NameHero WordPress Hosting Review: Powered By LiteSpeed

NameHero’s new WordPress hosting plans offer affordable and high-performing hosting with the added value of hosting unlimited websites. The LiteSpeed-powered servers performed well in both WebPageTest and Loader.io tests. The dashboard provides essential tools for site management, including staging sites, automatic updates, backups, and more. FTP access is currently unavailable.

This review was performed as part of our product analysis service using our in-depth analysis methodology.

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Searching for the best WordPress hosting for your site(s)?

In our hands-on NameHero WordPress Hosting review, we’ll take a look at a new WordPress-specific hosting service from NameHero.

If you’re unfamiliar with this host, NameHero offers affordable hosting plans that still perform well thanks to smart features like using LiteSpeed Web Server on all plans.

In April 2023, NameHero launched new platform-specific WordPress hosting plans that come with WordPress-specific features, as well as other benefits such as NVME storage on all plans.

To help you decide if these plans are right for your site(s), here’s what we’ll cover in our hands-on NameHero WordPress hosting review:

  • A quick summary of the features of NameHero’s new WordPress hosting plans.
  • A hands-on look at the NameHero WordPress hosting dashboard.
  • Our own NameHero WordPress hosting performance tests.
  • Details on pricing for the WordPress hosting plans.

Let’s dig in!

NameHero WordPress Hosting Review: A Look at the Features

NameHero WordPress hosting

Before we get to the more hands-on look at NameHero WordPress hosting, let’s do a quick rundown of the most important features.

If you want to see this in more detail, you can go to the NameHero WordPress hosting page.

First, let’s look at the performance-focused features to help you make your WordPress site load fast:

  • LiteSpeed Web Server on all plans, which generally offers improved performance and scalability over Apache.
  • Pre-installed LiteSpeed Cache plugin, which is one of the best performance plugins out there (and it’s free).
  • Unlimited NVMe storage on all plans, which is faster than traditional SSDs.

Beyond that, you also get lots of other helpful features:

  • Free SSL certificates.
  • Free email hosting.
  • Staging sites.
  • On-site backup tool (off-site backups are available for an extra fee).
  • Web application firewalls (WAF) to protect your site.
  • Real-time virus scanning.

NameHero also offers a bunch of WordPress-specific features powered by the WordPress Manager for WHMCS module, including the following:

  • Install and manage WordPress plugins and themes right from your hosting dashboard.
  • Edit wp-config.php values from your hosting dashboard.
  • Manage automatic updates from the hosting dashboard – works for core, plugins, and themes.
  • Create site blueprints to quickly install WordPress from a template.
  • Clear your cache.
  • Enable WordPress debug mode or maintenance mode from your hosting dashboard.

One notable limitation, however, is that NameHero’s WordPress hosting plans don’t offer FTP access, at least not at the time that we’re writing our NameHero WordPress hosting review. 

While this probably won’t affect most casual WordPress users, it might be something to consider if you prefer using FTP to manage files on your server.

Exploring the NameHero WordPress Hosting Dashboard

For its WordPress plans, NameHero lets you manage your sitesΒ within the NameHero client area, rather than cPanel.

*NameHero does use cPanel for its regular web hosting plans – just not for WordPress hosting plans.

Let’s start with a look at installing WordPress and then I’ll take you through managing a site.

How to Install WordPress

It is important to note that for this hosting package, WordPress comes already installed. You will not have to go through the following install process unless you are installing multiple WordPress sites on your NameHero server.

To let you install a new WordPress site, NameHero offers a simple popup wizard. In the box, you can:

  • Choose your domain name and HTTP protocol (the default is HTTPS – remember that you get free SSL certificates).
  • Set the administrator username, password, and email address.
  • Enter the default WordPress site name.
  • Choose the language for your WordPress install.
Install WordPress

If you want more control over the WordPress installs, you can click over to the Other tab in the popup to access more configuration options:

  • Install WordPress in a different directory.
  • Customize the database name and prefix.
  • Enable WordPress multisite.
  • Control automatic updates for the WordPress core, plugins, and themes.
Advanced options

Once you click Create, NameHero will do the work to set up your new WordPress site according to your preferences.

If you don’t want to set up a fresh WordPress install, NameHero also includes a tool to let you import a WordPress site from a remote server. This makes it easy to migrate an existing WordPress site to NameHero – either from a production website or from some type of development server.

Import remote WordPress site

How to Manage Your WordPress Sites

To manage your WordPress hosting account, you get an interface that looks like this:

NameHero WordPress hosting dashboard

There are two main parts here:

  1. WordPress Manager – access tools for your WordPress site(s).
  2. Email Accounts – set up custom email accounts using your domain name(s).

If you open the WordPress Manager, you’ll see all the WordPress sites associated with your account.

You can click the shield icon to automatically open and log in to your WordPress dashboard. Or, you can click the pencil icon to access more tools.

Managing sites

How to Manage a Single WordPress Site

When you click the pencil icon in the main site list, you’ll be taken to a dedicated dashboard for just that tool.

Here, you can access all of the important details and functionality for that site including the following:

  • Manage and create backups – these are on-server backups, so I recommend moving them to a safe place.
  • Manage your site’s WordPress themes and plugins – you can install, update, activate, and delete plugins and themes directly from the NameHero dashboard.
  • Control configuration settings in the wp-config.php file – you can do this without needing to connect via FTP.
  • Clear the cache.
  • Clone your site – you can clone it to a different domain name.
  • Update core WordPress software.
  • Change domains.
  • Manage automatic updates – for the core, plugins, and themes.
  • Create a staging site – there’s also a tool to push staging changes live.
  • Manage SSL certificates.
  • Create an instance image – you can then use this as the blueprint when creating new WordPress installs, which can be helpful for people who build a lot of WordPress sites.
WordPress dashboard

Let’s take a look at a couple of tools to give you an idea of the experience.

