Having a website is the best way, the only way, to promote your business and to sell your products or services online. To achieve that, it is vital that you partner with a great web hosting provider like FastComet
Because this is one of the best web hosting choices for beginners and total newbies, and for anyone looking to start a website for that matter. FastComet is a new force to be reckoned with in the web hosting industry.
Pros and Cons
FastComet Pros
- 45 day money back & 99.9% server-uptime guarantee
- SSD hosting – site loads 300%* faster (*according to FastComet)
- Free site migration and free daily & weekly backups
- Free SSL and Cloudflare CDN, NGINX and HTTP/2
- 1-click WordPress auto-installer with free theme setup
- Built-in firewall, brute-force protection and free malware scan
FastComet Cons
- Only the FastCloud Extra plan comes with the RocketBooster speed and security
- You can't host additional websites on the entry-level FastCloud Plan
FastComet is surprisingly unknown in the industry but they provide very fast server speeds, outstanding features, near 100% uptime, security, affordable plans, round-the-clock support, and many other benefits.
Here is my FastComet review I will give you a rundown of everything there is to know about this web hosting provider to help you decide if it's good for you.
So if you give me just 10 minutes of your time, then I'll give you all the must-know facts and information about what they offer when it comes to web hosting. Continue reading and you'll find answers to all of your questions such as:
- What features does FastComet provide its clients?
- What are the different plans available?
- How much does web hosting cost?
- What kind of hosting do they provide website owners?
By the time you are finished reading this review, you will surely be able to tell whether this is the right web hosting service for your needs.
Get started with FastComet's web hosting
Here is how our web hosting review process works:
1. We sign up for the web hosting plan & install a blank WordPress site.
2. We monitor the site's performance, uptime, & page load time speed.
3. We analyze the good/bad features, pricing, & customer support.
4. We publish the review (and update it throughout the year).
Here I am going to give you a FastComet review of what their services are like as a web hosting provider. I will show all their features, benefits, discuss the pros and cons, and compare the different pricing plans. When you have finished reading this I am hoping that you will be able to decide whether you would like to host your website with them or not.
What is FastComet?
If you are looking for shared hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated server, cloud hosting to use for your website then you definitely should consider FastComet. It is a hosting service company from San Francisco, California, providing some of the best and the highest quality hosting solutions for website owners.
Their servers are located at 11 locations around the world. You can choose among Tokyo, Singapore, Amsterdam, London, Newark, Dallas, Chicago, Frankfurt, Toronto, Mumbai and Sydney. No matter where you are physically located, you will never face the increased ping time and the website loading speed drop.
This web hosting company has been around since 2013, and today it has thousands of customers in almost 100 countries around the world. It provides a huge variety of features, offers low-cost plans. The biggest advantage of FastComet is using exclusively SSD drives on their servers. Their support service is customer-friendly and is ready to help 24/7/365.
Even if you are not an experienced web developer, you can easily use them for your personal blog or online store. The fact is that you can get almost everything set up in a few clicks and absolutely for free. It includes installing any CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, OpenCart, adding free modules and a theme template, and a bunch of free tutorials for any platform.
Now let's dive into all of the benefits of FastComet. You'll see why these guys are better than many other competitors in the budget web hosting space.
FastComet Shared Hosting Plans
They offer three shared hosting plans: FastCloud starting from $2.95 per month, FastCloud Plus starting from $4.45 per month, and FastCloud Extra starting from $5.95 per month (this is the plan I recommend, find out why).
You'll notice that this is really cheap and you won't need to go for 3 years to save the most even if you don't plan to have a website for 3 years.
FastComet Shared hosting features
| Shared Plans | FastCloud | FastCloud Plus | FastCloud Extra |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hosted Websites | Single site | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Storage (SSD drives) | 15 GB | 25 GB | 35 GB |
| Unique Visits | 25K/month | 50K/month | 100K/month |
| CPU Cores | 2 x AMD EPYC 7501 CPUs | 4 x AMD EPYC 7501 CPUs | 6 x AMD EPYC 7501 CPUs |
| RAM | 2 GB | 3 GB | 6 GB |
| Immediate Account Setup | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Multiple Server Locations | 11 locations | 11 locations | 11 locations |
| Free Website Transfer | 1 | 3 | 3 |
| Addon Domains | No | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Daily Backups | 7 | 7 | 30 |
Additionally, you can pay for some add-ons like Search Engine Submission, Domain Privacy, Search Engine Optimization Audit, and Google SiteMap. They cost from $5.95 to $14.95 annually and it is up to you whether you want to add them or not (I suggest that you don't, besides you can always add these extras on later).
