Namecheap review
We re-measured its figures and found three of them wrong in our record, then read its policies and configured the order without buying. Here is what we found.
- BySalwa Al-Otaibi · edited by Nora Al-Mutairi
- Read on
- Score6.7 / 10
Built from what Namecheap publishes about itself — its plans page, its acceptable use policy, its refund policy and its guarantee document — plus a re-measurement made without an account and without buying, with one dated capture. Read on .
Before anything else about Namecheap: our stored record of it was wrong on three numbers. We corrected it before writing this page, and the score fell by a tenth, taking its rank with it. The correction has a chapter of its own at the foot of the page.
After it, the picture is this: a low opening price against a renewal close to three times it, a hundred per cent uptime guarantee written into a legal document rather than an advert, and resource limits published in the contract itself rather than in a help article.
What fails our reader here is not a particular clause but a general absence: Namecheap publishes no entries at all in the alternate-language set, neither on its front page nor on its hosting page: it is one English site for the whole world. Its currency switcher, however, offers 7 currencies — the US dollar, the euro, the pound, the Canadian and Australian dollars, the Indian rupee and the Chinese yuan — and not one Gulf or Egyptian currency among them
How this review was built
We bought nothing from Namecheap. We read the plans page, the acceptable use policy, the refund policy and the uptime guarantee document, and configured the order until the total was displayed, then stopped.
We operated only what changes the price: the term switch and the data-centre choice. No account was created and no personal detail was typed.
Speed and uptime sit outside the score, here and at every company on this list, because measuring them needs a bought plan.
Buying and price
6.8
Basis: the company’s own pages · weight 33%
A low opening price, a renewal close to three times it, and a struck figure that people really do pay.
The plan we score opens at one dollar eighty-three a month on a one-year term — twenty-one dollars ninety-six today — and renews at five dollars eighty-eight.
Something in how it is presented counts in their favour: The struck price on Namecheap’s card is 5.88 dollars, which is also the renewal price, and also what a buyer on monthly billing pays. So the figure the discount is computed against is one that really is paid, in two separate cases, rather than a number nobody meets
And the free domain we credit them for is conditional: The free domain for a year appears in the plan’s feature list when billing is yearly or two-yearly, and disappears from it when billing is monthly. So a feature we count towards the score hangs on the term the buyer picks, not on the plan alone So anyone comparing monthly prices across companies is comparing a different product.
| Value | Points |
|---|---|
| Renewal jumps to 3.2× the opening price | 3.36 |
| a 12-month term is available | 8.17 |
| The renewal price is on the pricing page | 10.00 |
| $21.96 today | 8.90 |
Support availability
6.0
Basis: the company’s own pages · weight 27%
Two channels around the clock, no telephone, and nothing said about language.
Namecheap advertises support at all hours by chat and ticket. That is two channels rather than three, and it is what puts the support score where it is. We measure published availability and the number of routes, not the quality of the answer, which would need an account.
And where this score fails our reader: We found no occurrence of the word Arabic and no Arabic text on Namecheap’s front page or its hosting page, and no published statement about support languages in either direction. The company publishes no local edition in any language, so the absence here is not a choice against Arabic alone but one policy for the world
| Value | Points |
|---|---|
| support around the clock | 10.00 |
| Contact by chat, tickets | 6.67 |
| Publishes no Arabic support | 0.00 |
Published features
6.0
Basis: the company’s own pages · weight 20%
Five items of seven after the correction, and backups are not among them.
The plan carries an SSL certificate, email, a content delivery network and free migration, together with the free domain we added after re-measuring. The two missing items are backups and staging, and both begin on the plan above it.
What the contract says about backups here is worth reading: The same policy says any shared hosting account using more than twenty-five gigabytes of space, or holding more than 200000 inodes, is removed from the weekly system backup. The permitted inode limit is three hundred thousand, so a buyer can be inside their allowance and outside the backup — and the backup in question is weekly rather than daily
| Value | Points |
|---|---|
| 5/7 published features | 6.00 |
Refund and billing
8.0
Basis: the company’s own pages · weight 20%
Thirty days written down, and two conditions on it that the score cannot see.
The score looks at three things: is the window written down, are the exclusions published, and does the billing show the renewal price. Namecheap writes the first two: Namecheap’s refund policy says hosting fees are non-refundable unless the policy provides otherwise, that plan fees may be refunded within 30 days of purchase at Namecheap’s sole discretion, and that only first-time accounts are eligible for that guarantee. The window is written down, and the right to it is not absolute
A renewal is another matter entirely: The same policy gives a renewal 48 hours rather than thirty days: it may be refunded at the company’s sole discretion if the hosting is cancelled within forty-eight hours of the renewal, and after that a prorated refund may be provided upon consideration. No refund is available for any additional service, or for domain registration fees
And a limit in our own model, stated about ourselves for the third time this month: this company takes the same mark on this criterion as SiteGround, whose policy refunds a renewal within thirty days where this one allows forty-eight hours and reserves discretion. Our criterion measures that the window is written and the exclusions published. It does not measure how generous the writing is.
| Value | Points |
|---|---|
| a refund window of 30 days | 10.00 |
| The refund exclusions are written down | 10.00 |
| Billing does not state the renewal and its price | 0.00 |
Speed and uptime: we did not measure them
Speed and uptime sit outside this score because measuring them needs a bought plan, and a published uptime guarantee is a promise rather than a measurement.