Backup tool:

Backups

Plugin management tool:

Managing plugins

wp-config.php manager:

Managing wp-config.php

If you prefer a different experience, you can also access another version of this dashboard that uses a vertical layout and gives you a few additional options such as the ability to enable maintenance mode or debug mode.

NameHero WordPress hosting dashboard

NameHero WordPress Hosting Performance Tests

To help create a performance-friendly foundation, NameHero uses LiteSpeed Web Server on all of its plans, which generally offers good performance and scalability.

NameHero also pre-installs the LiteSpeed Cache plugin, which lets you manage caching from your WordPress dashboard and also access a huge array of other performance optimization functionality.

To test its performance, I set up a complete block-powered demo site using the popular Kadence Theme and the bundled Kadence Blocks plugin.

Then, I ran two types of tests:

  • One-off performance tests using WebPageTest.
  • Load tests using Loader.io.

Note – we’re using the Turbo WordPress hosting plan for our tests – more on pricing later.

WebPageTest

To test my sites performance in a single visit, I used WebPageTest with the following configuration:

  • Test from Virginia, USA (our NameHero data center is in the USA)
  • Run nine separate tests and take the median value.
  • Use a throttled FIOS 20/50 Mbps connection speed to create a more realistic scenario.

Based on the median run, my full test site had a Largest Contentful Paint time of just 0.370 seconds, which is quite fast.

NameHero WordPress hosting WebPageTest results

Loader.io

Next, I used Loader.io to see how NameHero’s WordPress hosting held up in higher-traffic scenarios, using a few different simulated tests:

  • 100 visits over 60 seconds
  • 250 visits over 60 seconds
  • 450 visits over 60 seconds

These tests simulate more traffic than most WordPress sites will receive – especially the last test – but we’re just trying to understand how NameHero’s WordPress hosting can hold up.

NameHero was able to pass all three tests with zero errors. More importantly, the average response time didn’t really change even as the traffic numbers went up:

  • 100 visits – 44 ms average response time
  • 250 visits – 45 ms average response time
  • 450 visits – 50 ms average response time

Here’s the results screen for the 450 visit test:

NameHero WordPress hosting loader.io results

NameHero WordPress Hosting Pricing

NameHero offers four different tiers for its WordPress hosting.

For the most part, the features are the same between all four plans (though there are just a couple of differences that I’ll detail below).

The main billing metrics that determine prices are as follows:

  • Number of websites – the two cheaper tiers have limits on the number of websites that you can host while the upper-level tiers support unlimited websites.
  • Estimated monthly visits – as the tiers go up, the estimates for the amount of traffic that a plan can support go up. These are not hard visit limits. They’re just an estimate of the number of visits that each plan can support if you’re using caching.
  • RAM – the entry-level plan offers 1 GB of RAM while the top-tier plan offers 4 GB.

Beyond that, there are also a few feature/functionality differences between the plans:

  • The two upper-tier plans add Turbo benefits, which gives you more resources for improved performance.
  • The two upper-tier plans give you free access to the Security Suite, which offers a web application firewall (WAF) and real-time virus/malware scanning.
  • The most expensive plan offers free Email Filtering, which helps you eliminate spam if you’re using the free email hosting.

Here’s the full pricing comparison:

NameHero WordPress hosting pricing

Again, for our NameHero WordPress hosting review, we were using the Turbo WordPress plan, which starts at $19.95 per month.

All plans also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee – so there’s no risk to trying it out.

NameHero doesn’t use artificially low first-payment promotional prices followed by sky-high renewal prices like some other WordPress hosts – so there shouldn’t be any surprises when you go to renew.

However, the prices above do assume that you pay for three years upfront.

If you’d rather pay for one year at a time, the prices will be a little bit higher. Here are the per-month prices for one-year payments:

  • Starter WordPress – $10.95 per month.
  • Plus WordPress – $14.95 per month.
  • Turbo WordPress – $24.95 per month.
  • Business WordPress – $34.95 per month.

For the Turbo WordPress and Business WordPress plans, you also have the option to pay monthly (the two entry-level tiers don’t support month-to-month billing, though). Here are the month-to-month rates for those plans:

  • Turbo WordPress – $29.95 per month.
  • Business WordPress – $39.95 per month.

Beyond the price for the hosting, you also have the option to add premium automatic backups. The backups are priced based on how many GB your backups require, starting at $5.98 per month for up to 5 GB.

Final Thoughts on NameHero WordPress Hosting

Overall, NameHero’s new WordPress hosting plans are a great option if you’re looking for affordable WordPress hosting that still performs well – especially if you value being able to host unlimited websites (which isn’t something most similarly high-performing hosts offer). 

Performance is the most important detail when choosing any host, and NameHero’s LiteSpeed-powered servers did very well in our tests.

Beyond performing well in WebPageTest, NameHero’s WordPress hosting plans also held up very well under scale when testing with Loader.io.

While the dashboard isn’t fancy, you do get access to a number of important tools to help you manage your site, including staging sites, automatic updates, plugins and themes, backups, and more. The one exception being the lack of FTP access, at least at the time of our review.

If you want to try the NameHero WordPress hosting plans for yourself, all of the plans are backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee, so there’s no risk to your wallet.

You can get started by using the button below…

Colin has been using WordPress for over a decade and is on a quest to test all 60,000+ plugins at WordPress.org. He has been a Writer and Product Review Expert for WP Mayor since 2017, testing well over 150 products and services throughout that time.

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