GoDaddy vs Namecheap: Hosting Services Compared (2024)

Trying to decide between GoDaddy and Namecheap for hosting your website(s)? 🤔

While these two providers are probably best known for their domain registration services, they offer a variety of hosting products for both WordPress and generic web hosting.

But which is better for your specific situation? That’s what we’ll help you decide in this post. 😎

In this detailed comparison, we’ll look at 🔎 each host from a number of different angles, with specific focus on their shared hosting plans. Let’s start with a top-level overview:

💡 TL;DR: Namecheap is the overall better value for most users. It offers most of the same perks as GoDaddy (e.g., free domain in the first year, free backups, email hosting included, etc), but at a much lower price. GoDaddy can be a good choice if you don’t mind paying more for better storage (NVMe vs Namecheap’s standard SSD), daily backups (vs Namecheap’s twice per week), and phone support (which is not available with Namecheap).

Plans, features, and pricing 💳

Cost is an all-important factor, even if you have the budget. On one end of the scale, you want as much value for money. On the other, you might want some advanced perks if you spend a lot.

Keep in mind that most hosts offer promotional rates for the first year, after which the cost of hosting can skyrocket. So pay close attention to both the promo rate and the renewal rate when making your decision.

GoDaddy’s pricing

GoDaddy offers four shared hosting tiers and a premium version of all four of those. Below is a quick rundown of the non-premium options. All prices reflect the per-month rate on a three-year contract. Billing is also available in a month-to-month, annual, or two-year format but at progressively higher rates.

• Web Hosting Economy: $5.99 / renews at $9.99. Supports 1 website with 25 GB NVMe storage.
• Web Hosting Deluxe: $7.99 / renews at $13.99. Supports 10 websites with 50 GB NVMe storage.
• Web Hosting Ultimate: $12.99 / renews at $17.99. Supports 25 websites with 75 GB NVMe storage.
• Web Hosting Maximum: $17.99 / renews at $24.99. Supports 50 websites with 100 GB NVMe storage.

Key plan features ⚙️

All four web hosting plans include:

• 30-day money-back guarantee.
• Unmetered bandwidth.
• Free cPanel email.
• Free SSL certificate (Economy plan is free for the first year only).
• Free domain in your first year.
• One-click WordPress install.
• Automatic daily backups.
• DDos protection.
• cPanel access with Softaculous app installer.
• WordPress migration tool.
• Pay Links (as long as your domain is also with GoDaddy).

Now let’s see how Namecheap’s shared hosting plans compare.

Namecheap’s pricing

Namecheap offers a more straightforward pricing structure for its shared hosting. You have the choice of three plans. All plans below reflect the per-month rate on a two-year contract. You can also choose to pay annually or month-to-month, but just as with GoDaddy (and most other hosts), you’ll have to pay more if you commit to a lower length of time.

• Stellar: $1.58 / renews at $3.50. Supports 3 websites with 20 GB of SSD storage.
• Stellar Plus: $2.28 per month / renews at $4.95. Supports unlimited websites with unmetered SSD storage.
• Stellar Business: $4.48 / renews at $9.04. Supports unlimited websites with 50 GB of SSD storage.

Key plan features ⚙️

All three Stellar plans come with the following:

• 30-day money-back guarantee.
• Unmetered bandwidth.
• Free email hosting (30 addresses on the entry plan and unlimited on the other two plans).
• Free SSL certificate in your first year.
• Free domain name in your first year.
• Free CDN.
• AI tools and a website builder.
• Minimum twice-per-week backups.
• Ongoing domain privacy.
• cPanel access with Softaculous app installer.
• Website migration service.

As you can see, both the promo rates and the renewal prices are significantly cheaper with Namecheap. However, there’s an argument that GoDaddy offers greater scope of its features and functionality.

For example, you might have noticed that GoDaddy’s shared plans offer NVMe storage, whereas Namecheap’s offer standard SSD storage. If you’re not familiar with the difference, the short of it is that NVMe drives offer significantly faster read and write speeds compared to their standard SSD counterparts. These kinds of details are sometimes overlooked when looking at pure number-to-number comparisons.

Even so, we still give it to Namecheap for this round. While GoDaddy does have some unique benefits, unless you really need them, the extra cost isn’t justifiable enough. Namecheap’s prices are simply more competitive and offer more than enough for the average user.

Winner: 🏅 Namecheap

Performance tests 📊

When it comes to how your site performs (at least with regards to speed), your server is the most important factor. This is greater than caching, image compression, or other optimizations.

Because we conduct so many of these hosting comparisons and reviews here at Themeisle, we decided a while back to invest our own money into signing up for accounts with most of the top hosting providers in the business.

The reason is simple:

When we talk about a particular hosting company, we want to do it from a place of authenticity, as actual customers of that company. There are so many hosting reviews and comparisons on the web and most of them are written by people with no direct experience (or even worse – by AI). You won’t find that here.

But there is another very practical reason why we have those accounts – so that we can track their performance.

To be more specific, we track page loading time and uptime.