This guarantee is worth pausing on, because we checked it expecting a contradiction and did not find one: Namecheap advertises a hundred per cent uptime guarantee, and its legal document confirms it for the plan we score rather than leaving it to marketing. What the guarantee pays is service time rather than money: one free day for each hour of downtime, capped at one month
Collecting it, though, is on the buyer: The guarantee requires the failure to be determined by the company alone, the downtime to be confirmed by a member of its support team, and the buyer to claim by submitting a ticket to the billing department within 10 calendar days of the downtime. The credit does not arrive by itself — it goes to whoever noticed and asked
The resource limits are published, and that counts in their favour: Namecheap publishes its usage limits in the Acceptable Use Policy itself, a contract document: fifty per cent of a processor with a temporary burst to two hundred, one gigabyte of memory, twenty concurrent processes, fifty megabytes a second of input and output, and 300000 inodes on the plan we score with a clause beside them for anyone who approaches those limits regularly: The policy says a user whose account employs the higher burstable resources on a consistent basis agrees to upgrade to a package with higher resource availability, and that the decision to upgrade rests solely with Namecheap. So the burst is available, and using it regularly opens the door to an upgrade rather than to staying put
Arabic: where it reaches and where it does not
The absence here is general, not aimed at us in particular.
We found no statement about support languages in either direction: We found no occurrence of the word Arabic and no Arabic text on Namecheap’s front page or its hosting page, and no published statement about support languages in either direction. The company publishes no local edition in any language, so the absence here is not a choice against Arabic alone but one policy for the world
The difference between this and others on our list deserves fairness: SiteGround builds fifty-four local editions and none is Arabic; GreenGeeks builds four and none is Arabic; this one builds none for anybody. An absence that covers everyone is a different fact from an absence that covers us. The result for a reader in Riyadh is the same either way: an English site, a price in dollars, and a server in Texas, London or Singapore.
As for the servers: The data-centre selector on the plans page offers 4 locations: the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and Singapore, with the United States chosen in advance. None is in the Middle East or Africa, and the nearest of them to the Gulf is Singapore or Europe
The correction: three numbers we had wrong
We had three numbers wrong, and this is what happened.
We recorded Namecheap on the sixteenth of September and re-measured it on the twenty-second: Our record, dated the sixteenth of September, carried an opening price of 2.28, a renewal of 4.66 and a first payment of 26.88. Reading the page and the order form on the twenty-second we found 1.83, 5.88 and 21.96, so we corrected all three and the score fell from 6.8 to 6.7
We do not know which explanation is right: did the price move, or did we read it wrongly? The company runs frequent seasonal offers, and its page today is headed with its nineteenth anniversary, so an opening price can change in a week. A renewal price moving in six days is less likely, and the free domain we failed to credit looks like our error rather than their change.
The effect of the correction is that the price score fell, because the gap between opening and renewal is wider than we had recorded, and the features score rose, because the free domain is real and we were not counting it. The two move in opposite directions, the net is a single tenth, and with it the company went from seventh place to tenth on a table where four companies now share the same score.
We write this chapter because a reader who never sees us correct our own numbers has no reason to trust the numbers we did not correct.
The full calculation
| Sub-score | Value | Weight | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | 6.8 | 33% | 2.244 |
| Support | 6.0 | 27% | 1.620 |
| Features | 6.0 | 20% | 1.200 |
| Refund | 8.0 | 20% | 1.600 |
| Total | 6.664 → 6.7 |
If not this one, then what
Both picks are computed from the scores rather than written by hand: the first is the one directly above it in the ranking, the second the one that beats it by the widest margin on the criterion it loses on.
ScalaHosting
6.7The service directly above it in the ranking.
$2.95/mo on a 36-month prepayment: $106.20 today, then $11.95/mo
Read the reviewGreenGeeks
7.2What this page offers instead on the criterion it loses on — Published features.
$2.95/mo on a 12-month prepayment: $35.40 today, then $13.95/mo
Read the review
Bottom line
Buy from Namecheap if you read English and accept the renewal figure, keep your own copy of your site rather than relying on theirs, and know that the window to refund a renewal is forty-eight hours rather than a month. Stay away if you need to be answered in Arabic, if you want a server nearby, or if you are building on the assumption that backups come with the plan.
Questions
Did you buy this plan?
No. We read Namecheap’s pages and its policies, and configured the order until the total was shown, then stopped. No account was created, no details were entered, nothing was bought. That is why speed and uptime are outside the score.
Why did Namecheap’s score change?
