Namecheap
Best for: Namecheap is cheaper than most of the market in year one and middling in year three, and it is one of the few hosts that shows you both numbers. The three figures that decide most purchases: a .com renews at $18.48, Stellar hosting renews at $55.88 a year, and a managed VPS costs the server plus $10–$25 management plus a cPanel licence. Price from the renewal column and nothing here will surprise you.
- Namecheap publishes registration, renewal and transfer prices in one table, which GoDaddy and most of the market still do not
- Domain privacy is free for life rather than a renewal line item, which is worth roughly $10 a year against registrars that charge for it
- The 30-day hosting trial and the first-month-free EasyWP Starter let you test before any renewal applies
- PremiumDNS at $9.98 a year on renewal is genuinely cheap for Anycast DNS with an uptime SLA
- Storage and mailbox allowances are stated per plan rather than hidden behind 'unlimited'
- Shared hosting renewals rose on 19 May 2026 and now run roughly double the introductory rate
- A .com renewal of $18.48 is about 75% above Cloudflare Registrar's flat $10.46
- Promotional extensions renew steeply — .co goes from $7.98 to $45.48 and .io from $34.98 to $75.98
- Free shared-hosting SSL expires after one year and then becomes a paid renewal
- VPS management and cPanel are separate charges that roughly triple the cost of a small managed server
Namecheap pricing 2026: domains, hosting, renewals
Every current Namecheap price with its renewal next to it: domains, shared hosting, EasyWP, VPS, Private Email, PremiumDNS and SSL.
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 prices are easy to find and easy to misread, because almost every one of them has two values: what you pay now and what you pay from year two. This page lists both for every product, with the current figures as of October 2026.
One rule covers the whole page: price from the renewal column. The introductory rate is a discount on a product you are about to own for years.
Domains
| Extension | Register | Renew | Transfer |
|---|---|---|---|
| .com | $11.28 (new-customer promo $6.79) | $18.48 | $11.48 |
| .net | $12.48 | $18.58 | $12.98 |
| .org | $8.48 | $18.98 | $12.28 |
| .io | $34.98 promotional | $75.98 | $65.98 |
| .co | $7.98 promotional | $45.48 | $38.48 |
| .ai | $89.98, two-year minimum | $114.98 | $99.98 |
Whois privacy is free for life on eligible registrations and transfers, which is worth about $10 a year against registrars that bill for it, and ICANN's fee applies on top of gTLD registrations.
Against the cheapest alternatives: Cloudflare Registrar charges $10.46 to register, renew or transfer a .com at cost; Porkbun charges $11.08 flat. Namecheap's registration price is competitive and its renewal is not. Our domains review runs the ten-year arithmetic.
Shared hosting
| Plan | Intro | Renewal | Effective monthly on renewal | Sites |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stellar | $2.28/mo | $55.88/year | $4.66 | 3 |
| Stellar Plus | $2.98/mo | $85.44/year | $7.12 | Unlimited |
| Stellar Business | $4.98/mo | $128.88/year | $10.74 | Unlimited |
Namecheap raised these renewals on 19 May 2026. A 30-day free trial currently applies, and every plan includes cPanel, email, unmetered bandwidth, Imunify360 and free migration. Plus and Business add AutoBackup.
The hidden cost here is SSL: free for the first year, paid after. Budget either a certificate renewal or twenty minutes installing a free Let's Encrypt certificate before year two. Our hosting review covers what the plans actually do.
EasyWP managed WordPress
| Plan | Current offer | Renewal | Storage | Monthly visits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | First month free | $9.88/mo | 10 GB NVMe | 50,000 |
| Turbo | $13.88/mo | $18.88/mo | 50 GB NVMe | 200,000 |
| Supersonic | $20.88/mo | $26.88/mo | 100 GB NVMe | 500,000 |
One WordPress site per plan, with CDN, Let's Encrypt SSL for the life of the plan, backups, automatic updates and SFTP. Note that EasyWP's SSL does not expire the way shared hosting's does, which is the clearest internal inconsistency in Namecheap's lineup.
