You can always tell when the going gets tough, because the tough get going. In other words, when the economy slows down and sales performance goes with it, smart businesses don’t cut back on sales & marketing expenditure, they increase it.

The logic for this is simple. If your competitors are reducing market exposure, that is when you should be increasing yours and get increased value for your marketing budget.

US web hosting company NameCheapHosting are doing just that with some great offers this month. Not only do they have aggressive pricing, they also throw in lots of special offers and freebies when you sign up with them.

I first encountered NameCheap (don’t let the name cause you to screw your face up) last year. In fact, I now have four domains registered and hosted with them, and have always been extremely satisfied with their support structure. In addition to on-site management tools that exceed those provided by most hosts, they also have flash video tutorials for how to complete just about every task in their domain management front end, plus a comprehensive email support system, and of course, the essential 24-hour live help live chat system.

In fact, last year I trashed the configuration of one of my sites, and NameCheap telecommuted-in, support personnel from three continents, who worked with me over a 12-hour time frame to get the site back up and running. All of it was co-ordinated via their live help system by a support tech who was also not in the NameCheap offices. Apart from anything else, that’s a really eco-friendly way of working.

In the hosting back-end, they use the highly featured and popular cPanel system. UK webmasters might not be familiar with it due to the paucity of features that UK web-hosting companies offer their customers. If you’re not, then I recommend you check out cPanel at www.cpanel.net and try pressuring your existing host to use it if they don’t already.

Some of the other great features of NameCheap Hosting include free Dynamic DNS – name server redirection for home and SME servers self-hosting web-sites on ISP connections that change IP from time to time. Additionally, (unlike at our UK ISP) you can assign user accounts at a multitude of levels for things like guest programmer FTP, SQL, and site admin use, and restrict their actions & permissions through cPanel.

What about these offers?

Well, in addition to all the above being standard, every domain you register with them receives a free WhoIsGuard account, which you can use or not for that domain, and if you don’t, you can use it with any other domain you move to them. I wrote about WhoIsGuard in the BuildaSkill WebAdmin series earlier this year. Depending on the purpose of your site, you may want to use it to reduce spam or other mail receipts, or you might want to not activate it if you’re running an ecommerce site that needs the verification of owner identity for 3rd party Trust services.

For a limited time, NameCheap are also providing a free one-year Comodo positive SSL certificate and site seal. This is essential for ecommerce sites (if only I could figure out how to use it). Also a limited time offer is reduced price domain registration (use coupon code JULYNEWS) which saves you more the longer you opt to register your domain name for. Remember, that search engines like domains with more than a year of registration left on them. Also a limited offer is .info domain name registrations for under $3.00 a year – move quick on that offer, it’s an awesome price.

Ed