There are plenty of articles claiming to review the cheapest, fastest, or most secure hosts. Yet, some webmasters prefer an in-between approach: neither the cheapest nor the most expensive, neither the fastest nor the poorest.
NameHero is a reliable hosting platform offering superior services. It’s not the most performant platform, but it’s a good host for a fast-loading site. It’s not cheap but doesn’t cost a fortune either. NameHero is the ideal choice for webmasters looking for a balanced value/money rapport. It also has many cool features that might pique your interest. Here is our detailed opinion on NameHero hosting services.
A Primer to NameHero
NameHero was included in the Inc 5000 as one of the fastest-growing private companies in the US. This inclusion doesn’t impact the performance of the site hosted, but it’s a guarantee that NameHero is a serious company. 40,000 customers and 750,000 websites hosted are pretty good stats for a company founded in 2015. NameHero has dedicated plans to WordPress and WooCommerce but also managed cloud services and VPS (virtual private server) hosting. The infrastructure running NameHero consists of four performant data centers located in the US (Michigan, Arizona, and Missouri) and the EU (Amsterdam, Netherlands).
In addition to hosting services, NameHero helps you manage the domains for your online businesses. You can purchase, transfer, and manage the domains directly from your dashboard, which is pretty convenient for webmasters.
Worth-Mentioning Features
NameHero comes with a wide list of services, covering the needs of solopreneurs, small businesses, and enterprise projects. This is possible thanks to the many useful features and options available for NameHero customers. Some caught our attention, and we treated them extensively.
Dedicated WordPress Hosting
WordPress has dominated the market of content management systems by a large margin for many years. The stats show that WordPress dominance remains unthreatened.
Imagine that four out of ten websites run on WordPress. In this context, any serious hosting provider should have dedicated plans for WordPress websites. NameHero not only provides WordPress hosting, but it also has WooCommerce hosting—a type of WordPress hosting tailored for e-commerce activities based on the WooCommerce plugin. In other words, NameHero welcomes all types of WordPress users.
LiteSpeed Web Server
If you are a casual WordPress user or webmaster, the LiteSpeed Web Server may not mean much to you. LiteSpeed Web Server is a web server software needed by servers to render websites. Unlike Nginx and Apache which are more frequently used, LiteSpeed Web Server is pretty rare. Additionally, LiteSpeed is a proprietary software, while Nginx and Apache are free and open source.
LiteSpeed is more secure and lightweight, so your website hosted on NameHero is faster and more secure. LiteSpeed servers are also more stable and require less maintenance. From this perspective, by investing in LiteSpeed Web Server software, NameHero shows that the performance of the company’s servers is a real priority.
Excellent Website Performance
While few people care about the stack used by the hosting company, everyone cares about the loading speed of the sites hosted. NameHero manages to satisfy the expectations of the users by ensuring impressive loading speeds. The performance of the site hosted depends on the specifications of the plan purchased. However, it’s good to know how NameHero ensures good website performance.
- LiteSpeed Web Server is lightweight and handles concurrent clients with minimal memory consumption. Therefore, more resources are available for the hosted websites.
- SSD/NVMe storage ensures faster operations, so it takes less time to render the website to visitors.
- QUIC.cloud support, a complete WordPress optimization solution that does website caching, image, and code optimization.
- LiteSpeed Cache plugin is pre-installed. This plugin has 4 million active installs and a rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars on the WordPress repository. It’s one of the best performance improvement plugins and it fits like a glove to the LiteSpeed Web Server.
Superior Uptime
NameHero guarantees 99.9% uptime. It’s not the best uptime, but it is the upper class of the hosting providers. 99.9% uptime satisfies almost all types of businesses and requirements. However, transparency and honesty differentiate them from most competitors.
First of all, it’s about the commitment to uptime—NameHero makes it clear that 99.9% uptime means that the websites hosted are up 99.9%, not their servers. Some hosting companies don’t make it clear and refer to the uptime of their own infrastructure, which is a little bit tricky. For instance, the server might be functional and the hosted websites could still be down. In this scenario, a host may not count this as downtime.
Second, NameHero’s service status page is another positive aspect that deserves mentioning.
Additionally, you are informed about the planned maintenance and recently resolved incidents.
Third, the uptime page includes an archive of uptime screenshots in the interval 2016-2020.
That’s a great idea, and potential customers may appreciate the honesty and transparency. However, it has data missing since 2020, which isn’t quite as useful and some people might be offended by this lack of data.
