NamesCo Reviews

Namesco are the UK’s fourth-largest hosting provider by domains hosted, and as such are an experienced and reliable name. That name, incidentally, hints at one aspect of their hosting plans - a free ‘.co.uk’ domain name is included in every package. Unfortunately, that’s not enough incentive to go with this provider, whose plans offer little value for money compared to those of the larger, and usually North American, companies.

Hosting

Namesco have four shared hosting plans, starting at £3.99 a month. The ‘Starter’ plan includes just 5GB of disk space, as well as a 10GB monthly transfer allowance. Many bigger-brand plans would include 20 to 100 times those specifications for a similar, if not lower, price, so what redeems Namesco here? The inclusion of ten FTP accounts helps somewhat, as does the support for most languages including Perl, Python and PHP 5.2, but it isn’t quite enough.

The other three plans: Professional, Premium and Platinum, whilst having a certain ring to their names, certainly don’t shine either. The first two offer poor storage and bandwidth again, though they do come with ten and twenty MySQL databases respectively. The highest-spec option costs £29.16 a month, which finally gives you unlimited disk space, email accounts and MySQL databases, but even then the bandwidth is fixed at 200GB. This negates the benefits of unlimited storage to a large extent, as although you may have a superb website full of information, graphics and documents for your users to enjoy, you could find yourself with too many visitors actually using your site and your monthly limit may be breached.

Other features of all Namesco’s plans include credit with advertising firm Simply.com, acquired by Namesco a few years previously, which will attract upwards of 100 visitors to your site. They also throw in common ‘1-click install’ applications like WordPress and Magento, and a 99.99% uptime guarantee. A website builder is included, but it’s only the free version of a program that’ll cost £4.99 a month for real functionality, and only paying customers receive support for it. Overall, then, while there are hints of some promising features, there certainly is not enough here to justify the high costs.

Support

Support is a key factor in choosing a hosting provider, and its importance really cannot be stressed enough. Without a good support network, you will be left on your own to deal with any problems your site and package may have. Namesco’s support is no better than its products, however: its phone support operates only Monday to Friday during working hours, and it even advises users to try its scarce online database during peak times. Given that most of the top hosting companies will offer 24/7 phone support alongside email, chat and a ticketing system, this really isn’t an impressive offering from Namesco at all.

Over-priced products, poor support and a limited range mean Namesco having nothing to offer over the competition. For a better idea of what a top hosting provider looks like, read our top 10 list, which covers all types of web-hosting at great value for money.

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