DEV Community: Muhammad Usman

Astra Killed Claude, Claude Killed Gemini, Gemini Killed Google, Google Committed Suicide

Muhammad Usman — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 19:50:23 +0000

Astra killed Claude. Claude killed Gemini. Gemini killed Google. Google committed suicide, and that's the end of the story. Somewhere in between, and nobody even sent flowers.

Why am I always crawling backwards into the same graveyard? How many times can one industry die this month? Tell me, genuinely, what changed between these products apart from a thinking level slider and your affiliate link. Why does every funeral have the same sponsor?

“New model just dropped” is not a personality, it is a subscription.

And can we talk about who is even buying these things. Like actually buying them, not retweeting the benchmark screenshot. Show me the affiliate dashboard, bro. Who is on the other end of that link?

The agencies don’t have clients who’ll even pay for their team’s ChatGPT Plus seat, so it’s not the agencies. The only people funding this entire ecosystem are the clients themselves, direct, with no middleman, credit card in hand at 11pm.

These LLMs have figured out something agencies never could: it is a very addictive game for a client who understands their own domain but doesn’t want to pay a stranger to translate it into code. That gap, the one between “I know what I want” and “I don’t want to hire you to build it,” that’s the whole market right now. That’s the funeral home’s business model.

The clients never understood the code anyway

Here’s the part that stings a little. Even when we built it for them, properly, with a team and a contract and a Slack channel, the client never understood the code. They just trusted us.

So in a weird way they’re in a better position now. They still don’t understand the code, that part hasn’t changed, but now it’s free, or fifteen dollars a month, and it comes with a chat window that’s nicer to them than their last agency was.

A client who couldn’t read a for-loop in 2019 still can’t read one in 2026. The only thing that changed is who’s smiling while they don’t read it.

And funny enough, they still come back to us. That’s the twist nobody puts in the keynote. I have had clients messaging me with their Lovable, Supabase, Bolt-generated websites, full send, vibes-only, proud of themselves, asking me to just “take a quick look.” We open the code.

We don’t understand what the AI was thinking. We ask the AI to explain itself. The AI does not understand what we’re asking either, it just apologizes and rewrites something else.

Production breaks. Client panics. And at the end of that chain, somehow, it’s still our skill that’s at fault. Not the model’s. Not the fourteen layers of generated abstraction nobody asked for. Ours.

The 2am zip file

This is my favorite genre of client story and I hate that I have a favorite.

Someone goes home, opens their laptop on the kitchen table, types “I need an Uber for vegetables” into a text box, and receives a zip file. They don’t extract it.

They’re scared of it, honestly, and I don’t blame them, I’ve seen what’s in some of these zips. So instead they call me. At 2am. Urgent meeting energy, for a folder they haven’t even opened yet.

The zip file is the new “can you hop on a quick call.”

There is no roadmap, no scope doc, no design file. Just a compressed folder and a deadline that existed only in their head five minutes ago.

SEO is dead, according to the guy who sells SEO courses

Every week someone posts “SEO is dead” and every week that same someone is still selling a $299 course on how to rank on Google. If SEO is really dead, why do you need three carousel slides and a countdown timer to explain it to me.

SEO isn’t dead. SEO got a new landlord. It used to be ten blue links and now it’s an AI Overview eating your click before you even get to the page you spent four months optimizing. That’s not death, that’s eviction. Big difference. Dead means nobody’s paying rent anymore. This is more like the building got bought out and now there’s a chatbot standing at the door summarizing your lease before you walk in.

Nothing on LinkedIn is ever “dead.” It’s just “disrupted” until the next carousel needs a hook.

Meanwhile the actual traffic numbers are doing something weirder and quieter than any of the posts admit. Some sites are getting cited by the AI Overview and getting zero clicks for it. Free labor, basically, except the invoice never shows up. Nobody’s writing a carousel about that part because

“your content is being used to answer questions on a page you’ll never see a visitor from”

doesn’t have the same energy as “SEO IS DEAD 💀.”

