Namecheap Stellar Plus Review

Stellar is the name of Namecheap's cPanel shared hosting line, and Stellar Plus is its middle plan. It gives you unlimited websites, unmetered SSD storage, unlimited mailboxes and the free AutoBackup tool for $2.98/mo on a yearly term, then it renews at $85.44 per year.

That makes Stellar Plus the plan I would pick over the basic Stellar if you run more than three sites or want automatic daily backups. If your site sells online or needs more CPU, the Stellar Business plan is the upgrade to look at.

In this review I go through what Stellar Plus includes, its real limits, its pricing after the first year, and three alternatives.

What Is Namecheap Stellar Plus?

Namecheap sells three Stellar shared hosting plans: Stellar, Stellar Plus and Stellar Business. All three run on cPanel, include free email hosting, unmetered bandwidth and free website migration, and differ mainly in sites, storage, backups and CPU.

Stellar Plus sits in the middle. It works well for blogs, portfolios, small business sites and anyone hosting several low or moderate traffic websites under one account.

You can host unlimited websites with it, and an eligible (non-premium) domain name is free for the first year. Namecheap allows one free domain per hosting plan.

In November 2026, Namecheap also offers a 30-day free trial on its shared plans, limited to one trial per account. The trial and the 30-day money-back guarantee don't combine: the refund only applies to first-time customers who start without a trial.

I am a Namecheap customer myself: I register several domains there, including webhostingadvices.com. I have also used Namecheap's WordPress hosting for some client sites, and those sites were extremely slow and hit their resource limits quickly. That was not a Stellar Plus account, so I treat it as a warning about resource limits rather than a verdict on this plan.

Pros and Cons of Stellar Plus Plan

Features & Benefits Of Stellar Plus By Namecheap

Stellar Plus has more room than the basic Stellar plan, and it is the only Namecheap shared plan with unmetered disk space. Unmetered still has rules: the space is meant for your website only, under the disk usage section of Namecheap's Acceptable Use Policy.

Here are the main features:

• Bandwidth: Stellar Plus has unmetered bandwidth. That means Namecheap doesn't count transfer against a fixed cap, but your site is still limited by the CPU, memory and process limits further down.
• Domain names: You can host unlimited domains and subdomains, and park unlimited domains.
• FTP users: You can create unlimited FTP users.
• Email accounts: You get unlimited mailboxes, which helps when every employee needs an address on your domain.
• Email forwarders: Forwarders are limited to 20 per mailbox and 200 per domain.
• Databases: You get unlimited MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, which the basic Stellar plan doesn't include.
• Backups: Namecheap runs internal backups twice a week, and Stellar Plus adds the cPanel AutoBackup tool with daily, weekly and monthly copies you can restore yourself.
• Security: Imunify360, cPanel two-factor authentication and jailed SSH access come with every Stellar plan.

Performance: Is Namecheap Fast?

Namecheap lists Apache/LiteSpeed as the web server on its shared plans, and it supports LiteSpeed, PHP 5.x to 8.x, Node.js, Python and Ruby. LiteSpeed handles PHP sites efficiently, but your theme, plugins and caching setup still decide most of the page speed.

In my November 2026 web hosting benchmarks, Namecheap had the fastest servers among the shared hosts I ranked. Across 3 real websites on Namecheap shared hosting (no CDN in front), the estimated server time was 131 ms, with an uncached TTFB of 196 ms measured with Grafana k6 from Ashburn, USA. These are customer sites, so I can't say which Stellar plan each one uses.

The screenshots below come from an older check of a small test site in April and May 2021, kept here for reference.

Over those 2 weeks, the site had 16 short outages (31 minutes of downtime, 99.82% uptime) and an average response time of 1.05 seconds. That old result doesn't match the much faster 2026 benchmark, which is why I would not judge the plan on one site.

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) is a Google metric for how quickly the main content appears. Google treats anything under 2.5 seconds as good.

In that 2021 test, the US-hosted site scored best when tested from San Antonio and loaded slower from London and Mumbai. Distance matters, which is why the UK, EU and Singapore data centers are useful if most of your visitors are outside the US.

Shared hosting has hard limits, so I don't recommend Stellar Plus for busy ecommerce websites. A growing store is better off on Stellar Business or a VPS.

Will Namecheap Customer Support Help Me?

Namecheap offers 24/7 live chat and a 24/7 ticket help desk, plus a large knowledge base. There is no phone support for hosting.

Namecheap's migration team also moves cPanel accounts from other hosts for free, which saves beginners a lot of manual work.

I haven't run a recorded support test with Namecheap for this review, so I can't give you measured wait times. Like any "24/7" promise, it tells you when support is open, not how fast a specific problem gets solved.

Stellar Plus Pricing

Namecheap's discount only applies to yearly and two-year terms and only to the first term. Monthly billing is charged at the regular price.

Source: Namecheap's shared hosting page and its May 2026 renewal price update, checked November 8, 2026.

The renewal prices above apply to renewal invoices issued from May 19, 2026. On a yearly plan, that is about $7.12/mo from the second year, so I budget for the renewal price rather than the first-year price.

If you start with the free trial, Namecheap charges its "After Trial" price for the first paid year, and later renewals follow the table above.

Namecheap provides 50 free SSL certificates for one year, one for each domain or subdomain, set up automatically. After that first year you buy a renewal certificate through the Namecheap cart to keep it, so add that cost to your second-year budget.

A dedicated IP costs $4.00/mo extra on every Stellar plan.

Namecheap accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, PayPal and Bitcoin.

Source: Namecheap's shared hosting page, checked November 8, 2026.

