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Brad Smith

Hosting Reviewer

FastComet was established in 2013 and is headquartered in San Francisco. They offer hosting services for more than 750,000 personal and small-business website owners and they have a team of 70+ employees.

FastComet hosting review

That diverse customer base is supported by their 11 server locations in major cities like Chicago, London, Amsterdam, Singapore, Mumbai, and Tokyo.

So how did they fare? Can a small, scrappy upstart try to support a worldwide customer base to keep up with billion-dollar hosting brands?

We signed up for an account to find out. We purchased the cheapest plan and set up a test WordPress site and been tracking uptime figures and site speed in Pingdom.

Let’s get into our early findings by starting with what FastComet does well.

General Info & Hosting Overview

Our Rating:

Our Verdict: 4.0

SPEED: 649 ms (January 2024 to June 2024)
UPTIME: 99.35% (January 2024 to June 2024)
SUPPORT:24/7 Live Chat, Phone, Email, Ticketing, and Knowledge Base
APPS:300+ Free Applications, Softaculous App Installer for the Most Popular Apps, Including WordPress
FEATURES:Single Hosted Website, 15 GB Storage, Free Domain Transfer, Fair Usage of Bandwidth, 45-Day Money-Back Guarantee, Daily Backups, cPanel, 1-Click Restore Management, Free SSL, Unlimited Email Accounts, and more.
HOSTING PLANS:Shared, Cloud VPS, Dedicated, WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, OpenCart Hosting
SITE TRANSFER:Free
PRICING: Starting at $2.95/mo (renews at $9.95/mo)

Pros of Using FastComet Hosting

FastComet makes some pretty bold claims for a relatively young, small firm.

The good news is that they were able to back up a lot of them, posting strong uptime and speed in the several months we’ve monitored with them.

They also go above and beyond typical hosts with transparent pricing and free additional services.

Here’s a full look:

1. Average Speed of 649 ms

Next to uptime, speed is another important factor when choosing a host. Not only is a slow website a negative Google ranking factor, but your site’s traffic depends a lot on how long it takes to load. For example, there’s a 32% bounce rate probability if your site page load time goes from one second to three seconds.

The good news is that FastComet delivered solid speed over the past six months, coming at an average of 649 ms.

FastComet last 6-month speed statistics
FastComet average speed | See stats

2. Fast, Personal Support

FastComet doesn’t hold back good words about its customer service quality. They claim to have resolved 83% of the issues in less than 15 minutes based on 10 000 support requests. Moreover, their customer support is available 24/7/365 via live chat, email, ticketing, and phone.

fastcomet support

We tested out their live chat option.

We asked a simple technical question and the customer rep connected with us in less than a minute. His replies were knowledgeable and quick and left an overall positive impression.

fastcomet live chat

Besides all the above-mentioned options, FastComet also has a vast knowledge base.

3. Longer-Than-Usual Money-Back Guarantee

Let’s be honest with each other for a second:

Moving to a new hosting company can be difficult. Seriously – it’s disruptive, forcing you to take down a seemingly good site. It’s also time-consuming and technically problematic.

So the last thing you want to do is be forced to move your host again because you’re unhappy with the one you chose (but are now locked into a long-term, prepaid deal).

Fortunately, FastComet will give you a full 45 days to get your money back. That means you can try out their service, or even spin up a test site like we did, and have over a month to vet them.

This 45-day period is among the longest we’ve seen. It means that FastComet is confident in the service they provide.

4. Free Daily Backups

Like it or not, you’re bound to run into site problems that threaten to derail all the hard work you’ve put in. Stay in the game long enough and it’s bound to happen to everyone.

No problem if you’re on FastComet, though.

  • First, they offer free daily backups. That’s almost unheard of on cheap, ‘value’ plans.
  • Second, they’ll store these backups for you, safely off-site for up to 30 full days.
  • And third – they’ll help you restore older versions of your site within just a single click if needed.

All of this is done standard, on all of their plans. Almost too good to be true.

5. Free Cloudflare CDN

FastComet will also throw in a free Cloudflare content delivery network (CDN) on their basic plans, too.

Content Delivery Networks will host your data across worldwide servers, so that it loads almost instantly for anyone, anywhere.

Most basic cheap hosting companies don’t even offer this service on their plans. And if they do, you’ll have to fork over a few extra bucks as an expensive upsell.

But not at FastComet. They’ll throw one in gratis.

This, in addition to being open-source friendly with over 300 applications, makes FastComet one of the best options for new businesses to get up and running ASAP.

6. Free Site and Domain Transfer

But wait, there’s more!

If you already have a site on the interwebs, FastComet will help you move it over to their service for free.