Software engineers are cooked, posted from a software engineer’s job.

This one’s my favorite because of who’s saying it. It’s always someone employed, full salary, benefits, writing “software engineers are cooked” from a laptop their engineering job paid for. Nobody who is actually cooked has the bandwidth to post about being cooked. They’re too busy debugging the thing that broke at 2am, remember that guy.

[Do we still need software engineers in 2026 after GPT-6 Astra?Software engineers are still going to be needed as long as AI hasn’t invented its own programming language. So I guess…

Here’s what’s actually happening, since we’re being honest instead of doing the discourse. Junior roles did shrink. That part’s real, hiring for entry-level dropped and it’s not some LinkedIn fantasy, it’s in the numbers.

But “cooked” implies the whole profession is over, and what’s actually happening is the job moved. It moved from “type the function” to “explain to the AI why the function it wrote is wrong, then explain again, then just write it yourself at 1am because the AI got confident and incorrect at the same time.”

The AI didn’t replace the engineer. It replaced the easy 60% of the ticket and kept the annoying 40% for you, personally, forever.

Nobody got cooked. Somebody just moved the stove into your house and told you it’s a smart stove now, it does the cooking itself, except it still burns things and you’re still the one who has to taste it before it goes out.

I’ll marry the tool that works, the rest can RSVP to their own funeral

Just kidding, I’m already married.

I’m not anti-tool. I’m anti-funeral-industrial-complex. If something genuinely works for me, I will use it, gladly, no ego about it. If it works better than the last thing, I will commit. I will put a ring on it (just kidding). The rest of the lineup, the ones that exist purely to announce the previous one is now legacy, they can get in line behind Gemini and GPT and wait their turn.

It’s coming for all of them eventually. It’s coming very soon. Someone’s already drafting the next tool’s death, and yes, it has an affiliate link in the bio.

If you’ve ever gotten a 2am call about a zip file, you already know exactly what this is about.

CSS new property field-sizing: content;

Muhammad Usman — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 18:59:49 +0000

Muhammad Usman

Sep 19

The New CSS Property I Wish Existed Years Ago

#css #webdev #frontend #design

4 min read

The New CSS Property I Wish Existed Years Ago

Muhammad Usman — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 14:02:17 +0000

I used to fix this with a JavaScript resize listener. Now field-sizing: content do it in one line.

Here’s another feature that we as web developers have been waiting for for years. It is CSS field-sizing. It landed in Chrome 123, Safari 26.2, and most recently in Firefox 152. Making it available in all major engines. Here’s how it works. By default, text areas have a fixed size, and if the content doesn’t fit, you get a scroll bar. But if you give the text area field-sizing: content; it will size itself to fit its content in both width and height.

Now, this example looks bad, so of course you probably want to set a minimum width or have it span full width, meaning it will only grow vertically. And as you’d expect, you can also provide maximum sizes. So in this case, we get scroll bars once the content exceeds seven lines of text. This replaces a bunch of JavaScript hacks that we were previously using to achieve the same effect. But it’s not just useful on text areas. It also works on text inputs, including the subsets like number inputs and search inputs.

It respects placeholders, as in the field is sized to the full placeholder content if the field is empty. Now for select elements, by default they are the width of the longest option. But with field sizing content, they size just to the selected option.

For select elements that display as a list box, as in they have the multiple attributes or a size attribute greater than one, it sizes to display all the options, which is great news if you’re one of the five developers that actually use these list boxes. But yes, the most common use will be on text areas, meaning we can remove yet another JavaScript dependency from our code bases. If you want to read the full documentation and play with demos, you can find all of that stuff on MDN.

