Shared Hosting Plans - Fast and Secure Web Service from Namecheap.

 Shared Hosting Plans - Fast and Secure Web Service from Namecheap. Are you looking for the right hosting to get your website up and running?

You may feel overwhelmed with options for hosting, and you are not alone. There is no shortage of providers to choose from when it comes time to nail down hosting for your website.

There are specific web hosting services that provide what you need, and

Shared Hosting Plans - Fast and Secure Web Service from Namecheap.

may be one of them.

This hosting company started as a domain registrar in 2000, and its success in this endeavor led Namecheap to add on other services, including hosting.

Today, the company has over 11 million customers and hosts over three million domain names.

While some companies make their money off upsells, Namecheap prides itself that it does not use the upsell tactic to make money. Instead, they work to provide affordable pricing plans that give you what you need, hence the name Namecheap.

Compare Namecheap to The Best Web Hosting Services

As mentioned above, Namecheap is far from the only web hosting service. There are others on the market that we found we like more—a conclusion we came to after a great deal of research and trial and error. We set out on a journey to find the best web hosting providers for you to use, and Namecheap didn’t make the cut.

However, just because it didn’t make our list does not mean that Namecheap isn’t a good solution for your hosting needs. Hosting needs vary from person to person, and Namecheap may have exactly what you need. It is worth learning more about, at least. And that is why we are digging deeper into Namecheap to show you how it compares to others.

See our top picks here, and read below for our thoughts on Namecheap

Namecheap: The Good and The Bad

Let’s take the plunge into Namecheap’s pros and cons so that you can determine whether its pros give you what you need and if the cons aren’t deal-breakers.

The Good

Trusted Brand: Namecheap has been around for over 20 years and is no stranger to the world of hosting. With over three million hosting customers under its wing, Namecheap is doing something right. You can trust that over the years, they have worked out a lot of kinks and today have a generally good product.

Good Uptime: An uptime you can rely on is an absolute necessity. A high uptime percentage means less downtime for your website. And downtime is something you don’t want. The more time your site spends offline, the more customers you will lose.

That’s why we love Namecheap’s 100% service level agreement for uptime. If an uptime of 100% isn’t achieved, you get your money back. Now that’s customer service. Namecheap can offer this because they have a history of strong uptime. There have been some minor dips in the past, but nothing catastrophic and nothing that didn’t get it oh-so-close to the 100% mark. Currently, the average uptime sits at 99.97%, which is pretty darn close to perfect.

And, keep in mind that if your uptime isn’t perfect, Namecheap will pay for it.

Free Domain and Migration: If you have your website hosted with another provider but aren’t happy with the services, Namecheap makes it cheap and easy to switch over to their plans. They are so cheap, in fact, that they charge you nothing. Yes, that’s right; Namecheap offers free migration of your site from other hosting providers.

What they also provide for free is a domain with the purchase of a plan. This makes sense since domains are their specialty. But we love a good freebie, especially when it’s something we will actually use.

Money-Back Guarantee: Not happy with your Namecheap experience? No problem. If you decide within 30 days of starting your services that you don’t like what is going on, Namecheap will refund you.

That means you have an entire month to take your Namecheap plan for a test run. If you’re not happy at the end of that run, you can switch to another plan option or get your money back.

Great Basic Plan: If you’ve ever searched for web hosting before, you likely know that the basic plans with nearly any provider give the bare minimum. They serve as a great starting place for those who are new to websites, but if you need much more out of your hosting than just a place to park your website, the bare minimum plans may not be enough.

However, that is not the case when it comes to Namecheap. Don’t let the name fool you because, even though their basic plan is cheap (we are talking pocket-change-just-over-a-dollar cheap), they offer a lot more than most of their competitors.

With Namecheap’s bare minimum plan, you get unmetered bandwidth. This is a rarity that you will enjoy as your site starts to grow. In addition to that, you also get a free SSL certificate for the first year. (As is the case with most free SSL certificate offerings, the first year is free, and every year after that, you have to pay. Namecheap does the same.)

But one of the things we love is that you get free backups twice a week. Other providers offer only free backup once a week, so twice a week is a big bonus. Backups are crucial because you don’t know when something may go wrong during an update that could potentially bring your entire site down.

But it doesn’t stop there. You also get not one, not two, but three websites with the basic plan. This is a huge step up from the single website hosting that most services provide with their cheapest plan. If you want to run both a business and a personal site, you’ll love this perk.

On top of all this, you get a whopping 50 email addresses, too. Most providers only give you one, and some don’t give you any, so 50 is a huge bonus.

And one more thing: you also get 50 MySQL databases, whereas most providers offer far less than that.

Quick Load Time: No one wants to hear the Jeopardy theme song while they sit and wait for a website to load. If a website takes more than 3-4 seconds to load, there is almost a 100% guarantee that those people will abort the mission and head to another website.

According to Google, a website should load in less than three seconds in this day and age. However, you should aim for less.

Namecheap makes Google’s number attainable. Their average page speed is 458 ms, which passes the test with flying colors. And it seems that the speeds with this provider continue to get faster.