I use NameCheap as a domain registrar and I use their shared hosting for some of my websites. They also have reseller hosting, but it has two big cons that may not be obvious on the product page or even on most reviews.

Let me start with the positives first…

NameCheap has cheap reseller hosting plans: $39.88/month for 100 cPanel accounts is a great deal. That’s about the lowest price I’ve found for cPanel reseller hosting. They give you unlimited bandwidth and the technical specs in general all look good.

Chat support has been responsive and satisfactory in my experience. An AI assistant (Suzy Q) is the first line of contact. It can answer a lot of technical questions based on the information available in the docs, but if it can’t help, you can ask it to connect you with a human support agent. It usually only takes a minute or two before a human agent joins the chat.

Now, the two cons I want to warn you about…

The first and bigger con is that they don’t offer free SSL certificates. They only have premium certificates. The cheapest one costs $11 for the first year then renews for $13.20 per year.

That can be a deal-breaker. Let’s say one of your clients wants to host 5 websites, so they need 5 SSL certificates. That’s gonna be an extra $55 for the first year and after that $66 per year for renewal.

Why waste so much money on something that should be free?! You can go with another provider that offers free SSL certificates and that money can go into your own pocket instead of NameCheap’s.

The second con is the inode limit. Each cPanel account in reseller plans is limited to 300,000 inodes. That’s not the problem since most hosts have a similar per-account inode limit.

But NameCheap has an additional inode limit for the entire reseller account. For example, the Galaxy Expert plan (100 cPanel accounts) is limited to 900,000 inodes in total across all cPanel accounts under the plan. That averages to 9,000 inodes (files) per cPanel account, which is a pretty low limit.

Let’s assume one of your clients has 5 WordPress websites hosted in their cPanel account. Those can easily grow to about 100,000 files in total, so that’s just one client consuming more than 10% of your total inode quota. So much for the 100 cPanel accounts!

The bottom line is; NameCheap’s reseller hosting is cheap, but the lack of free SSL certificates and the inode limit are huge issues. Think twice before signing up.