The actual functional demo of this new CSS baseline property:

What Developers Used to Do

So, what did developers do? They resized the text area with JavaScript. First, you reset the height of the text area to auto. This is important because otherwise the text area might grow when new text is added, but it will not shrink when the text is deleted. Then you read the scroll height of the text area. This is the actual vertical space the complete text content needs. And finally, you assign that measurement back to the text area as the new inline height.

textarea.addEventListener("input", () => {
  textarea.style.height = "auto";
  textarea.style.height = textarea.scrollHeight + "px";
});

So every time the user types or deletes a character, JavaScript measures the content and updates the layout. And I know this is not the most complicated script in the world, but I’m very happy that you can now fix this with one line of CSS.

The One Line of CSS

On the textarea, you add field-sizing: content.

textarea {
field-sizing: content;
}

The default value of field-sizing is fixed. Changing this to content tells the browser to calculate the preferred size from the actual content instead. When I type another line, the field grows automatically. When I delete text, it shrinks again.

Customizing the Size

And of course, you can still customize everything else. You could add a min-height to keep it large enough, and a max-height to limit how tall it can become. Here I would use something like 3lh. lh represents the current line height, so this is pretty useful for text areas.

textarea {
  field-sizing: content;
  min-height: 3lh;
  max-height: 10lh;
}

Now you can also add a max height and set this to something like 10lh. That way the text area can grow and shrink naturally, but it also has a minimum and maximum size.

Watch Out for the Resize Property

Now, one important thing to watch out for is the resize property. Text areas use resize: both by default, which allows the user to drag the corner to resize the text area. The problem is, once we resize this text area, field-sizing will have no effect. When I add more lines of text, the scroll bars will appear again. It will no longer adjust the height dynamically.

So I would probably set resize: none when I want to use field-sizing.

textarea {
  field-sizing: content;
  min-height: 3lh;
  max-height: 10lh;
  resize: none;
}

I hope you found this helpful and learned something new.

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Then show some love.
© Muhammad Usman
WordPress Developer | Website Strategist | SEO Specialist
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Junior Developers Are Learning to Build in Public Before They've Built Anything Private

Muhammad Usman — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:42:31 +0000

I used to think the problem with junior developers was that they didn't know enough yet. Now I think the problem is they never get to be bad at something without someone finding out.

Learning to code is mostly a long list of embarrassing guesses. You think the bug is in the database, it's in the loop. You think you understand recursion, you don't, not until the third time it breaks you. That ugly, wrong-guess phase is where the actual understanding gets built. Nobody skips it. Nobody ever has.

Except now almost nothing stays unseen:

The pull request gets reviewed before you've even decided if it's right
The Slack thread gets a reaction before the idea is fully formed
The pair programming session has someone watching your cursor
The standup asks what you did yesterday, so yesterday has to sound like progress

None of these are bad alone. Code review is good. Pairing is good. Stack them all together and every wrong guess has a witness. And once a guess has a witness, it stops being a guess. It becomes a performance of confidence, because looking unsure in front of someone feels worse than being wrong alone.

So they hedge. Google before trying. Ask in the channel before attempting the fix themselves, not out of laziness, but because failing alone with no one to see the attempt was reasonable feels like a risk with no upside. If nobody sees you try and you fail, you just failed. If someone sees you try and you fail, at least they saw you try.

That's the trade most junior developers make without noticing they're making it: optimizing for looking like they know, instead of the slower thing, which is actually finding out. And you cannot find out by watching someone else find out.

I don't think this is really their fault. Most workplaces reward the appearance of competence faster than the process of building it:

A junior who asks fewer questions looks more senior, even understanding less
A junior who ships fast looks stronger, even copying the shape of a solution without touching the reasoning
A junior who never looks stuck gets trusted with more, before they've earned the trust

Performing readiness and actually building it are two different skills. They don't transfer to each other.

The old way was slower and lonelier, and it worked because it was lonely. You sat with the broken thing until you weren't scared of broken things anymore. Nobody graded the four hours before the fix. Nobody needed to know about them. That's exactly why they worked.