All three plans are quite similar in what they offer and only differ when it comes to the number of addon sites you can host, RAM, cores, and storage. You can compare each plan in detail on its official website.
The FastCloud Extra Plan (the plan I recommend)
FastCloud Extra is their most expensive shared hosting plan, starting from $5.95/mo. But this plan packs a serious punch when it comes to speed, security, and performance! You get better performance than a dedicated server for a fraction of the price.
The FastCloud Extra plan comes with 3x more resources per account and 3x fewer users. Your site is hosted on a high-performance server; PHP7 hosting environment with LiteSpeed LSAPI, APC & OPcache, Static and Dynamic Varnish cache.
Here's why the FastCloud Extra plan from FastComet is the best-shared hosting plan! The performance is better than most dedicated servers, but for a fraction of the price!
3 times faster AND better!
3x fewer users per server and 3x more CPU and RAM, means more power for your site.
RocketBooster
RocketBooster is their custom in-house built caching system that is based on Varnish, PHP7, APC with OPcache and memcached.
BitNinja
BitNinja is their all-in-one globally distributed security system with machine learning algorithm that protects servers from malicious traffic worldwide and saves hosting account resources at the same time. BitNinja Server Security is enabled on all plans.
Varnish
The FastCloud Extra plan comes with Varnish Cache, which is really, really fast and Varnish typically speeds up TTFB (time to first byte) and page loading times with a factor of 3–10x, depending on your website.
PHP7 with APC and OPcache
Their servers use PHP7 with APC and OPcache will significantly boost your website performance to handle more simultaneous visitors with great page load time.
Memcached
Memcached is a memory distributed caching system that increases the performance of database-driven websites by caching data and objects to the RAM to reduce the amount of resources allocated for a process to be executed.
FastComet pros
No hidden fees and 45-days money back guarantee
All the plans are offered with fixed prices and without hidden fees. The company does everything it can to provide 100% customer satisfaction. You pay only for services you actually use.
They do not hide any additional payments and fees. So you will not be surprised to get an extra bill. All prices will not increase at the end of subscription period so you renew any service for the same price.
If for any reason you do not like the hosting provider quality, you will be able to get all your money back. Most competitors provide not more than 30 days, but with FastComet you have 45 days for a complete refund.
High speed and performance
Sites that load slowly aren’t likely to rise to perform well. A study from Google found that a one-second delay in mobile page load times can impact conversion rates by up to 20%.
Many hosting providers use the traditional hard disk drives (HDD) which are quite slow. As a result, your site loads very slow, and it can negatively affect your search engine optimization efforts. Google's algorithms promote faster websites better, and they get higher rankings on search engine results pages. How do they achieve such great results?
FastComet on the other hand only provides solid state drives (SSD drives). It helps increase website performance up to 300% as your files and databases will be loaded much faster. The average site loading time is about 200 milliseconds, while most competitors load pages in about 500-600 milliseconds* (*according to Fast Comet).
This means that most of your visitors coming to your site will be able to access your website, your online store or blog much faster, and they will not bounce while waiting for your site to load.
Moreover, the support team will consult with you on how to improve page load times by improving the Google Pagespeed Insight and GTMetrix scores. You won't even have to use any caching plugins because these speed features are built-in and enabled by default.
Free Cloudflare CDN
Another great feature to improve website performance and speed is using Cloudflare CDN. You won't have to buy an additional subscription as it's available by default in all plans for hosting services. CDN is a short form of a content delivery network. It uses different services around the globe to store all your static files like images, JavaScript files or CSS stylesheets.
When the visitor opens your website, the browser downloads all these static files. The farther the visitor is physically located from your main server, the lower the website loading speed will be. To prevent this negative impact, CDN providers will send images and other static files from the server closest to the visitor physical location. It helps to improve site performance and highly increases the loading speed.
