Take 3 minutes to read this and get the best deal on hosting while avoiding a lot of bullshit! This is based on our experience and honest opinion. You can save a lot of cash and stress with a good host. Don’t wait on it! It’s better to spend a couple of days and move to a good host than suffer on a crappy one.
The Good.
The Bad & The Ugly.
Why we love Namecheap? 😍😙
NameCheap is a host that has been around for MANY years, headquartered in Los Angeles, California, we have had extensive experience with Namecheap for nearly a decade.
An Excellent Experience (Support Rocks)
Namecheap has been great for us when it comes to both hosting, and domain purchasing. Everything has always been smooth with this host. Namecheap’s main portal is very intuitative, with all services categorized into different sections. It’s easy to manage your hosting services and domains from a single platform.
Domains come with a free SSL certificate for an entire year, which is great, as some hosts make you pay extra for SSL certificates.
Support has also been very helpful in any issues. We never had to wait more than 3 minutes to get chat support on the line and get our issue solved quickly.
Excellent Pricing
Pricing for shared hosting starts at as little as $1.50 per month. A CRAZY GOOD DEAL, when compared to literally any other host on the market that offers a similar high-quality hosting performance. Additional key points are listed below.
- Unmetered/unlimited bandwidth (Data transfer between server and your website visitors).
- High SSD – Between 20GB, 50GB, and Unmetered/Unlimited (Based on the plan). This is how much storage of content your server can hold that comes from your website(s).
- File Usage/Inodes – Between 300k to 600k. This figure is important. It indicates the tracking of files stored on the server and occurring. The more complex your site structure is, the higher the number will be (it’s pretty technical but you can read more about it here.) The figure Namecheap provides is high compared to other shared hosts we have used and never had an issue with it on Namecheap. Surprisingly, we’ve had more File Usage/Inode headaches with a far more expensive shared host provider mentioned further down in this article.
Speed and Technicals
Namecheap uses cPanel, which is a shared hosting management platform that allows for things like WordPress installations, email management, and file management. This is the standard in shared hosting and is something we and our clients have grown to love to use.
Speed of hosting has been great for the price, as you can see by the speed score of one of our client sites below, hosting specs are phenomenal. We have good results with other shared hosting accounts too, but keep in mind, these results are on a $1.5 (yes, a buck – fifty) per month plan. CRAZY!
Why we DON’T love SiteGround? 🤢🤮
SiteGround, headquartered in Sofia, Bulgaria is another host we have dealt with for almost 5 years.
A Terrible Experience (We got ripped off!)
Recently, SiteGround changed their Shared hosting from cPanel (a hosting management system) to another, the more “more simplified” platform called Site Tools. What bothered us about this move is that was done without notification for us and many of our clients (even though they claimed emails were sent), the only email record we have, shown below, was received several days after the 30 day refund period ran out (conveniently) for our full year of hosting plan.
Initial Invoice for our client hosting plan:
Email notice of hosting functionality change, sent a week or so AFTER the 30 day refund period.
And unsurprising, when we called into their foreign support center, the billing department rep rudely refused to give us a refund for the hosting package we utilize for our clients (BIG SURPRISE!).
We’ve had other issues with hosts of course over nearly 2 decades in the industry, however a situation like this is a first of us. So BE WARNED!
A host that refuses a refund for a customer that paid for a year and expects THAT service for a year, to only have it switch and a refund refused….is clearly not a company with THE CUSTOMER COMES FIRST ideals.
Not sure what this is in the SiteGround team’s country (probably normal), but in America, that’s called BAIT AND SWITCH. 😡
Sucky Pricing
You’d think that pricing would be roughly the same as Namecheap’s…but you’d think wrong. Compared to a comparable plan at Namecheap, which runs around $2-$3 based on the term, we are paying nearly $25 PER MONTH, and that’s for a year’s term. This would be even more expensive if it was paid for on a monthly basis.
Speed and Technicals
The speed of SiteGround is it’s strongest point. Speed and performance for all sites we have had, from custom built PHP websites, to WordPress content sites and WooCommerce shops, SiteGround speed has always been great. However, most major shared hosts in 2021 have good speed, due to better hardware being around.
💸💰 Save BIG on Shared Hosting by using our Link Below
Anyway, I hope our guide on our experience with these two hosts and opinion on Shared Hosting in 2021 has been helpful!
Below, you can follow our link to Namecheap, which we get an affiliate commission for. And you may be thinking…”well this article is biased!”. NOPE, SiteGround actually offers a bigger affiliate commission than Namecheap (we are affiliates of both). So it would be beneficial for us to recommend SiteGround. But we definitely DO NOT. 🙅🙅🙅
Additionally, if you need help setting up your website or having a custom website built, we can help. Whether it’s an eCommerce shop, a lead-generating website, or a local-business site, we can help you set up your website from start to finish and even get traffic to it.
Simply visit the link below to reach out! 👇