FastComet Review

Enter 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 in the web hosting industry.

FastComet is surprisingly unknown in the industry but they provide very fast server speeds, outstanding features, 100% uptime, security, affordable plans, round-the-clock support, and many other benefits.

Here in my FastComet review I will give you 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 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.

What you’ll learn from this review

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 a shared hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated server, cloud hosting to use for your website then you definately 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 8 locations around the world. You can choose among Tokyo, Singapore, Amsterdam, London, Newark, Dallas, Chicago, and Frankfurt. 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 and a free domain name for life. 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: StartSmart starting from $2.95 per month, ScaleRight starting from $5.95 per month, and SpeedUp starting from $9.95 per month (this is the plan I recommend, find out why).

You’ll notice that this is quite cheap but these prices are available only when you buy the hosting for 3 years in advance. If you choose the shorter period, it will cost a bit more expensive. Here below, you can compare how the price changes depending on the chosen subscription period.

FastComet StartSmart

FastComet ScaleRight

FastComet SpeedUp

FastComet Shared hosting features

Keep in mind that when you choose a monthly subscription, you will have to pay additional $19.95 setup fee. This additional fee is applied to all plans.

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 alway 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 details on their official website.

The SpeedUp Plan (the plan I recommend)

SpeedUp is their most expensive shared hosting plan, starting from $9.95/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 SpeedUp 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.

FastComet pros

No hidden fees & 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

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 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 the 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 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 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 the site performance and highly increase 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 guarantes 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 screenshots showing their near 100% perfect uptime.

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 is 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
• Your WordPress website is always up-to-date and secure with their free WordPress upgrade service

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 any problem to connect 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 domain name – forever

A domain name is a unique identifier that represents you and your business on the internet. A domain name can cost up to $20 a year depending on the domain extension and where you register it.

But not with FastComet. Because they give you a free domain name – forever! You can buy the new domain or transfer an existing one, for free.

So, no matter where and when you get your domain name, forget about manual renewal and additional payments. They provide all these features automatically for you.

Free site transfer / 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 (ScaleRight & SpeedUp) 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.

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 setup 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, and Frankfurt. When you sign uo, you get to choose which server location you prefer.

FastComet cons

$19.95 Setup Fee for monthly payments

This is the biggest negative of using them. Sometimes you just want to pay for a service on a month-to-month basis. FastComet allows monthly payment but if you do choose to pay monthly then you’re slapped with at $19.95 setup fee. The best, and only, way to get around this cost is to choose the one-year subscription or longer.

The good news is that if you decide to cancel your hosting with them, then there are no cancellation fees and if you cancel within 45 days from signing up with FastComet then they will give you a full refund.

No additional sites on the StartSmart plan

Another negative is that the StartSmart 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 on 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 SpeedUp plan as its performance is almost better than a dedicated server, but for a fraction of the price!

Reasons to sign up with FastComet:

1. SSD hosting – site loads 300%* faster (*according to FastComet)
2. Free domain name – forever free
3. Free daily & weekly backups
4. Easy to use / convenient cPanel
5. Shared hosting using NGINX and HTTP/2
6. Free SSL, SNI and Cloudflare CDN
7. Choice of 8 global server locations
8. 1-click WordPress auto-installer with free theme setup
9. Built-in firewall, brute-force protection and free malware scan
10. Free site migration
11. Helpful 24/7/365 live chat and phone support
12. 45-day money back guarantee

In short, I recommend FastComet for both beginners and advanced users.