11 min read

Our verdict

Namecheap Shared Hosting

Best for: Honest budget hosting. A full cPanel account with email, unmetered bandwidth and one-click WordPress for well under $60 a year is good value for a brochure site, a blog or a few small client sites. It is not fast hosting, the renewal is roughly double the intro price, and the free SSL lasting only one year is indefensible in 2026. Buy it knowing which of those apply to you.

Overall score

7.4/ 10

What we liked

A real cPanel account with Softaculous, email hosting, unmetered bandwidth and Imunify360 for under $60 a year on renewal
A 30-day trial, which is far longer than the three days Cloudways gives you and long enough to migrate a real site and watch it
Free website migration is included rather than a paid add-on
Stellar Plus and Business include AutoBackup, with 6 daily, 3 weekly and 5 monthly restore points
Stellar Plus allows unlimited websites, which no comparable host offers at that price

What to watch

Renewal is roughly double the intro rate and rose again on 19 May 2026 — Stellar is $2.28/mo to start and $55.88/year thereafter
Free SSL covers the first year only, where Let's Encrypt is permanently free and automated at most competitors
Shared resources mean CPU, memory and database contention, and reviewers name speed as the recurring hosting complaint
Namecheap's own documentation says server backups are for its restoration purposes and tells customers to keep their own copies, with backup eligibility limited by 25 GB usage and 200,000 inodes
No phone support when a site is suspended or down

PriceStellar $2.28/mo then $55.88/year · Plus $2.98/mo then $85.44/year · Business $4.98/mo then $128.88/year

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Namecheap hosting review: cheap, but is it good?

Stellar costs $2.28/mo and renews at $55.88/year. What the shared plans include, where they run out of road, and the SSL policy nobody defends.

By Claire Whitman · Senior Software Editor

16 October 2026

How we pay for this

We buy the hardware and pay for the subscriptions we write about. Claim a deal through our link and we may earn a commission — our readers sometimes get a discount or a freebie out of it too, but it never pushes the price up, and it never changes what the review says.

Namecheap's shared hosting is good value and the price on the page is not the price you will pay. Stellar starts at $2.28 a month and renews at $55.88 a year. That is still inexpensive for a cPanel account with email and unmetered bandwidth — it is just two different numbers, and Namecheap raised the second one on 19 May 2026.

What follows is what the plans actually include, where shared hosting stops being the right product, and the two policies worth knowing before you migrate anything.

The short version: right for a brochure site, a blog, or a few small client sites where $60 a year matters more than page speed. Wrong for a busy shop, an application, or anything where a slow afternoon costs money.

The three plans, and the number that matters

Plan	Intro	Renewal	Sites	Storage	AutoBackup
Stellar	$2.28/mo	$55.88/year	3	20 GB SSD	No
Stellar Plus	$2.98/mo	$85.44/year	Unlimited	Unmetered SSD	Yes
Stellar Business	$4.98/mo	$128.88/year	Unlimited	50 GB	Yes, unlimited storage

Read the renewal column as the real price. On Stellar that is $4.66 a month equivalent; on Plus, $7.12; on Business, $10.74. At those figures the comparison changes — Business at $10.74 a month is competing with managed WordPress hosts and small cloud servers rather than with other budget cPanel accounts.

The quirk in the table is Stellar Business having less headline storage than Stellar Plus. Plus advertises unmetered SSD; Business specifies 50 GB on a higher-resource environment. "Unmetered" is subject to acceptable use, so Plus is not actually the bigger plan — Business gives you better resources and unlimited backup storage, which is what you are paying for.

What is actually included

All three plans give you a standard cPanel account, which is the thing to understand if you have only used a host's own custom panel. cPanel is twenty years of accumulated hosting tooling: file manager, databases, cron jobs, email accounts, DNS zone editor, Softaculous for one-click installs of WordPress and about 400 other applications.

On top of that: unmetered bandwidth, email hosting with mailboxes on your own domain, Imunify360 for malware scanning and server-level protection, free website migration, and the AI site-building tools Namecheap has added. Stellar Plus and Business add AutoBackup, advertising 6 daily, 3 weekly and 5 monthly restore points.

