I'm writing to share my hosting experience with namecheap hosting.
Because I was eager to see their service shortly after it launched I bought a one month hosting from them.
The hosting service was good in means of speed and reliability. You also get the usual cpanel interface which is another good point. On the other hand the user interface inside your NC account where you manage your hosting was rather amateurish. It doesn't give you much information or control over your hosting account.
I tested the hosting for one month and I thought it was good. I was considering to switch to namecheap hosting when my current hosting plan with another company would expire.
When I bought the hosting I checked every step carefully. Everything looked OK and I was buying a hosting for one month. I thought this was good because to test a service you wouldn't want to pay for 6 months or something. The one month version was 8 or 9 USD.
I thought I will let the hosting just expire. To my surprise they did set it to auto renew, which is something that is not shown in user panel and was not mentioned during checkout. Instead the hosting expiring on its own I was rebilled.
There was a new invoice waiting there marked with a red flag and they didn't ask me if I want to renew and they didn't tell me it would renew.
I contacted NC hoping that they would cancel my hosting service and remove the new invoice but instead I received a reply asking me "are you sure?".
I replied telling them "Yes I'm sure. Just close the bloody hosting account". Then I receive a reply asking me "Why do you want to close your hosting account?".
I'm a big fan of NC but at that moment I wasn't expressing my admiration with very nice words in front of my computer.
I wrote back and they wrote back to me. This writing back and forth took a few days. A totally wasted time and energy. Plus by chance I was not on holiday or something.
Later on I wrote in their forum suggesting they should give clients control over enabling or disabling auto renew or making this a part of checkout but to my surprise they insisted a default auto renew option uncontrollable by the client was a good feature. In other words namecheap thinks it is OK to send a new invoice automatically when your hosting expires. They don't give users any control to disable it.
It appears namecheap doesn't want to lose their hosting clients and they thought a good way doing so would be making it difficult to quit..
I think that they are quite new to the web hosting thats why you have had such experience with them.
__________________ ServerPoint.com - a true hosting company offering online presence solutions since 1998 Web Hosting, colocation, dedicated servers, Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting Wholly owned multi homed network, servers and facilities
Sorry to hear about your bad experience with them.
Regarding the autorenew, I think there will be two opinions. There will be people who forgets about their renew date and won't be happy to see their service suspended when they are back from holidays. I think I have seen such threads in forums.
But i won't think there is no need to reply again and again when a customer asks them to cancel.
If you register a domain and leave it to expire but then you find out you were rebilled because it was automatically renewed without asking you and without mentioning this in the user panel and without giving you any control anywhere to disable or enable auto renew, would you still be happy? I guess not. Exactly this happaned to me with NC hosting.
I was not upset because NC hosting has a sneaky-hidden auto renew feature, but I was upset because they still insist this is a good thing. We discussed this subject at NC forums.
I had to send many emails and open tickets and many times I had to wait for a reply to sort out an unpaid invoice and close my hosting account. Still they think auto renew is a good thing even though it is not shown in user panel, it is uncontrollable by the user, it is not approved by the user on any stage.
Have you tried to call them? As rule one call helps greately.
__________________ ServerPoint.com - a true hosting company offering online presence solutions since 1998 Web Hosting, colocation, dedicated servers, Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting Wholly owned multi homed network, servers and facilities
You always can ask for moneyback if it is provided.
__________________ ServerPoint.com - a true hosting company offering online presence solutions since 1998 Web Hosting, colocation, dedicated servers, Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting Wholly owned multi homed network, servers and facilities
Every customer of Namecheap hosting can choose whether he wants to set up recurring billing for his hosting account or not. There are two options "Manual Payment" and "Automatic payment" which can be set up by a customer in his Namecheap control panel.
Every customer can always contact billing support to check what billing method is set up for his account, to ask for instructions on how to change it from his side or receive assistance in enabling or disabling automatic renewal from Namecheap's side.
__________________ ServerPoint.com - a true hosting company offering online presence solutions since 1998 Web Hosting, colocation, dedicated servers, Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting Wholly owned multi homed network, servers and facilities
If I'm not mistakem Namecheap.com launched hosting services about a year ago, right? And there were only shared packages then, have they added other packages now?
The domain name registrar seeking to embrace hosting services as well is often at risk especially at the beginning when not properly established yet, but those who manage to break through like Godaddy.com or Sibername.com are at an advantage.
alegend, did you mean their web hosting services or what?
__________________ ServerPoint.com - a true hosting company offering online presence solutions since 1998 Web Hosting, colocation, dedicated servers, Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting Wholly owned multi homed network, servers and facilities
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