Because we re-measured and found our record wrong on three numbers: the opening price, the renewal and the first payment. We also added a free domain for a year that we had not been counting. The score fell by a tenth, and the detail is in a chapter of its own on this page.
What will I pay on day one, and after a year?
Twenty-one dollars ninety-six today for twelve months, which we read in the order form. Then the month becomes five dollars eighty-eight, which is also the monthly billing rate.
Do I get backups?
Not on this plan. Automatic backups begin on the plan above it. There is a weekly system backup, and the policy says an account using more than twenty-five gigabytes, or holding more than two hundred thousand inodes, is removed from it — while the permitted inode limit is three hundred thousand.
Do I get a refund if I cancel after a renewal?
You have forty-eight hours from the renewal, at the company’s sole discretion, and after that a prorated refund may be considered. The first purchase has thirty days, on the same discretion, and only for first-time accounts.
What we know, and where from
Every figure on this page, where it came from and when we read it.
| What we say | How we know | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Namecheap publishes no entries at all in the alternate-language set, neither on its front page nor on its hosting page: it is one English site for the whole world. Its currency switcher, however, offers 7 currencies — the US dollar, the euro, the pound, the Canadian and Australian dollars, the Indian rupee and the Chinese yuan — and not one Gulf or Egyptian currency among them | we measured it | Namecheap — hreflang set and currency switcher | |
| The struck price on Namecheap’s card is 5.88 dollars, which is also the renewal price, and also what a buyer on monthly billing pays. So the figure the discount is computed against is one that really is paid, in two separate cases, rather than a number nobody meets | we measured it | Namecheap Shared Hosting — billing-term toggle | |
| The free domain for a year appears in the plan’s feature list when billing is yearly or two-yearly, and disappears from it when billing is monthly. So a feature we count towards the score hangs on the term the buyer picks, not on the plan alone | we measured it | Namecheap Shared Hosting — Stellar features by term | |
| We found no occurrence of the word Arabic and no Arabic text on Namecheap’s front page or its hosting page, and no published statement about support languages in either direction. The company publishes no local edition in any language, so the absence here is not a choice against Arabic alone but one policy for the world | we could not find it | Namecheap — no Arabic and no support-language statement found | |
| The same policy says any shared hosting account using more than twenty-five gigabytes of space, or holding more than 200000 inodes, is removed from the weekly system backup. The permitted inode limit is three hundred thousand, so a buyer can be inside their allowance and outside the backup — and the backup in question is weekly rather than daily | the company states it | Namecheap Acceptable Use Policy — backup exclusion | |
| Namecheap’s refund policy says hosting fees are non-refundable unless the policy provides otherwise, that plan fees may be refunded within 30 days of purchase at Namecheap’s sole discretion, and that only first-time accounts are eligible for that guarantee. The window is written down, and the right to it is not absolute | the company states it | Namecheap Refund Policy — Web Hosting | |
| The same policy gives a renewal 48 hours rather than thirty days: it may be refunded at the company’s sole discretion if the hosting is cancelled within forty-eight hours of the renewal, and after that a prorated refund may be provided upon consideration. No refund is available for any additional service, or for domain registration fees | the company states it | Namecheap Refund Policy — renewals and exclusions | |
| Namecheap advertises a hundred per cent uptime guarantee, and its legal document confirms it for the plan we score rather than leaving it to marketing. What the guarantee pays is service time rather than money: one free day for each hour of downtime, capped at one month | the company states it | Namecheap Uptime Guarantee §3 | |
| The guarantee requires the failure to be determined by the company alone, the downtime to be confirmed by a member of its support team, and the buyer to claim by submitting a ticket to the billing department within 10 calendar days of the downtime. The credit does not arrive by itself — it goes to whoever noticed and asked | the company states it | Namecheap Uptime Guarantee §4 | |
| Namecheap publishes its usage limits in the Acceptable Use Policy itself, a contract document: fifty per cent of a processor with a temporary burst to two hundred, one gigabyte of memory, twenty concurrent processes, fifty megabytes a second of input and output, and 300000 inodes on the plan we score | the company states it | Namecheap Acceptable Use Policy — acceptable use limits | |
| The policy says a user whose account employs the higher burstable resources on a consistent basis agrees to upgrade to a package with higher resource availability, and that the decision to upgrade rests solely with Namecheap. So the burst is available, and using it regularly opens the door to an upgrade rather than to staying put | the company states it | Namecheap Acceptable Use Policy — burst allowance | |
| The data-centre selector on the plans page offers 4 locations: the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and Singapore, with the United States chosen in advance. None is in the Middle East or Africa, and the nearest of them to the Gulf is Singapore or Europe | we measured it | Namecheap Shared Hosting — data centre selector | |
| Our record, dated the sixteenth of September, carried an opening price of 2.28, a renewal of 4.66 and a first payment of 26.88. Reading the page and the order form on the twenty-second we found 1.83, 5.88 and 21.96, so we corrected all three and the score fell from 6.8 to 6.7 | we measured it | Namecheap Shared Hosting — Stellar card and order total |