Somewhere there's still a junior developer doing it the old way. Closing the laptop on something half broken, telling nobody, coming back tomorrow with slightly less fear than the day before. Slower than everyone else in the room. Actually building something, though.

I think I have figured out where the tech industry is heading

Muhammad Usman — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 13:01:34 +0000

Not towards building anymore. At least not before posting the reel about what you are building.

Tech agencies are now content agencies.
Developers are now content creators.
Senior developers are creators.
10x developers are 10x creators.
And celebrated developers, they have ring lights now.

The guy who spent 15 years learning distributed systems is standing in front of the camera saying these are the three tools that will change your life forever.

Bro, the tools themselves will be changed in three days.

Agencies used to say we make websites. Then they started making AI products. Now they say we make you a personal brand. The developers followed along the same way. First they wrote code, then newsletters. Now they are in front of the camera doing "POV you just discovered Claude Code."

And the education industry is having the time of its life. Everyone is teaching everyone everything.

The developer teaches AI.
The AI guy is teaching automation.
The automation guy is teaching how to automate workflows.
And the guy who saw all of this on YouTube yesterday night is selling a course.

I don't blame anyone for this. Things change overnight. Being good at something is not enough anymore. You have to package it, create a YouTube video, and upload a thumbnail where you look surprised at a blasting laptop.

It's just new job descriptions coming into the market. So now it's a developer, creator, podcaster, AI automator, thumbnail model, and AI guru.

And beneath all this there is still one guy who knows how to code everything. But he has not pushed it to production, because the reel is not complete yet.

Being a Software Engineer Is Harder in 2026 Than It Was Five or Ten Years Ago

Muhammad Usman — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 08:58:22 +0000

Believe it or not, it's harder to be a software engineer in 2026 than it was five or ten years ago. I'm not talking about getting a job as a software engineer. I'm talking about being a software engineer. Let's assume you already got the job and you are a programmer.

It is harder in 2026 than it was five or ten years ago, and the reason is very simple: the expected throughput of a software engineer is ridiculous. It's actually ridiculous. You are expected to spend less than one day on one ticket. And if you take beyond a day, it's like, what's going on? You have all these AI resources, we gave you all this AI budgeting. Why are you not finishing the ticket?

Well, now we're expected to rush through our tickets, merge AI slop, and add more bugs to the codebase. Now we have to have future tickets to address the bugs that we introduced because we were told to rush. It's all mixed up.

As a pre-AI software engineer, you could spend weeks or months on a certain ticket, and if it was a difficult ticket, people would understand. But now the understanding is, we spent all this AI budgeting on you. You have all these resources, what's taking you longer than 24 hours? Like, why are you still not done with a ticket?

And because you have AI on top of the ticket you're currently working on that you're expected to finish in 24 hours, you're also expected to do other things, simply because you have AI, because you are a software engineer equipped with some magical superpower that makes you Superman. It's ridiculous, in my opinion. And I think before AI, there was a more realistic expectation of what a software engineer could do.

And once upon a time just because of this, I got fired.

Why Your AI-Generated Code Keeps Breaking in Production

Muhammad Usman — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 05:39:05 +0000

AI wrote your code, tests passed, you shipped it, and it broke in production.

Here is why that keeps happening and how to actually fix it.

Why It Happens?

AI models are trained on public code, which means they are also trained on bad code, outdated patterns, and deprecated APIs.

When you prompt Copilot or Cursor without context, it doesn't know your architecture, your environment variables, your edge cases. It's guessing confidently.

That's the real problem. It's not that the AI is careless. It's that it sounds certain even when it's working with none of the information that actually matters.

Here Is What You Can Do

Here is what senior engineers do differently.

They don't ask AI to write the solution. They ask it to challenge the solution.

Prompt it like this:

"Here is my implementation. What assumption am I making that could fail in production? What edge cases am I missing?"

Now you are using it as a code reviewer, not a code generator.