Here’s how it typically works:

  1. The hosting company will say they do free migrations. When you actually need it, they’ll send you a support doc that you’ll have to figure out all by yourself.
  2. Or, they’ll use some ‘wizard’ tool to automatically move the info so they don’t have to lift a finger.

FastComet, on the other hand, will have its own team of experts on the site for you. So you won’t have to do anything yourself. It’ll be all wrapped up in less than an hour, with zero additional fees or higher plans needed.

What’s even better?

This does not only apply to one site but you’ll get up to three site migrations for free!

Moreover, you can also transfer your existing domain name for free.

7. Multiple Datacenter Locations

FastComet has 11 data centers located in North America, Australia, Europe, Asia, and the UK.

Fastcomet data centers

Why is this important to you?

The location of the server’s data center can affect your site’s speed and uptime. Meaning, that the further the server is from your location, the longer distances the data and information have to travel. This, however, affects your website’s speed (slower) and connectivity (less reliable).

So, it’s good to know that FastComet is offering multiple data centers around the world and taking their customers’ location into consideration.

Cons of Using FastComet Hosting

FastComet’s uptime was excellent, support was friendly, and they offer a ton of free goodies.

Of course, no company is perfect. Neither is FastComet.

Take a look.

1. Poor Uptime 99.35%

Uptime is one of the most important factors in the hosting industry. After all, what is the point of having a website if it’s not up and running?

Therefore, we pay extra attention to how hosts perform in this area.

Unfortunately, FastComet’s uptime performance started off poorly, coming with an average uptime of 99.35% with 1 day of downtime over the last 6 months. This is mainly caused by March’s uptime which was only 99.47% and took down the whole average.

FastComet last 6-month uptime and speed statistics
FastComet last 6-months average uptime | See stats

Last 6-month average uptime:

  • June 2024: 99.98%
  • May 2024: 99.99%
  • April 2024: 100%
  • March 2024: 99.47%
  • February 2024: 99.95%
  • January 2024: 99.97%

2. High Renewal Prices

FastComet’s starting price is quite reasonable, starting at $2.95/month. However, once the initial signup period ends, you are faced with three times higher prices. For example, the cheapest FastCloud Plan would cost you $9.95 instead of the initial $2.95/month.

Definitely, something to look out for!

3. Domain Name is Not Free

A lot of hosts include a free domain name for the first year. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with FastComet.

Registering a domain name with them for the first year would cost you $9.95 and after that $10.95.

Sure, it’s rather cheap (some hosts charge you as much as $20 for a domain name), but it would still be a good value to include it for free. At least for the first year.

FastComet Pricing, Hosting Plans & Quick Facts

Here’s a quick overview of the hosting plans offered by FastComet:

FastCloud PlanFastCloud Plus PlanFastCloud Extra Plan
Pricing $2.95/month
Renews at $9.95/mo		 $4.45/month
Renews at $14.95/mo		 $5.95/month
Renews at $19.95/mo
Websites1UnlimitedUnlimited
BandwidthFair UsageFair UsageFair Usage
Storage15 GB25 GB35 GB
Email AccountsUnlimitedUnlimitedUnlimited
Other Features–o Free Private DNS
o 3 Website Transfers
o Unlimited Addon Domains		o 30 Daily Backups
o LiteSpeed LSAPI
o 3x More CPU and RAM

Quick Facts

  • Free domain? No.
  • Ease of Signup: Easy signup process.
  • Payment Methods: All standard credit cards and PayPal.
  • Hidden Fees and Clauses: According to their terms of service, “We cannot and do not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of any information, including prices, product images, specifications, availability, and services. We reserve the right to change or update information and to correct errors, inaccuracies, or omissions at any time without prior notice.”
  • Upsells: A few upsells, but not too many.
  • Account Activation: Fast account activation.
  • Control Panel and Dashboard Experience: cPanel.
  • Installation of Apps and CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): Access to over 150 popular open-source apps.

Do We Recommend FastComet?

Yes.

FastComet blew us away with several factors. They have delivered solid speed results and their customer service is fast and knowledgeable.

Moreover, their plans are packed with handy features and there are several data centers to choose from.

Even though there were some drawbacks including poor uptime due to two poor months, high renewal prices, and not-free domain name registration, they were still good enough to get our recommendation.

Best alternatives for FastComet:

Further reading: The 10 Best Web Hosting Services (In 2024)

Have you had experience with FastComet – either positive or negative? If so, please leave a transparent and honest review below!

16 user reviews for FastComet

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    Omar M

    1 — February 22, 2024

    Limit Database size

    If you are researching web hosting please don’t choose FastComet. They limit the database to 1024MB to the best performance web hosting plan for a small business you cannot use this service. Drupal, WordPress and other CMS don’t run well with this limitation.

