GoDaddy vs NameCheap for Domains, Hosting, & SSL

As a digital marketer with web design experience going back to the late 90’s, I’ve bought a lot of domain names over the years and tried several different hosting companies as well. Today, I thought I’d go over the differences between GoDaddy vs NameCheap.

I’m going to warn you however, I’ve become biased towards NameCheap (for reasons that will become apparent in this article) and also because NameCheap is cheaper. But both companies offer:

• Domain name registration
• SSL certificates
• Web hosting
• WordPress hosting
• E-commerce hosting
• Domain parking & selling marketplace

Domain Name Registration

If your interest in GoDaddy or NameCheap is simply to register domain names with, NameCheap beats GoDaddy on price. However, GoDaddy is much more popular. I don’t know what it is about them. For some reason, whenever I take on a digital marketing client and the client already has their domain registered, it’s almost always registered with GoDaddy! (Like 9 times our of 10!) They’re like the Google of domain names. For some reason, everyone just blindly goes to them without having any reason. And for the life of me, I don’t know where that ever came from.

Let’s compare the pricing of GoDaddy domains vs NameCheap. I’m gonna use a .com just see what the basic pricing for a .com is (I understand there are cheaper domain extensions but .com is better for SEO and what most people are likely in search of). So let’s try a test using the domain: domainnametestprice.com…

GoDaddy:

NameCheap:

At first glance, it looks like GoDaddy is cheaper at only $0.01 cent. But looks can be deceiving. That’s only an introductory price and it’s only good for the first year. It just jumps up to $22 ($21.99) as soon as the second year hits and you have to buy 2 years worth upfront in order to get that deal.

Now let’s look at NameCheap’s price. NameCheap charges $9.38 for the first year and then it jumps to only $13.98 a year. In addition, you can also lower that cost even more by buying multiple years worth upfront. Let’s say you want to buy 2 years worth upfront. Your upfront cost would be $20.56. And you can do that all the way up to 5 years:

• 3 years: $38.24 upfront
• 4 years: $52.22 upfront
• 5 years: $66.20 upfront

So NameCheap makes more sense when it comes to registration price alone. However, that’s not the only thing to look at. What all comes with the domain? Like…

Privacy Protection

The GoDaddy price above does not include privacy protection (GoDaddy refers to it as “domain protection”). They charge extra for domain protection and offer specials where you can bundle domain protection with domain registration. NameCheap, on the other hand, includes privacy protection for free!…

Are you starting to see why I stick with NameCheap these days?

*And by the way, in case you don’t know, you should always get privacy protection. If you buy a domain name without privacy protection, your personal information and email address becomes visible to an army of spammers that will do just that, spam your inbox like crazy. So luckily NameCheap provides it for free.

SSL Certificates

If you don’t know what an SSL certificates is, in very basic terms, it refers to the “s” in “https”. If a website’s URL begins with “http” (and no “s”), then the site has no SSL certificate. The SSL certificate is also the reason why you see a “lock” icon in your web browser when visiting an https site. So it’s pretty important if you want your site visitors to feel safe.

Let’s see how GoDaddy vs NameCheap compares when it comes to SSL certificates.

I had a client that used to pay over $120 for 2-year SSL certificates with GoDaddy…

I saved him a lot of that money by first, having him switch his websites to hosting companies that provide SSL for free. But there was one site that he couldn’t switch to another hosting company because the site wouldn’t have worked properly so I set him up with one of NameCheap’s SSL plans…

You can see that NameCheap’s 2-year SSL pricing is a lot better as well. And if you bump it all the way up to 5 years, those numbers come down even more…

Web Hosting

With domain name registration and SSL out of the way, how does comparing GoDaddy vs NameCheap stack up when it comes to web hosting? Well, both boast 100% up time and great speed (which is true). So where are the real differences? Once again, it comes down to price…

GoDaddy:

NameCheap:

Once again, GoDaddy comes in at higher prices. The cheapest plan they’ve got starts at $5.99 a month and you’ve got to buy 3 years worth upfront. And when you read the finer print there, it looks like it doubles when it renews in 3 years. That’s insane!

NameCheap’s cheapest plan is only $1.48 a month! You pay 1 year’s worth upfront ($17.76) and then when it renews, it’s $44.88 a year (and no more increases).

Both companies now provide free SSL certificates but NameCheap provides 50 free SSL certificates for all their plans while GoDaddy only provides 1 free SSL for their cheapest plan but unlimited SSL certificates for all their higher plans. So that’s something that GoDaddy has going for them nowadays.

Using the Web Hosting

Regarding using the actual web hosting, there is something I’d like to add. I actually cringe when I have a client that already has an existing website that’s hosted with GoDaddy because I don’t like using the GoDaddy interface. It assumes you don’t know how to use a computer and tries to take control over basic things. For example, if my client has a WordPress site, I can’t just log in through the site admin to edit it. I have to log in to my client’s GoDaddy account first, and then click 4 different places before the admin opens…

Whereas with NameCheap, I can just go straight the classic WordPress admin login page (which is always yourwebsite.com/wp-admin)…

And on top of that, with a GoDaddy hosted WordPress site, there is no place to access your site’s control panel. You will need your control panel to do all kinds of things like add email addresses, do redirects, access your site’s files, upload files that you get from Google and Bing for SEO. You can’t do any of that except for buy additional email addresses. But “buy”? You shouldn’t have to pay extra! Once you have hosting, you have hosting. But GoDaddy wants to charge you extra for basic things that should be including in your hosting…

On the other hand, NameCheap provides you with the industry standard, open-source, control panel: cPanel…

WordPress Hosting

Both GoDaddy and NameCheap offer WordPress hosting and the plans cost slightly higher than their regular hosting plans. But here is the thing, on NameCheap at least, you can use the cPanel (control panel) to install WordPress separately. There! Another way to save!

E-Commerce Hosting

The same is actually true for e-commerce. You can just buy a basic hosting plan, install WordPress, and then install a free plugin called WooCommerce that turns your WordPress site into an e-commerce site (like Shopify) but without all the extra costs associated with that (just a cheap hosting plan). WooCommerce also connects to your Square, Stripe, and PayPal accounts. So I’m not even going to bother comparing GoDaddy vs NameCheap in regards to e-commerce. You can just know that e-commerce plans (for both companies) would cost even more than WordPress hosting (which cost slightly more than basic hosting).

Domain Parking

Finally, I’m gonna touch on domain parking and selling with GoDaddy vs NameCheap. First of all, what is domain parking? That means you own a domain name but it’s not connected to any website. It’s just a domain name floating on the internet with no site. When that is the case, you want to park it. When a domain is parked, it may look something like this…

And if someone is online searching for the domain you own, and is looking to purchase it, they can go to your domain name registrar and make you an offer. Both GoDaddy and NameCheap offer this service and both also have their own internal marketplace. So, if you’re ready to part with a domain, you can sell it right there in the platform.

In GoDaddy, they make it easy to sell domains with a very visible “List for Sale” button and an internal price estimator…

That is something that is actually nice about GoDaddy because with NameCheap, you have to use a separate website to get an estimate. But selling on NameCheap is also something they do…