Always Include Your Actual Context

Paste your schema, your existing functions, your constraints.

A model with context beats a model without it every single time. Skip this step and you're not getting a solution, you're getting a guess dressed up as one.

Go Further

Extra helpful tip if you want to go further: set up a free commit hook that runs an AI review before anything reaches your repo.

Catch the confident guesses before they ship, not after.

Prompting Will Be Dead in Six Months

Muhammad Usman — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 07:51:53 +0000

That's at least what every tech bro is saying right now on Twitter.

The next wave, apparently, is graph engineering.

Okay, So What the Heck Is Graph Engineering?

If you picture a normal AI agent, it's typically one model looping through an entire task by itself, over and over, until it decides, yeah, this is good enough.

Graph engineering breaks that into smaller pieces called nodes.

A node is just one specific job, a researcher, a writer, or a fact checker. Each has its own model call or its own agent.

Nodes connect through edges, and an edge decides what happens next based on what the last node just did.

So say, for example, the fact checker finds an error. The edge flags it and sends the task back to the writer node with the error attached, so the writer knows exactly what to fix. Only once the fact checker approves it does the edge let the work move forward.

That's the core of graph engineering.

My Take

It's not really a new discipline. It's the same orchestration that myself and other people have been doing with tools like LangGraph for over a year, with a little sprinkle on it.

The term just went viral this month. But before it, it was loop engineering. Before that, harness engineering. Before that, context engineering.

Same idea, just slight changes. And every time, someone keeps declaring the old term dead when really it just got a slight improvement.

So No, Prompting Isn't Dying in Six Months

What's actually dying is the idea that you can duct tape one model to one clever prompt and call it a finished agentic system.

Follow and I'll keep you posted.

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Then show some love.
© Muhammad Usman
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Why Your First 10 Projects Should Be Bad on Purpose

Muhammad Usman — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:13:45 +0000

Nobody tells you this when you start.

Your first project is going to be bad. So is your second. Probably your fifth too.

Most people treat this as a problem to fix. Something to push through on the way to the "real" work. But bad projects aren't a phase you survive. They're the mechanism. Ten bad projects, done on purpose, will teach you more than one good project you spent six months protecting.

The single-project trap

Here's the pattern. You pick an idea. You decide it's going to be the one. Your portfolio piece. The thing that proves you can actually build.

So you slow down. You research the "correct" architecture before writing a line. You refactor the same feature three times because it doesn't feel clean enough. Six months in, you're still not done, and the thing hasn't taught you nearly as much as it should have, because you spent most of that time protecting it instead of testing it against reality.

One project can only teach you one project's worth of lessons, and it teaches them slowly, because you never let it actually break.

Quantity beats quality, and there's a reason it's not a coincidence

There's an old story from the book Art & Fear, about a ceramics teacher who split his class in two. One half would be graded purely on how many pounds of pots they turned in. The other half needed to hand in just one pot, but it had to be perfect.

When grading day came, the best pots in the room all came from the quantity group. While they were busy making pot after pot and learning from what went wrong each time, the quality group had spent the semester theorizing about the perfect pot and had little to show for it beyond some dead clay.

Web development works the same way. You don't learn to structure an app by reading about structure. You learn it by structuring ten small apps badly and noticing, around project six, that you're making the same mistake again.

What "bad on purpose" actually means

This isn't an excuse to write sloppy code and call it a strategy. Bad on purpose means something specific: you accept, going in, that the project won't be good, and you build it anyway instead of waiting until you know enough to do it right.

That's an important distinction, and it comes from actual research on how people learn, not just from folk wisdom about ceramics.

There's a concept in learning science called productive failure. The idea, studied by Manu Kapur and others, is that people who struggle to solve a problem before they're taught the "correct" way end up learning more than people who get the correct way handed to them first. In one study of pharmacy students, the group that struggled first didn't do any better on the immediate test. But a week later, when asked to apply what they'd learned to a new, related problem, they clearly outperformed the group that had been taught directly from the start.