Cloudflare has a distributed server infrastructure around the world. It has more than 100 data centers in different countries. So, even if your customers are from another continent, they will experience the greatest speed and performance of your online store or blog page.
Getting started with Cloudflare is easy. Once you create and launch your website with them, you can activate Cloudflare CDN feature in your hosting control panel in just one click.
99.99% Uptime guarantee
They guarantee 99.99% uptime. Why is this so important? When the uptime is lower than 99%, quite often your visitors can face the situation when your website is not available, and you don't want that. A 99.99% uptime translates to a weekly downtime of just 1m 0.5s. Here's a screenshot showing their near 100% perfect uptime.
Of course, this excludes planned maintenance and migration windows for upgrading infrastructure components as those increase performance overall, are rare as frequency and short as duration.
Also. I have created a test site hosted on FastComet to monitor uptime and server response time:
The above screenshot only shows the past 30 days, you can view historical uptime data and server response time at this uptime monitor page.
Security is taken Seriously
To prevent your site and your visitors from any online threats, they use a special application firewall that is already optimized for any content management system like WordPress, Magento, Joomla, and others. FastComet is able to block up to 99% of aggressive security threats.
Additionally, each shared hosting account has an isolated environment so even if someone else who uses the same server as you are infected, your files and website won't be in danger. The intelligent firewall protects against all known exploits, malware, and any other virus attacks.
Free SSL certificates
One of the most important components of any website security is an SSL certificate. They provide private certificates encrypted by SHA-256 hashing algorithms and 2048-bit RSA keys. You can order the certificate in one click and get it in less than an hour. Their SSL certificates provide up to 8 times faster secure connection than the traditional ones. Every certificate owner is insured for $10,000.
If you don't want to pay for an SSL certificate, they also offer free SSL certificates issued by Let's Encrypt. You can find it by login into your cPanel and navigate to the Security section or simply by typing Let’s Encrypt in the search field.
Managed WordPress hosting
WordPress is the most popular platform for building websites and blogs. It is very user-friendly and very easy to use. The support team is dedicated to giving customers the best-managed WordPress ready solution at a very affordable cost.
WordPress cloud hosting features
- Free daily and weekly WordPress backups of your data to keep you safe
- Your WordPress website is hosted on SSD-only cloud hosting
- Expert WordPress support and how-to guides to get your site up and running in the fastest time possible
- 1-click WordPress auto-installation with free WordPress theme setup, performed by expert WordPress support
One click installs and easy configuration
Besides WordPress, you can use Magento, Joomla, Drupal and more than 150 other platforms. They all are available for one-click installation. It's not needed to download and manually install them but if you cannot find the application you need (there is almost near-zero risk of that, but let's theoretically suppose), there is no problem connecting to the server via FTP and install it manually.
How can you use them? You do not even need any programming and development skills. They can be installed in one simple click from the control panel. All you need is just to follow the installation wizard commands.
Additionally, the installation wizard will install all the necessary free modules to make your website fully functional. Moreover, there are a lot of free theme templates available to choose.
All that simplifies the process of website installation and configuration and makes it very easy even for complete newbies. You can save hundreds of dollars for design, development, and support. Even if you cannot finish some tasks yourself, contact the support service, and they will be happy to help you.
Free site transfer and migration
If your website is hosted elsewhere, with another hosting provider, they will transfer it across for you for free. This service is free of charge without any additional fees and hidden payments.
Of course, you could do it yourself. But manual transfers can take a lot of time and resources – and if it's not done correctly is can cause your website to go down.
Of course, you could also hire someone to transfer your site for you, but why spend the money if it can be done for free? A support specialist will do it in an hour or less if the website isn't very big.
Free site backup and monitoring
Heard of Murphy's law? That “anything that can go wrong will go wrong”? Don't let this happen to your website.
They provide daily backups that are kept offsite and you will have backups from the past 7 to 30 days (depending on the plan you're on). You are given full, unrestricted access to your backups via the 1-click Restore Manager inside cPanel.
If you need any assistance, 24/7 technical support is ready to give you a hand if you need help restoring your website and that comes at no extra cost.
