When comparing Namecheap vs Surge, the Slant community recommends Namecheap for most people. In the question“What are the best website hosting providers?” Namecheap is ranked 12th while Surge is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Namecheap is:
Domain registration at Namecheap is economical, as their name implies.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Low prices
Domain registration at Namecheap is economical, as their name implies.
Pro Great support with 24 hour live chat
Namecheap support is available 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Their support is provided over live text chat, which has a lower barrier to entry, faster connection, and allows you to communicate easier than other the phone.
Because most of the support you need for domains require you to provide text configuration data, live online messaging is the most efficient way to get fast support. It also does not require your constant attention so you don't have to waste time while the operator is researching an answer for you.
Pro Free subdomains
Namecheap allows you to set up 198 subdomains for free, and also provides wildcard subdomain catching so you can manage them yourself.
Pro Free e-mail and URL forwarding
Namecheap allows you to set up 100 virtual email addresses per domain, as well as catch all forwarding all undefined addresses.
Pro Supports credit cards, PayPal and adding funds to your account separately
When it comes to paying for domains, Namecheap supports all common payment methods. For most people this will be credit cards and Paypal, but Namecheap also has an option to add funds to your account separately.
Pro Free dynamic DNS routing
Pro Strong Anti-SOPA stance
Namecheap took a stand against SOPA.
Pro FreeDNS for outside domain
Namecheap offers a free and premium (w/ SLA) DNS hosting service for domains registered with other registrars.
Pro Free WHOIS privacy protection
It's active for one year.
Pro Bitcoin payment support
Pro Expiration grace period
Namecheap will notify you if your credit card is going to expire, and has a 27 day non-guaranteed grace period for renewal.
Pro Two-factor authentication
Pro Proactive support
Not all registrar care, but when there's an error or something held up the registration they've always at least gave it a shot without prompting. This is done in a proactive way, which isn't seen very often at all. This way the user can be hands off and not need to deal with certain issues as it is taken care of in the background by their support. User is still informed, of course, but can be entirely hands off, or not, but usually they've been efficient and transparent.
Pro Free .me domain for students
Through its NC.ME program, students can get a free 1-year registration on the .me TLD and discounts on .com, .io, and other TLDs along with Namecheap Private Email hosting.
Pro Free Tier
Unlimited projects, deployments, and collaborators in free tier which also includes basic SSL. Pro options for those who need it cost $13/month (or all you can eat top tier at $30/mo) which gives you auto-provisioning SSL certificates on custom domains.
Pro Automatic Clean URLS
/page resolves /page.html
Pro Custom 404.html files
Catch-all 200.html files.
Pro Six Keystrokes to publish site
Type surge and hit enter in your project directory to deploy.
Pro pushState support for single page apps
Great for front ends like React and Vue.
Pro Automatic Gziping
Auto gzips and sends gziped files.
Pro Supports Jekyll and Grunt and other CIs
Pro Far-future expire headers
Pro Support on Slack
Live Chat Support.
Pro ent (intelligently) about trailing slashes (“/”)
Pro Fully featured CLI tool
Provides a CLI tool to easily deploy using terminal with surge
command.
Pro Atomic Deploys
Deployments are fast, instant, and atomic - with zero chance of collisions.
Cons
Con Misleading pricing
For example .me domain registration costs 3$ a year, but a continuation for 2 years cost 30$!
Con Expensive
It costs a lot of money to renew and purchase a domain. It also costs for their premium dns. They used to be cheap, but now it's so expensive.
Con Does not support .pdf by default
Does not support .pdf. To get PDF support you have to add a credit card by running surge card
(though no charges apply).