Unlimited Storage
Will you be uploading lots of multimedia content on your website? Are you planning to launch a complex website housing tons of images and videos? You’d better look for hosts that provide unlimited storage! NameHero should be on your list in this case, because even the cheapest plan has unlimited storage.
Large Suite of Freebies
All hosting platforms hook customers through a few freebies, and NameHero is no exception. Purchasing hosting services from NameHero includes a plethora of cool things for free:
- Unlimited email. A genuinely useful freebie that streamlines business management. Instead of going from platform to platform, the webmaster manages the sites, domain names, and emails from a unique platform. Moreover, you can create as many professional email addresses as you want at no cost.
- Auto SSL certificate. These days, encrypted connections between server and browser are standard. Yet, it’s not comfortable at all to implement an SSL certificate. NameHero comes with a great perk—free and auto SSL certificate. Rest assured that your website got that much-needed green padlock (the icon that confirms the implementation of the SSL certificate), earning your visitors’ trust. On top of that, the certificate renews automatically, so you don’t need to worry about it.
- Professional website migration. Even the most experienced webmasters don’t like to migrate websites from host to host. Any error may result in serious losses. Migrating to NameHero is no problem— no matter what plan you purchase, the site migration is free. NameHero experts take care of the process.
- Daily backups. It’s refreshing to know that the host platform performs daily backups of your site. The backup is a safety net for your business and definitely helps you focus entirely on growth and increased profitability.
Professional Support
No matter your location or timezone, a quick and well-trained agent is always ready to help you fix any issues. Support is available 24/7 via ticketing or live chat. The knowledge base is pretty comprehensive, so you might find a solution to your problems there.
NameHero stands apart with its YouTube channel, which includes almost 400 videos.
Many of them are of great help to webmasters, WordPress enthusiasts, and entrepreneurs. The videos cover all types of tastes—from short ones explaining a simple problem like accessing cPanel or setting up a subdomain, to complex ones like configuring a DNS cluster or creating web hosting packages to resell.
User-Friendly Dashboard
The admin dashboard is clean, simple, and user-friendly. Certainly, less-experienced webmasters appreciate its simplicity. You get a clear picture of the active websites, domains, invoices, and tickets from the first second. It takes just five minutes and a few clicks to create a website. Head to your admin dashboard and click on the Manage button in “Active Products/Services”.
Next, click on the “WordPress Manager” button that drives you to another screen.
Finally, click on “New Installation”, fill out the needed details for your new WordPress website, and press the “Create” button.
Creating an email account is also straightforward. Similarly, from the admin dashboard click on the Manage button in “Active Products/Services”. Click the “Email Accounts” button, fill out the required details, and click the “Create” button. Your email address has just been created!
Things to Improve
NameHero is a great choice taking into account the rapport value vs. money. Despite that, a couple of things have room for improvement. These aren’t deal-breakers, but it’s fair to mention them.
Limited Number of Datacenters
NameHero doesn’t have any datacenter in Asia and Africa. A hosting platform with global coverage should have at least one Asian data center. There’s a high chance that entrepreneurs targeting the Asiatic market will prefer a host having a server as close as possible to their customers. A CDN partly resolves this drawback, and NameHero has support for QUIC.cloud CDN.
Tricky Names for Web Hosting Plans
The name of the web hosting plans are Starter Cloud, Plus Cloud, Turbo Cloud, and Business Cloud.
At first sight, you are tempted to believe that all of them are cloud services, which isn’t entirely true. The web hosting provided by NameHero isn’t 100% cloud hosting, but it has many similar features to it. For instance, the host doesn’t automatically scale up and down. Also, customers pay a regular fee and do not pay as they go, as the cloud model requires.
The truth is that all these aspects are relevant only to experienced users. Regular webmasters care less about technical aspects and focus more on the final output.
Pricing Plans
The cheapest plan, StarterCloud, starts at $3.40/month for a three-year-long commitment and one website. Plus Cloud starts at $6.48/month for a three-year-long commitment and up to seven websites. Turbo Cloud is a real deal—host unlimited websites by paying $9.98/month for a three-year commitment. Finally, Business Cloud comes with better specs and sets you back $14.98/month. Similar plans are available for WordPress hosting.
NameHero has resources to satisfy the most demanding projects—you can go for either VPS or cloud-dedicated servers. Bear in mind that these are introductory prices that are massively discounted.
Over to You
NameHero fully deserves your attention, thanks to the large suite of useful features. It’s a reliable, secure, and performant hosting platform. While there are better hosts than NameHero, only a few manage to have the same good value/money ratio. Therefore, keep NameHero in mind for your future projects, you can’t go wrong with it!
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