Namecheap vs Neocities

Domain registration at Namecheap is economical, as their name implies.

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.

Namecheap allows you to set up 198 subdomains for free, and also provides wildcard subdomain catching so you can manage them yourself.

Namecheap allows you to set up 100 virtual email addresses per domain, as well as catch all forwarding all undefined addresses.

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.

Namecheap took a stand against SOPA.

Namecheap offers a free and premium (w/ SLA) DNS hosting service for domains registered with other registrars.

It's active for one year.

Namecheap will notify you if your credit card is going to expire, and has a 27 day non-guaranteed grace period for renewal.

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.

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.

Neocities has a free tier which provides hosting for up to 1GB of space and tools for website building.

Neocities uses a drag and drop interface to upload files on their server. This makes it arguably the best option for beginners for it's ease of use.

Neocities also has a social aspect allowing for discovery of your site and interaction with and learning from others.