The struggle isn't a detour on the way to learning. It's what makes the learning stick.

There's a caveat worth taking seriously here. The research is clear that this only works when the struggle is short, bounded, and followed by some kind of reflection or correction. Flailing at a project for six months with no plan and no follow-up isn't productive failure. It's just being stuck. The value comes from the loop: attempt, fail, notice why, move to the next attempt. Not from the failure alone.

Ten reps, not one masterpiece

This is also just how skill works, structurally. There's an old model of skill acquisition from researchers Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus, first built from studying Air Force pilots, that lays out how people move from novice to competent to expert. At the novice stage, you don't have any real context to draw on. You're just following rules with no sense of when they apply and when they don't. That only changes with repeated exposure to real, messy situations, not with more preparation before the first situation.

You can't think your way into that kind of context. You have to rack up the reps.

Ten small, bad projects give you ten separate collisions with reality. Project one teaches you that your local setup lies to you about what will work in production. Project three teaches you that the feature you were proudest of is the one nobody touches. Project seven teaches you that the bug you assumed was in your code was actually in a library you didn't read closely enough. None of that shows up in a tutorial. It only shows up when something you built actually breaks in front of you.

What each bad project is actually for

If you're going to do this on purpose, give each one a job.

Project one just needs to exist. Something small, ugly, deployed. A page, a button, a tool that does one dumb thing. The goal is only to go from nothing to something live, because that path has more friction than people expect the first time.

Project two through four are where you start breaking things on purpose. Rebuild a layout you like without looking at the source. Remove a piece of a working app and see what falls over. Ship something with a bug still in it and watch how it fails.

Project five through seven are where patterns start to repeat. You'll notice you're making the same structural mistake for the third time. That's not a sign you're bad at this. That's the first real signal that you're starting to see your own habits, which is the whole point.

Project eight through ten are where you start adding constraints on purpose. One hour only. No frameworks. No AI. Rebuild something that already exists from scratch. Constraints force you to solve problems instead of copying solutions, and copying solutions is the easiest way to finish a project without learning anything from it.

The part people skip

None of this works if you never look back at what you built.

A bad project you never revisit is just a bad project. A bad project you glance back at in a month, wincing at a decision you made, is the thing that actually teaches you something. That wince is the whole mechanism. It means you now know something you didn't know when you wrote that code, and the only way to know it was to write the bad version first.

So don't aim for one great project. Aim for ten bad ones you're willing to look at again later. The tenth one will still have problems. But it will have different problems than the first one, and that difference is what learning actually looks like.

Did you learn something good today as a developer?
Then show some love.
© Muhammad Usman
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AI won't replace you, your refusal to learn it will

Muhammad Usman — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:46:22 +0000

If you count yourself among those people who don't know about these tools, I have bad news for you. You are far too left behind.

Tool	What it does
Opus	Model built for complex coding and reasoning
Fable	AI model for coding and agent workflows
Kimi	Chat model with long-context reasoning
Qwen	Open-weight chat and coding model
Anti-Gravity	AI-assisted coding environment
Cursor	Code editor with built-in AI
Open Code	Open-source AI coding tool
Codex	Generates and completes code
Grok	Chat model with real-time data access
Perplexity	AI search that cites its sources
Lovable	Turns prompts into working apps
Replit	Cloud coding platform with AI app builder
Higgsfield	Generates short-form AI video
Spark	Builds apps from plain text prompts
Cowork	AI workspace for multi-step tasks
Heygen	Generates talking AI avatar videos
Kling	Generates video from text or images
Omni	Handles text, voice, and visuals together
Hugging Face	Hub for hosting and running AI models
+ more...

Nobody sends you a memo when a new one ships. They just show up, get used by someone on your team, and one day you're the only one who hasn't touched them.

