You might have spent several hours for weeks and months to fine-tune your website and ensure that your visitors enjoy a rewarding experience. But if you end up selecting a wrong web host, all of your hard work would probably go in vain. Right from speed, availability, to security, there are several important aspects of a website that abundantly rely on the web host you select.
But with so many hosting companies offering so many different types of hosting plans, the selection is way more complicated than one would expect. To make things easier, we are doing a detailed comparison of two of the most popular web hosts- Bluehost and Namecheap.
Bluehost Vs Namecheap Hosting Comparison 2021
The hosting providers will be compared on the basis of a few very important factors to make sure that you can easily select one that best matches your preferences. So, let us begin-
Bluehost Vs Namecheap: Pricing Comparison
One of the most important considerations for anyone looking for a web host is pricing. This is especially true if you are just starting with a blog or a small online store. While comparing the two, it is important to keep in mind that Namecheap is primarily a domain name registrar. While it also offers hosting services, it is mostly considered for registering domain names.
So, to begin with, both Bluehost and Namecheap offer a number of different hosting services and multiple plans under each service. Shared hosting is generally known to be the cheapest form of hosting. With Bluehost, the shared hosting plan costs $2.95/month annually if you pay for the entire year at once. Once the initial term is over, per month hosting cost will be $7.99.
Shared hosting with Namecheap starts at $1.28/month for the first year if you go with the annual plan. Renewal after the initial term will cost you $2.57/month.
But while Bluehost is more expensive as compared to Namecheap, it is also important to check what is included in the plan. If you will check the features and benefits of the cheapest plan from the web hosts, you will see that the plan from Bluehost is more advantageous and thus, mostly makes up for the price difference.
Bluehost Vs Namecheap: Speed and Uptime
The next important point is speed and uptime. While Bluehost received a lot of criticism with regards to the speed a couple of years ago, things have changed drastically since then. Several online speed tests agree to the fact that Bluehost is now one of the fastest hosting service providers. Overall, Bluehost currently stands at the 4th spot for the fastest web hosting service and Namecheap is at the 9th spot.
Even with respect to uptime, Bluehost is far better than Namecheap. In the first 6 months of 2018, Bluehost only recorded a downtime of around 6 minutes. The stellar performance continued in the second half of the year as well with just 8 minutes of downtime.
Namecheap, on the other hand, had downtime almost every other week throughout the year. If the speed and uptime of web host matter to you, Bluehost is a clear choice between the two.
Bluehost Vs Namecheap: User-Friendliness
You also need to make sure that the web host you select is easy to use. There are a number of factors such as domain registration, website migration, control panel, website building tools, etc. that help determine the user-friendliness of a web host. Both the hosting service providers offer free domain name for a year and cPanel to manage the hosting services.
With Namecheap, you get free website migration within 24-hours. If the migration is not completed within 24-hours, your first year of hosting will be free. There is no free migration with Bluehost. You will have to pay $149 fee for migration but this will allow you to migrate up to 5 websites.
For website building, Bluehost has a Weebly-powered building tool. Namecheap has its custom website builder which most users agree is very quick and easy to use.
Bluehost Vs Namecheap: WordPress
Most people, especially the one’s building website for the first time, now use WordPress. If you too will be using WordPress for your website, you can go for a hosting plan that has been customized for this popular CMS. Bluehost offers shared WordPress hosting which starts at $2.95/month. It includes automatic WordPress installation, automatic WordPress updates, Microsoft Office 365, free domain name for a year and WordPress staging environment to test all the changes you make to your website.
Bluehost also offers WP Pro which is managed WordPress hosting with a number of additional features like marketing dashboard, email marketing and SEO tools, social media controls, and improved performance for better speed. WP Pro costs $19.95/month. Shared WordPress hosting with Namecheap starts at $1.28/month and includes all the basics that you can expect from a shared hosting plan. It also offers managed WordPress hosting which starts at $3.88/month.
Bluehost Vs Namecheap: Security
The cheapest shared hosting plan from Bluehost only gets you a free SSL certificate for your website to improve its security. Other plans like Plus, Choice Plus, and Pro also include features like Spam Experts and CodeGuard Basic for automatic website backup. There is also a 3rd party add-on SiteLock for increasing the safety of your website. This add-on costs $30/year.
Namecheap also offers the basic security features like SSL certificate for free with its cheapest shared hosting plan. If you also take the domain name from Namecheap, you also get free access to its WhoisGuard tool which helps in preventing domain hijacking, killing spam, and protecting personal information. There are also shared hosting plans with automatic daily backups which start at $26.44/year.
Bluehost Vs Namecheap: Scalability
Your hosting requirements will also change as your website grows. So, you need to make sure that you are not required to switch to a different host to meet the increasing needs of your website. To ensure easy scalability, both the web hosts offer many different types of hosting services. For instance, Bluehost offers shared hosting, VPS hosting, reseller hosting, WordPress hosting, and dedicated hosting.
Namecheap also offers services like shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, private email hosting, WordPress hosting, and reseller hosting. All the different types of services are available under various plans to perfectly meet the needs of your growing website.
Bluehost Vs Namecheap: Customer Support
Even though Bluehost is such a large company, it still manages to offer excellent customer support. Right from pages on social networking platforms, online chat, multiple phone numbers, to tickets, there are several ways in order to get in touch with the support team of Bluehost. Moreover, the company is also known to employ professionals like WordPress contributors and website developers to provide expert help to the customers.
Namecheap also offers online chat and ticket support. However, it can easily take 1 day to get an answer to your ticket. With live chat too, the wait time is generally longer than you would expect. So, with regards to customer support too, Bluehost is the way to go.
Conclusion: Which Is The Best Hosting Among Bluehost Vs Namecheap in 2023?
Based on the factors discussed above, Bluehost is the obvious choice if you are looking for the best host between Bluehost and Namecheap. It has been around for a very long time and still continues to offer one of the best hosting services. While you can consider Namecheap for cheap domain names, you should rely on Bluehost for top-quality hosting.
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