GoDaddy vs. Namecheap

Good for transferring over an existing site. Truth be told, I haven't used it for building a brand new site-- I know that this is a fairly common thing but I just never needed it. For what I've used it for, it has worked well. For a small business with anyone with a little bit of technical skill, it's surprisingly good.

Incentivized

Namecheap is the absolute best domain registrar that I have used, and I have used just about all of the big names. They are priced right; they offer excellent customer service, their FAQs and documentation are excellent. They don’t spam you with offers for things you don’t want, and they don’t have misleading practices like hiding that the first-year fee is 1/10 of the regular annual cost. They don’t try to sneak in a change to your bill and charge you for multiple years when you’ve already set it to a one-year renewal. The only negative of Namecheap is its brand name. I have had a few raised eyebrows when I have told executives that we are using Namecheap. It doesn’t sound like a professional service. It sounds like a consumer service. This is terrible because they are the MOST professional service and reliable service of all the services I work with on a daily basis.

Incentivized

• Registering a domain - I've found their site to be the easiest to navigate
• Website builder - their website builder is user friendly
• Email hosting - easy to set up and use, wether in an email app or online email.
• Wordpress hosting - I have multiple wordpress sites I use under one account
• Their customer service is always very helpful and easy to contact.

Incentivized

• Domain registration is easy. This is big because when finding the perfect domain name, you have to do a lot of domain checking to see what is available. Namecheap not only makes this easy, but they recommend other domains that you might like instead, if the one you want is taken. They also allow you to sell domains and buy premium domains from other sellers if they are already registered to them.
• Free Whois Guard & privacy. This is HUGE. All those annoying phone calls and emails you get the second you register a domain, they will stop when you start using NameCheap to register your domains. This is because they provide free Whois and domain privacy with all domains, for the life of the domain as long as it is registered with them. I love this and it is a huge selling point.
• Easy updating and management of domains. This is a must. At many time, I need to update the nameservers of multiple domains at once. Namecheap makes it extremely easy to do this and allows for bulk updating. Things also seem to propagate quicker than other domain providers.

Incentivized

• Support agents are woefully undertrained, even in knowledge of their own products.
• Support agents will always try to upsell you, even when you're dealing with an urgent, high-impact issue.
• There's no guarantee of uptime, and there will often be gaps in service as part of normal procedures.

Incentivized

• I wonder if it's feasible to have bulk discounts or a loyalty program?
• They may have this already, but features to buy and sell premium domains, or browse ones for sale, would be great.
• We don't use their hosting because there are higher quality options, but it'd be great if they did better hosting so we could keep it all under one roof.

Incentivized

We can't really choose anyone else and the cost/effort of moving all of the hosted data would be extremely large, and we just have to stick to them, and hope they improve service

Incentivized

Some integration could be much cleaner and smoother. Seems it used to be easier. Plus, they took away the catch all email feature.

Incentivized

I think a lot of companies can learn from GoDaddy's support team. I have found:

• Chat or phone support is almost always available.
• Their agents are friendly and helpful.
• Their agents seem to care and be knowledgeable about a wide range of issues.
• I rarely have to escalate my problem to get the support that I need.
• If they can't help me, then they can tell me why something is happening and direct me to resources that can fix my problem.

Incentivized

We very rarely have to reach out to customer support because the service is so quick, easy and intuitive to use. But when we have had to use it, the customer service was quick, reliable, answered our questions and addressed our problems without too much back and forth, and was native English speaking.

Incentivized

We use Wix currently for our online store. It is nice and easy to use, but they don't offer the email domains as well (the last time we checked). They have pretty decent customization of the web page, but still limited. We're going to try it with GoDaddy, since we have other services from them already. It just doesn't make sense to pay two different companies for something we can do with one.

Incentivized

Namecheap wins hands down on cost and ease of use. I have experienced zero compromise with using Namecheap. There was no trade-off to enjoy the cost savings. Namecheap does everything the other registrars do and more in some cases.

Incentivized

• GoDaddy reduces our ROI by costing me in non-billable hours. I don't charge clients for sitting on the phone with tech support to power cycle the server or fix the php.ini file, so my $/hr takes a hit.
• Their nickel&dime strategy requires I have an additional conversation with clients about their max recurring fees. Small as they are, I need approval for upping their bill. GoDaddy is only the cheap option if you don't value security, stability, or performance.

Incentivized

• Namecheap has saved us hundreds of dollars a year on services that we were required to pay extra for by NetworkSolutions that Namecheap provides for free.
• Namecheap has made managing our domains simpler, saving us dozens of labor hours a year.
• Namecheap has encouraged us to experiment with new domain names to see which ones work best. We couldn’t do this with our previous registrars because it was too hard to change from one domain to another.

Incentivized