AI won't replace you. Your stubbornness on not learning AI will replace you. A developer who treats a new tool as optional is competing against one who doesn't. Same skill, same experience, different output six months from now.

You don't need all of them. You need one habit: when a name comes up twice, spend twenty minutes with it. Find out what it does. See if it fits something you already do slower than you'd like.

I request you learn and adapt, otherwise, you will be replaced.

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Then show some love.
© Muhammad Usman
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The hot AI term of the moment is the harness.

Muhammad Usman — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:52:57 +0000

The user interface you log into is the portion of your AI subscription that you interact with the most on a daily basis. The harness is that interface, but also everything underneath it. Things like projects, memory management, connectors, and skills. And that’s where I think we’re going to see a lot of the changes going forward.

A recent example: OpenAI just added a way to interact with iMessage on a Mac. You can ask ChatGPT to search your messages, catch you up on a conversation, draft a reply, even send it, all without opening the Messages app yourself. That’s a change to the harness. The model didn’t get smarter. The scaffolding around it just got another arm.

Now, Claude and ChatGPT kind of look the same. Chat box, projects, and skills have the same basic shape. But a harness that came out last week is taking a different swing at the interface. It’s a shared workspace. You can see who else is logged in, chat with them, and work through a session together where you’re co-authoring a presentation or a document or whatever, with the AI sitting right there in the thread with you instead of off in its own tab.

And I kind of like this shared workspace idea, because if I’m in a session with a coworker, I can watch how they prompt. Maybe they’re better at it than I am. I get to see that play out live, in real time, instead of just seeing their finished output. That’s kind of interesting to me. I think it’s kind of cool. It’s a genuinely different take on the interface, on the harness.

As we go forward and the models themselves, like Astra or Fable 5, get more and more powerful, I think the real differentiator between subscriptions stops being the model and starts being the interface. The harness. So I think companies are going to want to make sure their harness is the best one out there, just to keep you from wandering off to a different subscription.

Anyway, that’s what a harness is. Have a great day.

Hostinger vs Namecheap 2026: 20% Extra Discount Promo Code

Muhammad Usman — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:54:55 +0000

In this detailed Hostinger VS Namecheap comparison, we are putting both hosting providers side by side so you can clearly see which one gives you the best value for your money in 2026.

We are going to be testing several things, including pricing, performance, speed, uptime, customer support, and real features. And by the end of this comparison, I will tell you exactly which one I would choose if I had to start a brand new website today.

Get up to 20% extra off Hostinger using this special deal:
Hostinger special deal

Why You Should Trust This Hostinger VS Namecheap Comparison

Over the past couple of years, I have built and managed dozens of websites and online businesses. From small blogs to multi page funnels, SaaS projects, and ecommerce websites, I have handled all of them.

Navigating and jumping from one hosting provider to another has honestly been hell. But thank God I survived.

The fact that I have personally used both Hostinger and Namecheap, not just for testing but for real businesses, is exactly why this review is coming from personal experience, not from reading feature lists or blog posts.

What Is Hostinger Known For?

Hostinger DashboardHostinger is well known for its speed (lightspeed servers), affordability, and beginner friendly tools. One major feature that stands out is the free AI website builder.

This allows you to literally create a professional website in minutes just by describing your business. That alone makes Hostinger very attractive for beginners.

What Namecheap Is Best At

Namecheap started as a domain registrar, and from my experience, that is still where their biggest strength lies.

Most of my domain names are with Namecheap, and I honestly love sticking with a company where their biggest strength is very clear. That is exactly what I will most likely continue using Namecheap for going forward.

But here is the real question.

If you find a better option for hosting, will you still stick with Namecheap?

Hold on. I will get to that as we continue.

Hostinger VS Namecheap Pricing Breakdown in 2026

This is where the difference really starts to show.

At this particular point in time, Hostinger launched special deals on its hosting plans. With long term deals you can get a 24–48 month plan for an introductory price of around $1.99 to $2.99 per month, depending on the exact plan and discount applied. For many of these plans, a free domain name is included with the hosting.

