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We signed up for FastComet in November 2017 and set up a WordPress test site. Since that time, we have been monitoring various metrics including uptime, page load speed, and customer support to name a few, and the following is largely based on our usage.
What is FastComet
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Headquartered in San Francisco, FastComet has more than 45,000 paying subscribers in 83 countries and territories, and they have a total of eight data centers covering some of the world's major cities.
11 data centers
Click here to test the speed of each data center
This company is also one of the few private companies in the hosting industry. Unlike large groups like EIG, their team consists of only a few dozen people, and the names and faces of each member appear on the official website, which helps build trust between them.
Despite having a small but highly motivated staff, FastComet has carved out a niche for itself by competing against the multi-billion dollar brands with their reliable hosting services and is now one of the best web hosting companies.
Benefits of FastComet
For a relatively young company, FastComet has some compelling offerings. During our testing period, they delivered satisfactory results, with some of the metrics including uptime, fully transparent pricing, free add-ons, and a hosting model that goes beyond traditional hosting, to name a few. Next we take a look at what makes FastComet so appealing.
- Stable uptime
When you visit FastComet's home page, the first thing you see is this impressive chart.
They cite many well-known brands in the industry as competitors and assure you that they are the best hosting company overall. Fortunately, FastComet uptime performance is strong, with a perfect 100% for the first few months and only a slight drop in later months.
- Fast customer support
FastComet may be small compared to other hosting companies, but that can be an advantage.
The founding team has been working in the hosting industry for many years before the public cloud hosting side of this company began to officially emerge since 2013. They specialize almost exclusively in complex hosting services for enterprise customers, so if they can handle those businesses, scaling down shouldn't be a problem. In fact, they have handled over 400,000 live chats and 875,000 Tickets.
The second major benefit of smaller teams is that they are able to provide fast, friendly customer service that most other companies can't match. In dealing with larger companies, you may not know who the other person is and have little access to helpful customer service, or worse, they don't offer live chat and force you to send emails but never reply when you need them.
But that's not the case with FastComet, the support team will answer your questions in seconds and help in the way you want. You will know exactly who the person is because FastComet has pictures of all its employees posted on its official website. It's clear that FastComet runs its own customer support team carefully, rather than outsourcing it like many other companies do, and they invest heavily in customer support, and you can feel it deeply.
- More than the usual money-back guarantee
Moving to a new hosting company can be a bad experience for anyone, which can force you to take down a seemingly great website that is not only time consuming, but can also have unexplained technical problems.
Migrating a website can be a daunting task, luckily FastComet offers you a full 45 day money back guarantee, which means you can try their services and even launch a test site and have over a month to review them.
It's not as good as DreamHost's 97 days, but 45 days is pretty good.
- Free daily backup
Like it or not, there is always the risk of possible damage to a website that you have worked hard to build. However, if you use FastComet, then this risk can be minimized.
- First, they offer free daily backups, which is almost unheard of on cheap hosting plans.
- Second, they will arrange for these backups for you and store them safely elsewhere for 30 days.
- Finally, they can also help you restore older versions of your website if needed.
- All of these are services included in the standard plan and you do not need to pay extra for them.
- free Cloudflare CDN
FastComet offers a free Cloudflare CDN service on all plans, meaning your website data is hosted on servers worldwide and can be loaded for visitors from any region, anytime, anywhere.
Most hosting companies do not offer this service in their introductory plans, or you have to pay a significant fee for it.
- Free website migration
If you already have a site on another server, FastComet will help you migrate to their server for free.
Many companies offer this service, but when you really need it, they send you a support document and you have to figure out all the operations yourself. Or, they use some tool to migrate your site automatically so they don't have to lift a finger.
But FastComet takes this service very seriously, they have their own team of experts and will personally move the whole site for you, all operations will be done within an hour and you don't have to pay any extra fees.
