For over a sixteen years (since February 2010), I’d been with the same web host. For all of that time, I’ve been paying $85.97/year to keep Wheatdesign, Wheatblog, JamesNotJim, Wheat’s BassBook, and a handful of email addresses online.
In January 2026, I got a bill for my upcoming year of hosting. But, this time, it was for $155/year. That sent me into a bit of a panic.
Nothing I do here is high-traffic or super significant, in the grand scheme of things. My websites are hobby projects. But it’s still important to me to keep these projects going and have a place to host new ones. So, after reaching out to my current host about a price reduction (they offered 10%), I started hunting. There are a lot of options out there, and hosting is, in general, more expensive than it used to be. But I finally decided on a new host: Namecheap Web Hosting. Namecheap has been a domain name registrar for a while now, since 2000. I’m not sure exactly when they got into hosting, but it seems a natural progression.
Everything has been transferred over to the new host. Namecheap offers to handle the transfer for free, which is nice, and I took them up on it. I had to downsize some things to fit on the new plan, but that mostly meant archiving a bunch of email that had been stacking up for a long time. There will likely be some issues to solve. But, as of this writing, things are going well.
So, I’m now on Namecheap Web Hosting’s Stellar Plus plan. I paid up front for two years ($58.88). After that, it’ll go up to $130.88 every two years. SSL (the thing that turns your http to https), after the one-year introductory period, is treated as an add-on. So, there will be some additional outlay for that, but that’s a problem for future Wheat. But it looks like an additional $20/year for three domains.
This is one more in a series of switches I’ve made this year to avoid inflated costs for the same level of service. So far, in addition to web hosting, I’ve switched home insurance, car insurance, and mobile phone plans. I may have more to say on those in other posts. I’ll keep you updated on how it goes with Namecheap,
Image Credit
The Feature image for this post shows Marlyn Meltzer (left) and Ruth Teitelbaum (right) programming the ENIAC (an early computer). I grabbed it from “December 1945: The ENIAC Computer Runs Its First, Top-Secret Program” by Tess Joosse, in an article for the American Physical Society (APS), November 10, 2022.