Hostinger pricing plans> Grab Hostinger’s discounted plan here, click the link below:

Hostinger special discount

Now let us compare that with Namecheap.

Namecheap’s shared hosting Stellar plan starts at about $1.98 per month when billed annually.

Namecheap pricing plansHere is the catch.

With Hostinger’s introductory pricing, you also get:

A free domain name
Unlimited bandwidth
Professional email accounts
AI website builder
24/7 live customer support
And many more

With Namecheap you get a lower introductory price, but domain registration and email may still cost extra after the first year depending on the exact offer.

On pricing and value alone, Hostinger still gives more bundled features for what you pay upfront.

Hostinger VS Namecheap Speed and Performance Test

Now let us talk about speed.

In multiple tests, Hostinger consistently loads websites in under one second. This is thanks to their LiteSpeed servers and built in caching.

This is the speed of Hostinger even with a complete custom website.> This level of optimization is part of what Hostinger includes on its shared hosting plans.

👉 Link Hostinger includes on its shared hosting plans

Namecheap, on the other hand, averages around 1.8 to 2.5 seconds on shared hosting plans.

That speed is still decent, but it is not as optimized.

If performance matters to you, especially if you run an ecommerce business or you care about SEO, then Hostinger wins again at this level.

SSL, Uptime, and Security Comparison

Both Hostinger and Namecheap offer free SSL certificates and a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.

However, Hostinger goes a step further by including automated weekly backups and Cloudflare protection by default.

With Namecheap, most of these things need to be configured manually.

So once again, Hostinger is clearly more beginner friendly.

Hostinger VS Namecheap Customer Support Experience

This is where a lot of budget hosting providers usually struggle.

Hostinger offers 24/7 live chat support that is fast, friendly, and actually helpful.

Hostinger With AI IntegratedNow, Namecheap support is also very decent. Honestly, I would even say they have one of the best customer support teams out there.

There have been many times when I needed things fixed quickly, and I did not want to start racking my brain. I contacted Namecheap support, and most times they helped me resolve the issue directly.

That is a huge plus for them.

But that was before I started using Hostinger.

Hostinger also has very good response times, and I would definitely give them credit for that.

At this level, I would honestly call it a draw. Both companies are really good when it comes to customer support.

Control Panel and Ease of Use

If you are new to building websites, this part matters a lot.

Hostinger uses its own custom control panel called hPanel. It is clean, modern, and built specifically for beginners. They also guide you through setups in real time, which makes the whole process very smooth.

Hostinger HPanelTheir AI website builder allows you to create a professional site in minutes just by explaining what your business does.

Namecheap still uses cPanel, which is fine for technical users, but it is not as simple visually.

If you want something plug and play, Hostinger wins again.

Total Cost Comparison Over Two Years

If you are building a brand website, blog, or ecommerce store, the numbers matter.

With Hostinger’s long-term plan, your total cost for two years, including the domain, comes down to a very competitive price compared to similar hosted packages.

With Namecheap, once you add domain registration, email hosting, and other extras, you will likely spend more over two years even with their own introductory prices.

That means more savings upfront with Hostinger and often faster load times over time.

Final Verdict: Hostinger VS Namecheap

Both Hostinger and Namecheap are legit, secure, and affordable.

But here is my honest take.

I would go with Hostinger if you want speed, simplicity, and long term savings.

You should only choose Namecheap if you already have your domain there and you just need basic hosting for small projects.

For 2026 and beyond, Hostinger takes the win.

Let me know your thoughts and concerns in the comments, and you can also join my community through the link provided.

For those comparing Hostinger VS Namecheap in 2026, Hostinger remains a strong choice for performance, ease of use, and overall value. If you want, you can get an extra 20% discount using my code directly with your plan.
👉 Extra 20% discount using this LINK.