Few Limitations Of Stellar Plus Plan

These limits come from Namecheap's resource limits guide (CloudLinux LVE), updated June 24, 2026:

• RAM (memory): Stellar Plus gets 2 GB of RAM. Namecheap's current limits don't list a memory burst on top of that.
• CPU: The CPU limit is 50%, which means up to half of one CPU core, with short bursts up to 200%.
• Storage and inodes: There is no fixed disk size, but the plan is limited to 300,000 inodes (files, folders and emails).
• Entry processes: The maxEntryProc limit is 30, which caps how many PHP requests can run at the same time.
• IO: The IO limit is 50 MB/s, the maximum speed for reading and writing data on the server's disks.

Hitting resource limits is exactly the problem I had with client sites on Namecheap's WordPress hosting. When a site keeps hitting its CPU or entry process cap, visitors see slow pages or errors. If you expect steady traffic growth, compare the limits here with the 100% CPU and 40 entry processes on Stellar Business.

What Do People Say On Trustpilot?

In November 2026, Namecheap had a TrustScore of 4.2 ("Great") from about 22,000 reviews on Trustpilot. That score covers the whole company, including domains, not just hosting.

Here is what some customers have said about Namecheap hosting:

There are some negative reviews as well:

Most reviewers are positive, but the complaints often mention slow sites and resource limits, which matches what I saw with client sites. Every host has negative reviews, so what matters is how often the same problem comes up and how the host handles it.

3 Alternatives To Namecheap Stellar Plus Hosting Plan

Hosting.com (formerly A2 Hosting): Starter Plan

The Starter plan is the entry-level shared hosting plan from Hosting.com, which replaced A2 Hosting's old Startup plan. It includes 5 websites, 15 GB of NVMe storage, daily backups and a free SSL certificate.

Hosting.com backs its hosting plans with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Its pricing page only showed Black Friday deals when I checked, so look at the current price and renewal rate in the cart before you buy.

• Good for a handful of small sites
• NVMe storage instead of plain SSD
• Daily backups included
• 30-day money-back guarantee

DreamHost: Web Hosting Launch Plan

DreamHost's old Shared Starter plan is now sold as Web Hosting Launch. It costs $2.89/mo for the first year on a yearly term and auto-renews at $10.99/mo.

This plan is aimed at beginners and includes 25 websites, 25 GB of NVMe SSD storage and a free SSL certificate. Yearly plans include a free domain for one year with free private registration.

• Ideal for beginner websites and blogs
• Room for up to 25 sites
• Free domain privacy
• Free SSL certificate

Hostinger: Premium Shared Hosting Plan

The Single Shared Hosting plan that used to be Hostinger's entry plan is gone. Its Premium plan now starts at $1.99/mo on a 48-month term ($95.52 upfront) and renews at $10.99/mo. You can host 3 websites with it.

Premium suits small website owners and bloggers. It includes 20 GB of SSD storage, free weekly backups, a free SSL certificate and a free domain for the first year.

• Free SSL
• 20 GB SSD storage
• Free weekly backups
• 30-day money-back guarantee

Here is a quick comparison of all the plans at a glance

Prices checked November 8, 2026. Hostinger's and Hosting.com's November prices may be Black Friday promotions.

Namecheap Stellar Plus Review: Final Verdict

Stellar Plus is good value in its first year if you need several small websites, unlimited mailboxes and automatic backups under one cPanel account. The renewal price is where the real cost shows, so compare hosts on what you'll pay in year two.

If you have never hosted a website before, start small and watch your resource usage in cPanel. You can upgrade to Stellar Business or a VPS later if your sites keep hitting the CPU or process limits.

Who Is It for?

• People with a limited hosting budget who still want several sites in one account.
• Personal websites, WordPress blogs, portfolios and business landing pages.
• Not for demanding or high-traffic websites: those need more CPU than Stellar Plus allows.

Overall, Namecheap is a reasonable shared host for small sites, and its servers did well in my 2026 benchmarks. But if you run a big website or expect high traffic, the 50% CPU limit will slow you down.

I'm happy with Namecheap as a domain registrar for my own domains. If domain prices are your main concern, see my NameSilo vs Namecheap comparison, and for more hosting options, my list of shared hosting providers.

FAQ (frequently asked questions)

What is Stellar on Namecheap?

Stellar is Namecheap's shared hosting brand. It has three plans (Stellar, Stellar Plus and Stellar Business), all managed through cPanel with free email, unmetered bandwidth and free SSL for the first year.

What does Stellar Business add over Stellar Plus?

Stellar Business doubles the CPU limit to 100% (bursts up to 400%), raises entry processes to 40 and the inode limit to 600,000, and adds Cloud Storage in the US data center plus personal nameservers. Stellar Plus has unmetered storage, while Business has 50 GB.

What's the difference between Namecheap EasyWP and Stellar hosting?

EasyWP is Namecheap's managed WordPress hosting. It uses its own EasyWP dashboard, hosts one WordPress site per subscription, and doesn't include email hosting.

Stellar hosting is cPanel shared hosting. You can host several sites, install WordPress or another CMS through Softaculous, create email accounts, and manage files over FTP, SFTP and SSH.

Is email free with Namecheap Stellar Plus?

Yes, email hosting is included for free. Stellar Plus gives you unlimited mailboxes, while the basic Stellar plan allows 30.

Who owns Namecheap?

Namecheap is an ICANN-accredited domain registrar and technology company based in Phoenix, Arizona. Richard Kirkendall founded it in 2000. In September 2025, CVC Capital Partners bought a majority stake, and Kirkendall stepped down as CEO in December 2025, handing the role to Hillan Klein.

Kirkendall kept a significant stake. Namecheap is one of the largest domain registrars and also sells shared, VPS, dedicated and WordPress hosting.

If you have any suggestions or want to add to the information in this review, let me know in the comments section.