Hostinger vs Namecheap: Who Offers The Best CHEAP Web Hosting

Hostinger vs Namecheap

You know there’s a weird feeling, I have talked a lot about Hostinger and Namecheap on this channel yet somehow I never did a direct comparison. So, buckle up because we’re going for a ride. I’ll take a look at the performance and the different technologies both companies use I’ll also take a look at the different pricing models, the support, extra features and stuff like that to determine which provider works best for what type of website and what type of user. click here for Buy Windows Cloud VPS.

1. Pricing Differences

Hostinger has its cheapest single shared hosting plan for $0.99 a month a 4-year plan is a single payment of and $47.52. While Namecheap’s cheapest plan comes in at around $2.95 cents a month or a maximum of 3 years will set you back around $106. On average Namecheap tends to be around 50% to 55% more expensive at every tier. They’re an older company, they do a lot of marketing so they have a little bit of a premium on the top of the regular price.

But people talk about an old prophecy about the chosen one who will use the discount codes in the description and save hella crazy cash money. In all seriousness, you can get an extra 10% of Hostinger plans this stacks with other promotions or a discount when buying Namecheap plans by using the links in the description down below. But full disclosure mode online I want to let you know that whenever you use those links yeah you get a discount, but I also make a commission.

That’s how I monetize this YouTube channel and I found it to be the perfect solution where I can still be objective and tell you what I think about web hosting providers and yet still make enough money to keep making articles full time. So, get the biggest discounts available online in the description down below.

And support the channel at the same time. One feature that Namecheap has over Hostinger is that you do get a free domain name with their cheapest plan. Hostinger only offers a free domain name if you buy the more expensive plans, but you can buy a domain name with Hostinger separately and it’s still gonna be more than twice as cheap compared to Namecheap. It’s just a small little inconvenience.

2. Performance Tests

And here’s where these 2 web hosting providers really start going their separate ways. Hostinger, while being the cheaper option is actually extremely performance-focused. They use Litespeed servers, take advantage of PHP 7.4, and HTTP/2, have part of their infrastructure on the Google Cloud Platform, and use SSD storage over HDD. In simple terms, it’s some good stuff.

On the other hand, Namecheap is a more feature-focused hosting provider, the last performance update that Namecheap had was back in 2017. So, they’re running on a bit of a legacy tech at this point. Just to see how much of a difference in terms of performance there is between these 2 providers I’ve actually created completely new empty WordPress websites and since Hostinger comes with a caching plugin already pre-installed I’ve also installed the third-party free caching plugin on Namecheap as well. Just to make it a little bit fairer.

with all of that taken by the way, both Namecheap and Hostinger have automatic WordPress installers available and made it extremely easy to create a new website. Hostinger with a $1 plan loaded the empty website in 1.2 seconds completely standard stuff. Anything below or close to 1 second is what you would expect from a fast hosting company. Namecheap though, yikes 2.9 seconds loading time more than double that of Hostingers the legacy tech of Namecheap is really starting to show here. Okay but this isn’t like a definitive answer. Remember these websites are empty no users.

In reality, you would have some users on your website performing some. I don’t know whatever users do on your website. So, I did what I usually do in these types of tests, I send some virtual users to simulate real users to see if the performance takes a dip. And took a dip it did. Hostinger wasn’t able to reliably handle 50 users at the same time without slowing down the whole website.

The $1 per month plans are just not equipped for this kind of load Namecheap and their cheapest plan though slower in speed were able to handle the 50 users at the same time no problems. While it’s fun doing these performance tests and seeing the graphs go up and down, what does this actually mean? Well, on average every single Hostinger plan will be around 2 times faster than the Namecheap counterpart.

However, if you’re looking at strictly the cheapest plans Hostinger does limit the user count a bit to keep up its fast performance, Namecheap doesn’t do this. But if you’re getting a substantial amount of users you shouldn’t be sitting on the cheapest plan. So, in my opinion, when it comes to cheap plans, speed matters more than how many users they can handle.

3. Support Options

Namecheap just kinda wins this one by default. At the time of this article, Hostinger has their live chat completely disabled. They also don’t offer phone support of any kind. So, you’re only left with email. Actually, you can buy live chat support but it will cost you around $2 a month extra which is more expensive than some of their hosting plans.

However, I have contacted Hostinger in a previous article and asked them about this and they basically told me that they plan to bring back free 24/7 live chat support to everyone as soon as the world goes back to normal-ish. Though with Hostinger you still get an extensive knowledge base of information to browse through if you like to fix problems yourself. They have detailed articles with pictures and step-by-step instructions that they constantly update and you don’t even need to buy a plan to access all of this knowledge.

You can just visit their website and it’s there. But as I mentioned before Namecheap just straight-up wins in this category because they’re offering free 24/7 live chat support, email, and phone support. As per the accuracy of the answers of the support agents I can’t really give much insight on that because it really depends on the person that’s supporting you. In general, I had a better experience with Hostinger but these were such edge cases that I don’t even think they’re relevant and it’s anecdotal evidence at best.

4. Extra Features

One of the most important, unique features of Hostinger is that they allow you to select the data center you want your files to be stored on. They have servers in all parts of the world, why is this important? Well, the less distance there is between your users and your website files the faster the information travels. Namecheap only has data centers in the United States. One on the west coast and one on the east coast. However, Hostinger has data centers all across the world. In the United States, Asia, and Europe.

So, if you’re looking to create a website and you know that your readers will be European or Asian, I would recommend choosing Hostinger. Just because they have more data centers or have data centers in the locations that you need. However, Namecheap has some advantages when it comes to managing your website. They offer automatic WordPress updates. However, this feature became obsolete in WordPress 5.5. Because, WordPress version 5.5 already automatically updates your plugins, themes, and the core WordPress version if you wanted to. But, you do get 1 more unique feature which is called website staging.

This allows you to create a copy of your original website and test out the changes you make before you release them to the public. So, you reduce the risk of stuff going wrong. By the way, remember when I said that Hostinger is more focused on speed and performance? Well, Namecheap is more focused on helping you with the business side of things by offering consultations and tools to better manage your business. In short, Hostinger features are better tailored to host international websites with a big emphasis on speed and performance while Namecheap will help you grow in the US market and build your business.

Recommendation

With all of that taken into account, who should choose Hostinger, and who should choose Namecheap? I think that Hostinger is best for people that want an extremely low price and good performance. But, you will be left in charge of managing your website and your business without much external help. Namecheap is for people that are new to starting a business and want some help with their digital strategy.

Yeah, the performance isn’t all that great but when you’re just starting a business, customer acquisition is much more important than the top of the line performance. Because you do need visitors in the first place to utilize your fast website.