Why There’s No Free Domain With All NameHero Plans

Right now, NameHero offers a free domain with all Turbo and Business cloud plans when purchased for 2 years or more. You’ll notice that the free domain doesn’t come with a “Starter” or “Plus” plan. Why is this? After all, there are plenty of low-cost hosts that give you a free domain on even starter plans. So how come NameHero is different? The reason has to do with the way we pay for domains, and NameHero’s philosophy.

Domain Costs Scale Linearly

To a large extent, costs in shared hosting can be spread across all the clients on a server. They share bandwidth, CPU, and storage. The more densely packed a server is, the cheaper prices a host can offer – but at the cost of slowdowns, and strict limits on what you can and can’t do. Cheap web hosting sometimes takes this to an extreme and ends up imposing absurd limits on website functionality.

Domain costs, on the other hand, are completely different. It’s a fixed amount that needs to be paid every year, and there’s no way to “spread them out”. So when a host offers a free domain, it’s taking the hit for the full amount directly to its bottom line. CPU or storage costs on the other hand might remain the same, with the cost being a small hit in performance for each additional account.

For this reason, offering a free domain name for hosting is a very different thing. A host needs to be willing to pay for it themselves, and in doing so, they have to make up for their lost margin in other ways. Some of these include:

1. Packing servers even more densely
2. Cutting corners on customer service
3. Not using the best software, to reduce costs

So everything has a trickle-down effect. You’re always paying for the domain name if not in cash, then in performance.

NameHero: The Difference Between “Value” and “Price”

At NameHero, we try and maximize our customer’s value. And that sometimes means we don’t jump on the “Free domains for everyone!” bandwagon. Compared to “low-cost” web hosts, NameHero has all these features for maximum value:

1. LiteSpeed webserver
2. Real-time security scanning
3. Offsite Weekly and Nightly Backups
4. Unlimited SSD storage

Our advanced plans also have NVMe drives, free premium SSL certificates, and more. Low-cost web hosts that offer free domains have none of these crucial features, that make your web hosting fast and secure. We’re unwilling to sacrifice these important services just so that we can offer a free domain name.

Domains Will Cost your Yearly Anyway

If you get a free domain name from a low-cost web hosting provider, you can be sure that it’s only for the first year. No web host will pay the domain renewal fee year after year for you. So it’s a one-time cost saving that often doesn’t even extend as long as your first billing cycle discount. So you’re not saving very much at all.

And the reason for this is, again, that domain pricing is fundamentally different from web hosting pricing.

Low Prices at Great Value

NameHero provides the best possible value at the lowest price without sacrificing functionality and features. That’s at the heart of what makes us different. We’re constantly new aspects to our web hosting, and upgrading our infrastructure. All the while having US and Canada based support staff, so you don’t get outsourced technical support.

If providing all that means that we can’t have free domain names for all our services, then that’s a trade-off we’re willing to make!