Loading time

This measures the speed at which a webpage loads after someone clicks on a link (or types in the web address) to go to it. To use you (yes, you who is reading this 😎) as an example:

When you clicked on the link that took you to this post, the loading time is how long it took between you clicking and the content on this page loading in your browser.

We monitor this constantly on our GoDaddy, Namecheap, and other hosting accounts, and we update the results for our readers on a monthly basis.

The results change from month to month, and we do redo the tests every ~30 days. So what you see above is the most recent data.

Uptime

This represents how long a website remains active without interruptions. An uptime above 99.9% is the benchmark industry standard for quality.

For uptime, we publish the running average of the prior three months. We also maintain a live log that you can take a look at by using the links below.

It is impossible to call it in one direction or the other here. Since we update the results on a monthly basis via a shortcode mechanism, the numbers you see above might swing in favor from one to the other on any given month.

The more important thing to pay attention to is the test location that’s closest to the physical location of your site’s target market. You want that number to (ideally) be under a second.

Overall though, from having been at this for a while now, both of them offer consistently great performance and uptime. If they happen to have an off month, consider it an anomaly.

Winner: 🤝 Draw

Customer support 🖱️

You have to know that if something goes wrong with your hosting, or you need help with your account, a host will have your back. However, almost every host offers 24/7 support now, just in different forms and varying channels.

This is where our next comparison comes in. Let’s take a look at the support provisions on offer, and whether they can match up to the best.

Namecheap’s customer support

Namecheap provides 24/7 live chat, which is helpful if you want to have a real-time discussion about your query.

From personal experience, the Namecheap support agents are generally very helpful and friendly.

They will usually both fix your issue and provide you with a knowledge base article that’s relevant to what you asked about.

If you don’t require immediate help, then you can also request assistance through a ticketing system or via email.

Unfortunately, for those who prefer it, there is no phone support offered.

For self-help options, there’s the aforementioned knowledge base and other self-help content. If you don’t like reading, Namecheap also has video tutorials on many of its more common troubleshooting queries.

We like the array of help on offer, and it’s rounded out nicely by Namecheap’s blog.

GoDaddy’s customer support

GoDaddy offers a number of channels and self-serve options that we appreciate.

For instance, you can call the support team at any time from a high number of locations to get the help you need.

Alternatively, you can use the online chat functionality. They’ve recently added an AI chatbot to it as a frontline answering mechanism, but if you ask the bot to speak with a human, it will connect you.

When it comes to self-help, there’s a whole product support Help Center on hand, full of documentation, articles, and even courses. On the whole, GoDaddy offers a lot of support for its customer base, and its blogs are some of the best for helpful information.

In practice, both of these hosts provide support across different channels, and look to give you lots of content to solve your problems.

We’d argue that both of them offer good support.

Winner: 🤝 Draw

User experience 🧑‍💻

It doesn’t matter how much power a host provides if the usability is through the floor. As such, testing out how comfortable and logical each host’s control panels are is an important comparison to make. Let’s judge each one on its own merits.

Namecheap’s user experience

Namecheap doesn’t become number one as a domain registrar because it lacks in usability. Its dashboard has more color and less white space than GoDaddy, but offers just as good of an experience.

Pretty much everything you need can be found on the left-hand sidebar.

If you go into the domain management section, you’ll see that auto-renewal can be activated / de-activated with a simple toggle switch. And each domain has a clear “manage” button next to it that lets you navigate to more options.

This makes it ideal to setup your domain, link it to your site, apply the relevant domain privacy settings, and begin to work on your website.

Speaking of working on your site, Namecheap also makes it very easy to access cPanel. You can get there directly from the “Hosting List” section of the dashboard. All it takes is a single click:

Since so many hosting companies use cPanel, having it readily available means that the layout and options will be familiar if you’re transferring over an existing account from another cPanel host.

All in all, it’s a great user experience on all fronts.

GoDaddy’s user experience

Just like Namecheap, GoDaddy’s shared hosting also relies on cPanel and also lets you access it directly from the user dashboard:

There’s a helpful “Action Center” area, which gives you notifications about important tasks and also an “Account Actions” drop down menu with additional options.

In terms of design, when compared to Namecheap, it’s less busy and less colorful. There’s lots of white space, and very few attention grabbers.

All of this minimalism serves a purpose: you have complete focus on the options available to you. It makes for a smooth navigation experience.

It’s hard to pick a winner in this last round of our battle. The user dashboards are both user-friendly and since both hosts rely on cPanel (with their shared plans) to do the bulk of their heavy lifting, it results in almost exactly the same experience.

Winner: 🤝 Draw

Which one should you choose for hosting? 🤔💻️

Let’s recap our findings. Here are the winners in each of our five categories:

• Plans, features, and pricing: Namecheap
• Performance: Draw
• Customer support: Draw
• User experience: Draw

As you can see, it’s a close contest – albeit one that Namecheap comes out slightly ahead in. In reality, it’s hard to choose. In a nutshell, GoDaddy will suit you if you don’t mind paying extra for NVMe storage and other unique features like Pay Links. However, Namecheap is going to be a better value for the average user. It has everything that most basic websites and blogs need, but at a much lower price.

Do you have your own winner in this GoDaddy vs Namecheap comparison? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below!