At $9.88 a month, EasyWP Starter costs more than Stellar's renewal and hosts one site instead of three. You are paying for simplicity and NVMe storage, not capacity. Our EasyWP review covers whether that trade works.
VPS, and the three-part bill
| Plan | Intro | Annual renewal | CPU | RAM | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spark | $3.88/mo | $58.56/year | 1 | 1 GB | 20 GB SSD |
| Pulsar | $6.88/mo | $106.56/year | 2 | 2 GB | 40 GB SSD |
| Quasar | $12.88/mo | $190.56/year | 4 | 6 GB | 120 GB SSD |
| Magnetar | $24.88/mo | $346.56/year | 8 | 12 GB | 240 GB SSD |
| Hypernova | $46.88/mo | $52.88/mo | 12 | 24 GB | 500 GB SSD |
Every plan is unmanaged by default — Namecheap calls it User Responsible, and it means patching, firewalls and backups are yours. Management costs $10 a month for Basic or $25 for Complete, is only available on Quasar and above, and requires AlmaLinux plus cPanel. cPanel starts around $17.88 a month; Webuzo is around $2.88.
So a managed VPS is the server plus management plus a panel: a Quasar at $190.56 a year, plus $120 a year of Basic management, plus roughly $214 a year of cPanel, is over $500 — not the $12.88 on the plan card. Our VPS review compares that against hosts where management is included.
Private Email
| Plan | Price | Mailboxes | Default quota |
|---|---|---|---|
| Launch | $14.88/year | 1 | 5 GB |
| Expand | $41.88/year | 3 | 10 GB each |
| Scale | $71.88/year | 5 | 15 GB each |
All include custom-domain email, webmail, IMAP/SMTP/POP3, calendar, CalDAV/CardDAV, spam filtering, two-factor authentication and the new AI writing assistant. Mailboxes are limited to 500 outgoing messages per hour, with up to 50 recipients across To, CC and BCC per message.
Launch at $14.88 a year is about a fifth of Google Workspace's cost for one user, and the gap is the collaboration suite. Worth knowing: subscriptions created from 2 June 2026 run on a rebuilt platform that dropped some of the old document and spreadsheet tools. Our Private Email review covers what changed.
PremiumDNS and SSL
PremiumDNS is $4.88 for the first year and $9.98 a year on renewal, adding Anycast DNS, DNSSEC, DNS-layer DDoS protection and a 100% DNS uptime SLA, usable with domains registered elsewhere. Cloudflare's free tier covers most of the same ground, which is the comparison to make before paying.
Standard SSL starts around $5.99 a year on long-term prepaid terms, with one-year pricing higher. Paying for a DV certificate is unnecessary for most sites because Let's Encrypt is free — the paid products earn their place for OV, EV, wildcard and multi-domain certificates, which Let's Encrypt does not issue. Our SSL review covers which is which.
Three worked examples
| What you are setting up | Year one | Year two onward |
|---|---|---|
| Personal site: one .com, Stellar hosting, free SSL installed by hand | About $39 | About $74 |
| Small business: one .com, Stellar Business, Private Email Expand | About $112 | About $189 |
| One WordPress site on EasyWP Starter plus a .com | About $120 | About $137 |
The pattern across all three: year two is 40–90% higher than year one. That is normal for this industry and it is the number to put in a budget.
How to pay less
- Take the new-customer domain promotion if you are registering anyway, and ignore it when choosing where to keep a domain long term.
- Install a free SSL certificate on shared hosting before the first year ends, rather than renewing a paid one you do not need.
- Use the 30-day hosting trial with a copy of your real site, so the decision is made on evidence rather than on the intro price.
- Keep the registrar separate from the host. It costs nothing, and it means neither account problem can reach the other.
- Check the renewal before adding a fashionable extension. A .co at $7.98 becomes $45.48, which is the single most expensive assumption on this page.
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