Convenient cPanel
cPanel is the most powerful control panel to manage your hosting account on the market. It has a very user-friendly, convenient and intuitive interface, and is completely mobile friendly. The interface is so easy and intuitive that even a complete newbie can understand how to use it. cPanel's more advanced features will be useful for more experienced webmasters.
What can you do with cPanel?
- Contact customer support via any device: desktop, tablet, smartphone. Even if you are an experienced webmaster and developer there can be situations when you may require assistance from support.
- Manage your account, refill your account, make payments, or change the hosting plan.
- Manage the services you use: purchase, activate, or deactivate any paid addon or feature.
- Launch a new website in the plans (FastCloud Plus & FastCloud Extra) that support unlimited number of websites. All you need to do is choose a domain name and start a website.
- Manage your domain names. It is possible to register, transfer, or close any of your domains. Even if you have many sites, you can easily control all of them on any device.
- Get emails and notifications. cPanel monitors all your activity and immediately notifies about any changes you have made. It can really be useful when you have several websites because you do not need to control everything manually. Just react to the notifications or emails and apply the necessary changes.
- Monitor all important things for you. The Client Control center indicators provide detailed information about all the hosting service you use. Control everything from account status to the traffic bandwidth.
- Install popular software such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
Free 24/7 knowledgeable support
There can be situations where you may require professional support. In fact, any good hosting provider should have fast and competent support staff who can help out in any situation.
Their support can be reached via phone (1.855.818.9717 – US toll-free 24/7), email, and online chat.
Online chat is the fastest option as a specialist will reply to you in less than 10 minutes. I tried this and while the person I spoke to wasn't a native English speaker, her language level was very good, she was easy to understand and her instructions very clear.
So, what help can you expect?
- Lightning fast responses to any tickets via an email or a live chat. The team answers in 10 minutes or even faster.
- Hosting support: any issues with email, FTP, site setup and configuration, and a transfer from the old hosting provider.
- Optimise and security. The support team will help to improve your website speed performance and to help you make it more secure.
- Programming modules upgrade. Sometimes it is not easy to install the new version of any module, especially without special programming skills. The support team will help to solve any problems with any software component.
- Virus and malware removal. They provide free security monitoring and will help you remove any virus and malicious software if you catch some.
Free tutorials
Sometimes you want to get your hands dirty and do things yourself with your website. When you get stuck they have a huge library of free tutorials and how-to guides to help you out.
You can find loads of articles and videos on a range of topics, from how to set up and configure your website, to how to launch a blog or an online store, plus many others how-to guides. When you can't find the necessary tutorial, their support is only a click away.
Generous affiliate and referral programs
You can invite up to five friends and as a reward you get free hosting. Three months of hosting is given for free each time you invite a friend.
Their affiliate program works pretty much in the same way. Instead of getting free hosting, they will pay you a commission for every new sign up you refer to them. The more people you refer, the higher the commission you will get.
Global server network
They have a global server infrastructure network with data centers in Dallas, Chicago, Newark, Tokyo, Singapore, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Toronto, Mumbai, and Sydney. When you sign up, you get to choose which server location you prefer.
FastComet cons
No additional sites on the FastCloud plan
A negative is that the entry-level FastCloud plan does not allow you to addon several domains. You can only host one website. Is that really a big disadvantage? Not really but it depends on what you prefer. But if you plan to have more than one website then consider signing up for one of their other plans.
Do I Recommend FastComet?
Yes I do. FastComet isn't a 100% perfect web host but (as shown here above) the pros certainly outweigh the cons.
I am particularly impressed by the FastCloud Extra plan as its performance is almost better than a dedicated server, but for a fraction of the price!
Reasons to sign up with FastComet:
- SSD hosting – site loads 300%* faster (*according to FastComet)
- Free daily & weekly backups
- Easy to use / convenient cPanel
- Shared hosting using NGINX and HTTP/2
- Free SSL, SNI and Cloudflare CDN
- Choice of 8 global server locations
- 1-click WordPress auto-installer with free theme setup
- Built-in firewall, brute-force protection and free malware scan
- Free site migration
- Helpful 24/7/365 live chat and phone support
- 45-day money back guarantee
In short, I recommend FastComet web hosting services for both beginners and advanced users.
Review Updates
20/04/2021 PHP-8 is deployed on FastComet
01/01/2021 – FastComet pricing update
