When comparing Namecheap vs Amazon S3 , the Slant community recommends Amazon S3 for most people. In the question“What are the best website hosting providers?” Amazon S3 is ranked 11th while Namecheap is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose Amazon S3 is:
The free tier will cover most personal home pages.
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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 for small sites
The free tier will cover most personal home pages.
Pro Easily scalable
There's no cap in storage or traffic. Cost is based on usage.
Pro Super cheap with a year's worth of free service
S3 storage costs $0.03 per GB and gets cheaper the more is stored, PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests are $0.005 per 1,000 requests and GET and all other requests are $0.004 per 10,000 requests. And with some restrictions is available for free for a year.
Pro Fast setup
You can provision a S3 bucket, upload files, setup the DNS, and go live in under 10 minutes.
Pro Fast
S3 is fast even without a CDN.
Pro Easy to setup with CDN
Simple to set up with Amazon's CloudFont CDN.
Pro Supports custom root domains
To set up a custom domain, Amazon Route 53 has to be configured as the DNS provider with the domain registrar, two buckets have to be created and configured with the name the same as the domain - one including, one excluding www. A more in-depth explanation can be found here.
Pro No security risks
There's no server to manage, so no security issues to patch or keep watch.
Cons
Con Misleading pricing
For example .me domain registration costs 3$ 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 Credit card needed
Amazon will try to retrieve the money every month after one year trial. If you have no money you will be banned.
Con Setting up automatic public permissions is confusing
By default, S3 sets uploaded files to private. You can configure your S3 bucket to auto-apply public permissions by copying and pasting a template. But the template might be intimidating to some users.
Con Confusing web interface
Amazon S3's web interface is quite confusing, especially for first-time users, but there are many tutorials online that help beginners to set up a static site on S3.
Con No SFTP support
Amazon S3 does not have SFTP support, instead the S3 web interface has to be used.