Funny you should mention that. At my previous employer I needed to buy some domains and our current registrar was simply horrifyingly terrible (like $30 per sub-domain, yes you read that right: sub-domain. Bad support. Payment issues. Their website had issues in general) so when they asked me for alternatives I gave them NameCheap, and the biggest sticking point was the name (and how it didn't sound professional).

We did eventually go with NameCheap and had no issues. But the name definitely does them more harm than good for business users.

godaddy sounds worse. They even sexualize their commercials.

It is fascinating that people look past that, it's far worse than Name+Cheap. I imagine it's due to the very large brand recognition they now possess.

When Google first launched and I tried referring friends to use it, as a superior search service to AltaVista et al., friends would give me a look of "what the hell?" due to the name. Back then it wasn't uncommon to see media stories referencing Google's childish / baby sounding name, and how it was a ridiculous name for a service, and that the logo made it come across even worse.

When I bought Namecheap domains in 2006, domains were close in price to ~$70. Namecheap's name was intended to show that you'd buy it for less.

The brand grew from there. That's why Namecheap is still called Namecheap.

Disclosure: Namecheap employee/personal experience

I was actually running a hosting company in 2006 and we had a lot of domains under management at eNom. ENom charged us $8.95 per domain per year, and we charged our customers $15 per year for registration through us. (I went back and looked up our prices back then just for this post.)

Domains haven't been $70 each since around 1996 or so.

Domains were nowhere near ~$70 in 2006. Maybe in 2000.

Neh. Not even Network Solutions was charging $70 in 2000. Only half that.

Maybe they could rename to Nameaffordable. Amusingly enough, Googling for "nameaffordable" does, in fact, show Namecheap (for me): http://i.imgur.com/BCV8aXG.png

I've been using Namecheap for a few years, and have (for the most part) been pretty happy. Their SSL certificate service is super clunky, but the domain stuff is decent.

I actually agree re:name, but besides that - everything else seems to be pretty solid with namecheap.

Is the name Google (or Microsoft or Apple) much more appealing than NameCheap? Seems when companies get huge their weird names are no longer weird.

I don't care for the name NameCheap either. On the other hand it's been easy to remember.

Why not just say "your domain registrar" or "your domain provider" to clients to keep the name out, if it's an issue?