- Free domain name for life
Sure, most companies are happy to recommend a domain name to you, and they may offer a year of free usage or sell it to you for a small fee. But after the first year is up, they will let you renew it, and the renewal price may be 4 to 5 times the initial price, and you obviously don't want to enable a new domain name at that time, right?
FastComet is very honest in this regard and they offer free domain names for life.
- Honest and transparent pricing
Most companies offer significant discounts to new sign-ups and then hit them with actual prices at renewal time, which ultimately, can result in you facing 1 to 3 times higher hosting costs after the initial delight.
But FastComet is different in that they offer a fixed entrance fee and a renewal fee, which is very rare!
Disadvantages of FastComet
FastComet has very good uptime and good customer support, plus a ton of additional features for free. Of course, no company is perfect, and here are some of the problems we've encountered.
- page loading speed
In fact, we have high hopes for this metric, as there is an exciting graphic on FastComet's Why Fastcomet page.
Looks chic, right?
However, our tests showed slightly different results. For example, we just recently reviewed GoDaddy and their average load speed over the past year was only 455 milliseconds, similar to Bluehost's 424 milliseconds, but HostGator was 984 milliseconds long and FastComet's number was 955 milliseconds.
The following is FastComet's monthly tracking data.
FastComet's prices
FastComet offers 3 types of shared hosting plans.
StartSmart
$2.95/month
- 1 site
- 15GB SSD storage
- Free domain name for life
- Unlimited traffic, database, subdomains
- Unlimited database, FTP accounts, mail accounts
- Free SSL, Cloudflare CDN
- Free daily backup service
- View Details
- ScaleRight
- $5.95/month
- Multiple sites
- 25GB SSD storage
- Free domain name for life
- Unlimited traffic, database, subdomains
- Unlimited database, FTP accounts, mail accounts
- Free SSL, Cloudflare CDN
- Free daily backup service
- 2x the CPU and memory resources
- Free GlobalSign SSL
- Free Private DNS
- View Details
- SpeedUp
- $9.95/month
- Multiple sites
- 35GB SSD storage
- Free domain name for life
- Unlimited traffic, database, subdomains
- Unlimited database, FTP accounts, mail accounts
- Free SSL, Cloudflare CDN
- Free daily backup service
- 3 times more CPU and memory resources
- Free GlobalSign SSL
- Free Private DNS
- LiteSpeed LSAPI
- Server-level caching
- 30-day data backup
- View Details
- Additional information.
- Domain name: free for life
- Account registration: very easy
- Payment method.
- Account activation: very fast
- Control panel and dashboard: cPanel
Summary
FastComet has consistent uptime, responsive customer support, and honest and transparent pricing. There's only one problem: page load times may not please everyone. If you want faster loading speeds, check out our preferred WordPress dedicated hosting -- Kinsta, which is 68% faster than FastComet, has more data centers, but is much more expensive .
Of course, FastComet is probably the most cost-effective option compared to most web hosting providers, mainly because of their unique pricing strategy: the price for the first purchase and the price for subsequent renewals are exactly the same.
Advantages
- Honest and transparent pricing, very cost effective
- Friendly and responsive customer service representatives
- Stable uptime
- Free Cloudflare CDN
- Free domain name for life
- Free Website Migration
- Free Daily Backup
- 45-day money-back guarantee
- Disadvantages
- Page load times may not be satisfactory to all
- Purchase a 3-year plan to get the lowest price
- Established: 2013
- Lowest price: $2.95/month
- Uptime: 99.97%
- Page load time: 955 milliseconds
- Hosting plans: web hosting, cloud VPS, dedicated servers, WordPress hosting, WooCommerce hosting, Magento hosting, OpenCart hosting, Joomla hosting, social engine hosting
- Customer Support: Live Chat, Email, Phone, Tickets, Knowledge Base
- Data Centers: Dallas, Chicago, Newark, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Mumbai
- Control backend: cPanel
- Payment method.
- Money back guarantee: 45 days