For a small site, having email included is a bigger deal than it looks. Google Workspace is around $7 per user per month; cPanel mailboxes are part of the hosting. For a two-person business that difference is more than the hosting costs.

The backup wording deserves a careful read

Backups exist and they are not a substitute for your own. Namecheap's own documentation says server-level backups are maintained for its restoration purposes and tells customers to keep independent copies. Weekly shared-server backups are subject to limits including 25 GB of account usage and 200,000 inodes — exceed either and your account may fall out of the backup set without a notification that means anything to you.

Stellar Plus AutoBackup has similar stated limits; Stellar Business gets unlimited backup storage under AutoBackup, which is the clearest reason to pick Business over Plus.

None of that is unusual for shared hosting, and all of it is why "automatic backups included" should never be read as "you can stop thinking about backups". An offsite copy you have restored once is the only backup that counts, on any host.

The SSL policy is the genuinely bad part

Shared hosting includes up to 50 Standard SSL certificates for hosted domains and subdomains, free for the first year. After that they become paid renewals.

Let's Encrypt has issued free, automatically renewing DV certificates for years, and essentially every competing host now installs them permanently and silently. Charging for a basic certificate in year two exists because Namecheap also sells certificates, and it is the one part of this product that feels like it is working against the customer.

You can install a free certificate yourself — cPanel's AutoSSL or a Let's Encrypt plugin — and most people should. But a host that makes you do that is giving you homework its competitors do not. EasyWP, by contrast, includes Let's Encrypt for the life of the plan, which makes the shared-hosting policy look like a decision rather than an oversight.

Performance: what "shared" means in practice

Shared hosting puts a few hundred accounts on one machine with limits on CPU, memory, concurrent processes and database connections. Your site is fast when the neighbours are quiet and slower when they are not, and no amount of "unmetered" changes that.

The review pattern matches. G2's Namecheap hosting listing sits around 4.2 from about 106 reviews, with positive reviews naming affordable cPanel hosting and fast live chat, and negative ones naming shared-hosting speed, resource limits and mail-server reputation. That is a fair and unsurprising summary of the category.

Where that bites: a WooCommerce store, because cart and checkout pages cannot be cached and every one of them hits PHP and the database. A site with a heavy page builder. Anything with a steady trickle of logged-in users. For a brochure site served mostly from cache, the ceiling is simply never reached.

The balancing point is that this is a $56-a-year product and it does not pretend otherwise. If you need predictable performance, the honest upgrade path is a managed WordPress host or a small cloud server, and our Kamatera review covers what a $4 server gets you if you are willing to administer it.

Email on shared hosting: usable, with one caveat

cPanel mailboxes on your own domain are included, and for a small business that is often enough. The caveat is sending reputation: a shared hosting server's IP is shared with everyone else on it, and if a neighbour is sending badly, your legitimate mail can land in spam through no fault of your own. Negative reviews mention exactly this.

The mitigation is standard and worth doing on day one: set SPF, DKIM and DMARC records properly, and route anything important — password resets, order confirmations, newsletters — through a dedicated sending service rather than the hosting server. Our piece on how sending reputation actually works explains why that separation matters more than the host you pick.

The 30-day trial is the best thing about buying this

Namecheap currently runs a 30-day free trial on shared hosting, which is unusually generous — Cloudways gives three days. Thirty days is long enough to migrate a copy of a real site, point a test subdomain at it, and watch how it behaves on a Monday morning rather than guessing from a benchmark.

Use it properly: migrate the actual site rather than a fresh WordPress install, because a clean install on any host is fast. Our WordPress setup guide covers the install, the SSL timing and the DNS sequence.

Who should buy it

Buy Namecheap shared hosting for a personal site, a small business brochure site, a low-traffic blog, or a handful of client sites that do not pay enough to justify better hosting. Budget the renewal, pick Business if backups matter, and install a free SSL certificate before year two.

Do not buy it for a shop taking real orders, an application, a site where speed is part of the product, or anything you would be embarrassed by if it were slow during a campaign. That is not a criticism of Namecheap — it is what $56 a year buys anywhere.

If you are comparing against the other obvious cheap option, Namecheap vs Hostinger is the head-to-head, and the pricing breakdown has every renewal figure in one place.