Spaceship web hosting review

In recent years, we've seen several hosting brands attempt to expand their services and challenge the envelope of the best web hosting services. Spaceship is the result of one such effort, with the parent company being Namecheap.

Granted, Spaceship offers a slightly more futuristic site design and interesting product names (e.g., Starlight, Hyperlift). However, even this is subjective, since one man's meat can be another's poison. Additionally, the superficial design differences don't affect the performance of the core products themselves.

In some instances, the product offerings are also identical in many ways. For example, the cloud WordPress hosting offered by Spaceship is EasyWP, which is another product that Namecheap has tried to spin off as a standalone offering.

• Want to try Spaceship? Check out the website here

What types of hosting does Spaceship offer? 

Spaceship offers an extensive product range that includes domain name services, web hosting, and associated services like a CDN, VPN, and domain name-based communication services. And because it's stripped out some essential services from hosting, these can also be considered other services, such as email hosting and auto backups.

Spaceship shared hosting

Spaceship's shared hosting plans start at $1.21/mo and top off at $2.87/mo on two-year cycles. They all begin with a 30-day free trial before any charges are due. The lowest-tier (Essential plan) comes with 20GB NVMe storage, free SSL, SiteJet AI website builder, and security services from Imunify360.

As you move up the plan tiers, storage space increases, and you also get the inclusion of AI tools that can help you write content for your site.

The kicker is that email services are free for only 30 days or one year, depending on the email plan you choose during sign-up. You'll also have to decide if you want auto-backups, which start at $11.76 for 5GB on the two-year plan. Added together, that initially low hosting price doesn't feel so low anymore.

Spaceship Cloud WordPress hosting

With WordPress sites driving much of the internet today, it's unsurprising that Spaceship also offers cloud-based WordPress hosting. These plans include the same 30-day free trial option as Spaceship's shared hosting plans. Thereafter, prices range from $28.88/year to $48.88/year, depending on which plan you choose.

Likewise, email services on these plans are free for a year, after which you'll have to pay separately for them, outside your hosting fees. At least you get HackGuardian for free, along with MalwareGuardian Autoclean protection on the two higher-tier WordPress plans.

Spaceship VPS hosting and App hosting

Spaceship offers a range of Virtual Private Server (VPS) plans called Starlight Virtual Machines. These come in three flavors: standard, CPU-optimized, and memory-optimized. The prices are also similar to Spaceship's cloud plans and are available on a monthly, quarterly, yearly, or pay-as-you-go basis.

For example, the standard VPS offers 1 CPU core, 2GB of RAM, 25GB of NVMe storage, and 1 TB of bandwidth. This is priced at either $4.90/mo, $13.88/3 months, $42.44/yr, or $0.007/hr.

You can also add on block storage of between 50GB and 500GB to these plans, of course, for an additional fee. Block storage plans cost between $30.44/year and $302.44/year, and you can attach up to 3 blocks to each virtual machine.

App hosting comes in the form of Starlight Hyperlift plans, which are essentially micro VMs. These allow you to connect to GitHub, then pull and build your code for deployment. It's a convenient and super-cheap way of deploying apps quickly. Hyperlift plans cost between $30.88/year and $453.88/year.

Can I build a web store with Spaceship?

Since Spaceship comes with the SiteJet AI website builder and supports WordPress, you can technically build an online store. That means you either create one from scratch or run WooCommerce.

There are no ecommerce specific features at Spaceship, so you'll have to find all your ecommerce needs elsewhere, such as payment gateways, specialized plugins, and so on. However, most of what you'll need is available with the Softaculous app installer (free at Spaceship).

If you want a dedicated ecommerce or online store, consider a service dedicated to this, such as Shopify or Squarespace. Or if you're planning to build for extreme traffic, a more scalable option like Cloudways or ScalaHosting.

How fast is Namecheap?

To measure Spaceships' performance, we uploaded our standard WordPress test site. This site sports a relatively simple design with online store functionality and a handful of products.

We then run two key tests: One to assess how well the hosting server handles WordPress in general, and the other to see whether it can withstand increasing user traffic over set periods.

It's interesting (and yet unsurprising) to see that Spaceship shared hosting servers offer nearly identical performance characteristics to Namecheap servers. In core WordPress performance areas, Spaceship servers held up well under scrutiny, with results slightly above average.

The siege load testing tool we use is the more critical of the two since it best reflects how well a site hosted on Spaceship will perform in real-world scenarios. Unsurprisingly, performance here was also similar to Namecheap, with Spaceship successfully processing all transactions even at 15 concurrent users.

Even better, the longest transaction times were consistent, meaning your website users won't have to deal with overly long wait times, even when many users are on your website. While it may sound like something all web hosts should be capable of, this delicate load-balancing act isn't always present among hosting brands.

How easy is Spaceship to use?

Right on its About Us page, Spaceship states that its "primary mission is to redefine speed and simplicity." This is about half right since we've already seen that Spaceship offers above-par performance. However, the usability factor is a separate ballgame altogether here.

After you've signed up for a Spaceship plan, the site attempts to take you through what it calls an "unboxing process," which initially worked well for us. However, after completing the final step, we were unceremoniously booted to the website's main page with no explanation. After that, we were on our own and had to follow the standard experimentation process. Not an altogether smooth transition.

The user dashboard at Spaceship is also a little hard to use, especially for those new to web hosting. Sure, it looks cool (subjective), but it doesn't offer much of a different experience from cPanel. You'll still have to plod through the options one by one and figure them out on your own.

The bigger problem is that our default WordPress installation didn't work. This ended up in a chat with support, which took around 30 minutes to resolve. The strange thing was that the issue was caused by a misconfiguration in the .htaccess file, which the system itself created. Not an entirely great experience nor first impression if you're a new Spaceship user.

What is Spaceship's support like?

Spaceship offers 24/7 support via a knowledge base, live chat, and email (there's no telephone support).

The web knowledgebase is a modest collection of how-to articles organized into several categories. Sometimes, even the categories don't make much sense. For example, although Spaceship offers the SiteJet AI website builder, there is a knowledge base category that covers the Alf website builder instead. At the same time, Alf is what Spaceship calls its automated support chatbot, so you can understand our confusion.

Aside from the knowledge base, you can also choose to chat with their AI agent (and get transferred to a human) or email them for support. The process of getting in touch with them is smooth. We tried the process, and it took us just a few seconds to connect to a real support agent.

Final verdict

Spaceshop hosting plans start at pretty unbelievable prices, but you'll quickly realize that if you need all the regular features a hosting plan comes with, those low prices will soon balloon. At the same time, stripping them out offers a good deal if you don't want email or backups with your plan.

While their server performance is decent, we're concerned about the failure of their automated WordPress installation system. For new users, this can be a breaking point and lead to a disastrous first impression.

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