something to be expected. And Namecheap doesn’t disappoint with their ultra high-level customer support that features:
- 24/7 access to live chat
- A ticketing system for more complex or ongoing issues
- An easy to use (and understand) value-packed knowledge base with step-by-step tutorials
Pricing for Namecheap’s Web Hosting Plans
Namecheap has carved out a name for themselves for providing well… cheap plans. They go as low as $1.44/mo. But in this instance (to be fully transparent) low price and comparatively lower quality do go together. So if you’re on an ultra tight budget, Namecheap’s lowest-tired hosting plan could be a good move for you right now—but once you’re generating some income from your blog, it’d be smart to upgrade hosting plan with them.
Namecheap’s lowest-priced plan, the Stellar, gets you:
- 20GB of storage
- Hosting of up to 3 websites
- Unrestricted bandwidth
- Free SSL certificate
- 50 MySQL databases
- Optional free website domain name
- Privacy protection
The Stellar Plus (their most popular plan) adds on:
- Unlimited websites
- Unmetered SSD
- Automatic backup
A notable addition that comes with the Stellar Business plan from Namecheap is their cloud storage access. They also offer their Supersonic CDN, which leverages a global network of high-performance servers. Images, videos and other files get delivered from the storage location closest to your users—which means super fast website speed for more satisfied visitors.
All of their hosting plans come with a rock-solid 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can try out their plans and see for yourself if they’re a good fit for you.