Hosting Companies

FastComet Review

FastComet ReviewFastComet has been providing system administration services for private and business individuals since its inception in 2008. It was not until 2013 that the company began to offer hosting services. Therefore, it is a relatively new hosting provider that wells up with numerous other novices.

FastComet has been dabbling at shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting services. Up to now, it has served over 11,500 users all around the world. As one of the companies that offer SSD-powered hosting packages, the company claims that its services are of high accessibility and affordability.

However, whether the company’s hosting services are as good as it advertises? To help readers dispel this puzzlement, we are going to deliver an in-depth review of its shared hosting packages.

In this FastComet review, we focus on multiple aspects that are important in choosing a web host, including reputation, price, feature, performance, and technical support.

FastComet Review

  • Reputation
    rating 2.5 of 5
  • Feature
    rating 2.5 of 5
  • Performance
    rating 2.5 of 5
  • Support
    rating 3 of 5
  • Price
    $2.95/mo

Is FastComet Cost-Effective?

Hosting plans in review

For shared hosting, FastComet provides three plans, that is, Single Website, Multiple Websites, and E-Commerce. These hosting plans are priced at $2.95/mo, $5.95/mo, and $6.95/mo respectively. Honestly speaking, the prices are affordable in the industry.

Also, the company promises that there is no hidden fee and additional charges for any of its hosting services. It also ensures each user that its services are renewed at the same price for all billing terms, including 1/12/24/36 month(s).

Based on the above facts, it is true that FastComet provides inexpensive hosting plans. However, being budget friendly does not equal to being cost effective. When evaluating the cost effectiveness of a hosting provider, the following aspects are also taken into consideration.

Money back guarantee

The company offers a 45-day money back guarantee, with which users who want to cancel their accounts are able to receive a full refund if their cancelation requests are valid.

Generally speaking, this money back guarantee is longer than that of many shared hosting providers. However, it is still much shorter than some reputable companies like InMotion hosting that provides a 90-day refund period for users to try out its hosting services.

It also has to be noted that FastComet does not refund any renewal payment and fails to provide any prorated refund. Therefore, users’ hosting services with this company are not totally risk-free.

Hosting features in review

As a matter of fact, FastComet provides some nice features. It offers unlimited monthly transfer, email accounts, FTP accounts, and MySQL databases. Also, the company provides each hosting plan with a free domain that is valid as long as the user has an active hosting account with it.

Besides, we have to admit that there are some other merits about this company’s hosting features.

  • It provides solid state drives, which is up to 300% faster than traditional HDDs.
  • The company offers free CDN, free site transfer, free daily and weekly backups.
  • It includes cPanel as the default control panel for users to manage their hosting accounts easily.
  • A 1-click installer is provided to simplify the installation of various popular applications.
  • It supports PHP, Perl, Python, and SSH access.

However, the limitations of FastComet features are also obvious. To make it clearer for understanding, we have listed these limitations that revolve around Single Website hosting plan.

  • The most apparent limitation is the limited allocation of server resources. FastComet only provides 35GB disk space for users to store their data. Also, the company allows only one website for each account.
  • Ruby on Rails, which is an important open source web application framework, is not supported.
  • Since online transactions are becoming increasingly popular, many hosting companies are providing their users with free advertisement credits. As for FastComet, this company simply lacks this offering.

What About FastComet Facilities?

Multiple data center locations

It is indisputable that FastComet has paid much attention to enhancing its facilities. This company provides six data center locations, including Chicago, Dallas, London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Singapore. In the coming days, it will also provide a data center location in Tokyo.

Since the proximity of data centers influences the page loading speed and connectivity, users are able to choose the one that suits their target audiences best.

FastComet Data Center Location

Each of the company’s data centers is equipped with N+2 power redundancy to guarantee a reliable hosting environment. Besides, multiple security layers are adopted to protect their infrastructure, including enterprise-level access control, multi-level clearance, and 24x7x365 human monitoring.

FastComet servers

FastComet claims that its technicians perform routine maintenance on the servers. It adds that all hardware and software of these servers are carefully selected. Also, it utilizes high-quality SSDs and the latest Intel E5 processors to maximize the servers’ performance.

What About FastComet Reliability?

With the help of multiple data center locations and robust facilities, FastComet provides each user of its share hosting plans with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which complies with the industry standard. Many hosting providers are offering the same or even higher uptime guarantee to ensure users with a safe and sound hosting experience.

According to our real-time monitoring results, the company has almost coordinated its words with actions. In the past month, FastComet has achieved an average of 99.98% uptime, which is pretty good for shared hosting. The following image presents more detailed information about its uptime.

FastComet Uptime

How’s FastComet Hosting Speed?

It is true that FastComet has made constant efforts to optimize the hosting speed. Besides using SSDs, it partners with CloudFlare to provide free CDN for each hosting plan to speed up content delivery.

Moreover, the company utilizes the so-called 5-level caching layers to boost page loading speed, including Google PageSpeed Mod, Facebook FlashCache, Memcached, APC, Xcache and more.

However, it is not the same case as “The more plowing and weeding, the better the crop”. Based on the monitoring outcomes, FastComet performance in speed is not as satisfying as we expected. In the past thirty days, the average server response time of the company is 650ms.

FastComet Server Response Time

When compared with many other reputable hosting companies, the hosting speed of FastComet is relatively slow. A real example is InMotion Hosting. The company takes 237ms merely for responding to a server request.

How’s FastComet Technical Support?

The industry witnesses that more and more attention is paid to the quality of technical support when selecting a web host. In general, FastComet has done a good job of providing effective and responsive support.

The company offers full hosting support that is available 24×7 via its toll-free hotline, live chat, and ticket system. It promises to respond to users’ requests and solve issues within 10 minutes.

Besides, the company offers installation, configuration and other supports for 150+ open source applications, including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. Also, it provides a tremendous number of tutorials for reference.

Is FastComet Right for Shared Hosting?

From this FastComet review, the company has done a good job of providing multiple hosting plans, high-quality facilities, good uptime, and responsive technical support.

However, it offers limited server resources for the shared hosting plans and lacks some other important features. What’s more, it fails to guarantee fast hosting speed that is of critical importance for websites’ successes.

As a result, we do not recommend FastComet for shared hosting. If you are looking for a web host that is reliable yet cost-friendly, the following alternatives are worth trying. They have outperformed many hosting providers including FastComet for their prices, features, reliability, performance, support, and any other aspect that you may name.

Rick Hammond

I'm a marketing consultant by trade and also own a portfolio of over 20 websites. Over the years I have tested most of the well know hosting companies for my sites and therefore can give insight into which are good and which are not from my personal experiences.

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