First time website hoster here. I just need a simple, cheap website and I stumbled upon namecheap and their shared hosting/website builder.
As far as I can tell from what I’ve seen they seem good, but is there something I should know about privacy-wise?
Sorry if this post is naive, I’m not really sure where I should be looking.
Namecheap are fine in terms of registrar and offer DNS privacy (where your details won’t appear on a whois), though they will provide it to law enforcement if requested; I recommend hosting your DNS on CloudFlare if you want to do a LetsEncrypt DNS challenge though, Namecheap got too slow for that a while back.
Thanks for the info. I don’t plan on doing anything majorly illegal, just personal stuff. More interested for peace of mind, so the law enforcement compliance isn’t a problem.
Sounds like I’ll probably stick with them for now, thought I may switch to CloudFlare in the future. Also do you know if Namecheap’s ‘premium DNS’ is fast enough for the DNS challenge? I don’t think it is, but just checking you weren’t referring to the free one.
What are your concerns? Most of the shared hosting providers are not going to be different to each other in terms of general privacy.
They will give what they know to the authorities if you’re doing no-no stuff on their server. Other than that, it depends on how/what you do, not them, mostly. Just check their ToS and Privacy policies.
There’s also something like nja.la
Thanks, I don’t have any major concerns, just checking they aren’t like the Meta of shared hosting or whatever. Njalla is interesting, I might look into them for the sake of supporting something I believe in, not that I ‘need’ an overly private service.
The CloudFlare free DNS is a thing that you can easily do; the issue appears to be with the namecheap API. It successfully creates txt records but they take longer to replicate than LetsEncrypt challenges are valid