Namecheap is a firm that started its journey as a domain registrar in 2000. By this date, the 20-year-old company has over 10 million customers. The top-selling products of Namecheap are SSL certificates, shared/VPS hosting, premium DNS, and domain names. Is Namecheap better than Godaddy, the world’s largest registrar? Are its hosting plans better than that of Bluehost, one of the top shared hosting service providers in the world? Let’s find it out!
Domains
Namecheap is one of the few registrars that sell .com domains for below $10. Its rates for the top-level domains are among the best in the world.
NC enables you to register the following domains:
- .com, org, .net.
- .co, .ai, .io, .xyz, .app.
- .online, .club, .live, .site, .network
- .store, .group, .ink, .me, .global, etc.
Buying a new domain from NC is easy. To get started, enter the domain in the search box that appears on the Namecheap homepage and click the search button.
If the domain is available for purchase, click the “add to cart” button. If it is unavailable, enter a new name and click enter or select one from the list shown below the text box. Now, click the “View Cart” button. NC will now take you to the checkout form. Enter the required details and complete the transaction.
If you’re not happy with your current registrar, you can move your domain to NC. Domains moved to NC from other registrars are renewed for a year. Namecheap provides WhoIs guard free of cost to users for a year.
I had bought two domains from NC. I have never faced any issues with the domains. The Namecheap dashboard to manage domains is easy to use. The company alerts you when the domain is about to expire. NC supports domain auto-renewal. It lets you forward domain names and set up a redirect.
See Namecheap domain pricing here
Premium DNS
Sometimes, a website is unreachable even when it is up. This issue is caused by a DNS error. It may hurt the business badly. Slow DNS servers are also responsible for the poor performance of the website. The first thing that the web page speed testing tool tells users is to improve the DNS lookup time. This proves the importance of a DNS server.
To make sure that your website is always up and serving the visitors and the web server responds only to legitimate requests, you can use Namecheap’s premium DNS feature. Namecheap’s DNS servers are powered by AnyCast technology. They also avert DDoS attacks. Unlike other registrars that charge 30 to 40 USD, Namecheap charges only $5 for its premium DNS service.
SSL Certificate
Websites that ask users to enter the debit/credit card number, password, or other crucial information must use the secure version of HTTP protocol i.e. HTTPS instead of HTTP. If it doesn’t do so, the browser will display the “Insecure” message besides the address bar. Due to this message, a customer might not buy anything on your website or log in to his account.
To make sure that the browser doesn’t show an “insecure” warning message and scare away the visitors, you should install an SSL certificate on the server. Then, you must configure the server to use the HTTPS protocol instead of HTTP. Sounds difficult? Well, with Namecheap, it takes just a few minutes to make your website serve pages over the secure HTTP protocol.
Namecheap is the best place to buy SSL certificates. The company sells a variety of SSL certificates for a price starting at $10.
View Namecheap SSL certificates plan here on the official website
Hosting
Namecheap offers shared, reseller, and VPS hosting services to the users. The company provides a CPanel tool with which users can manage the server, install apps i.e. WordPress, Magento, etc without hiring anyone.
Namecheap’s shared hosting plans start at $2.88. The company’s shared servers are located in the US and UK. You’re allowed to choose your preferred location. The servers employ SSD drives and they don’t have bandwidth limitations.
The cheapest plan i.e. Namecheap Stellar shared hosting plan allows you to launch up to 3 websites. It gives you access to a website builder tool and 20GB of storage memory. The 2nd cheapest hosting plan i.e. Stellar Plus has no limitation on the number of websites users can launch and the amount of data you can store on the server’s SSD drive. It costs $4.88.
The last shared hosting plan i.e. Stellar Business is priced at $8.88. It allows websites/you to save the site’s assets on a pure 50GB SSD drive. The above three plans are ideal for people who are looking for a cheap and reliable hosting provider.
Namecheap offers two VPS plans – Pulsar and Quasar. The Pulsar plan costs $14.88 per month. It provides a server powered by a dual-core processor, 2GB RAM, and 40 GB SSD. This plan comes with a bandwidth usage limitation of 1TB.
The Quasar VPS plan is priced at $24.88. It offers a quad-core processor, 6GB RAM, 3TB bandwidth, and 120GB storage space. NC uses the latest Dell servers to deliver the best experience to the visitors and website owners. NC VPS plans include CPanel, WHMCS, etc. The performance of Namecheap shared hosting servers is satisfactory and that of VPS is good.
See full features on Namecheap hosting here
New services
Namecheap introduced a VPN service in 2019/2020. The Namecheap VPN plans are incredibly cheap. Namecheap has also launched a content delivery network service called “Supersonic CDN”. The CDN service is in the “Early Access” stage and is expected to go live this year. Some of the features of Namecheap CDN are as follows:
- HTTP/2.0 support, GZIP compression.
- Analytics, WAF, etc.
Support
Namecheap is known for its top-class customer support. The company offers ticket-based, live chat, and email-based support to the users. The fastest way to get the problem solved is to use the live chat feature of the website and the slowest is email. Ticket based support ensures that the ticket will remain open till your problem is not resolved.
Final thoughts
Namecheap is a reliable company. It is one of the top 5 registrars in the world. Its hosting plans are affordable and SSL certificate pricing is the best in the industry. NC sells premium DNS and domain names for a great price.