    Victoria B

    1 — November 9, 2021

    FAST COMET – NO GO

    FAST COMET – NO GO. Not unless you don’t mind having worked a decade on a blog, fleshed it out for 10 years with articles and data that you value, only to have the entire thing disappear into oblivion, never to be seen again, thanks to trusting FastComet to host it.

    They didn’t get paid, but couldn’t wait a month before deleting the 10 year old blog and all of its data.. forever. I was traveling and didn’t get to pay them on time. Thank you Fast Comet for erasing 10 years of work, for a missing hundred bucks.. No grace period.. no mercy.

    Trevor

    1 — August 17, 2021

    Useless might be a euphemism

    I am really sorry but I cannot believe that one could recommend FastComet, as per your bottom line. Support ticket waiting time is usually over half an hour, their Technical Support very often sends back totally confusing (if not wrong answers), and they make loads of mistakes…

    In a couple of instances they have reinstated one website with another when they overwrite it (and again that was their mistake).

    I seriously do not believe that the review on this page, by Brad Smith is unbiased, or it might have been correct at the time it was written, but things have heavily changed since then.

    My bottom line: avoid at all costs, migrating to FastComet will cost you loads of inconvenience, frustration and money!

    Joe M

    1 — July 21, 2020

    Avoid FastComet

    I have been with FastComet for about two years. Their hosting seemed to be working out for some very low traffic WordPress sites used by some local hobby clubs I manage. Based on that experience, I decided to move some of my business assets there.

    That turned out to be a disaster.

    Our biggest issue is email. Several senders cannot reach us by email. It appears that email from entire domains do not get through. The sender will usually receive a “refused by server” message. We have also just learned that many outgoing emails are not delivered to the recipients. Neither we nor the intended recipient receives any error message – the email simply disappears.

    Support does respond relatively quickly, but with useless answers. They confirm that we have no “filters” on our account and that email is “working” (although it is not). In the end, they told me they are a hosting service and that email is an “add-on.” They tell me if I want reliable email I should seek out another provider for email. Confusingly, they suggested I use “SendInBlue” – which is an email marketing platform.

    Email disappearing is not acceptable. At this point we have had to use personal gmail accounts for the clients we know are affected by the problem. What’s scary is how many clients and potential clients we _don’t_ know are affected by an issue that FastComet refuses to acknowledge.

    I am in the process of moving my business elsewhere. Unfortunately, I am paid for a full year. Their website states you can “cancel your subscription at any time.” What it doesn’t tell you is that there is no pro-rated refund for the unused portion. I still pay for the months I do not use.

    If you use email, stay far away from FastComet.

    Trevor W

    1 — June 16, 2020

    Doubled yearly cost with vague explanations of improvements

    I switched to FastComet from InMotion as they supported Let’s Encrypt for free SSL certificates and InMotion wanted $100 yearly for a certificate. From the beginning I had problems setting up DNS for my website and MX records for my email. I could get either my website working or my email working. Since I hadn’t put any work into my website and I needed email I left my website non-functional. I contacted them for help resolving my issue several times but was never able to get everything working.

    Fast forward three years and I see that my yearly cost has more than doubled. I only received one email nine months before my renewal date about my existing plan being discontinued that didn’t mention anything about massive cost increases. After receiving my invoice and seeing that the cost has doubled I contacted them for a reason why there was such a massive increase year-over-year. Here’s the explanation I received from two different support reps: “we kept developing the service by adding technology, features, security features, etc. Given the improvements introduced, we had to adjust the cost. This will not only allow us to keep offering the same outstanding service but to further improve it as well.”

    There was no explanation of what “technology, features, and security features” were added. The only recourse given was either a 20% discount or a partial refund, minus the first month of service and domain privacy fees. Needless to say I have switched my website to DreamHost due to their transparent pricing and ease of integration with G-Suite. The switch was quick and painless, my only regret is I wished I had switched sooner.

    Michael L

    5 — May 18, 2020

    Since 2019, they’ve been pretty great.

    I’ve been a customer of FastComet on and off for over 5 years. I sometimes hopped around to SiteGround and a few others looking for a good deal on decent servers. The only top two in my book still are FastComet and SiteGround, I’d never use anyone else. Seems most other services are owned by EIG now, and housed in the same slow-ass American data center.

    As opposed to the slew of recent 1 star reviews, I understand people get upset about pricing and such, but personally – I’ve not had a problem since I re-signed up in mid-2019. The site is always available. I have websites that are visited internationally and nobody has ever mentioned on our FB pages that the sites were unreachable. My target audience is global through these various websites. (nevermore-horror.com, frisco.com.tw, lasotamusic.com, etc…)

    The speed is great – I use Singapore and Japan, as I’m in Taiwan. And despite being in Asia data centers, my Canadian friend said the site loads super fast in Ontario (jdtdesign.ca).

    Additionally, their support has been fast. It’s not lighting speed, but it’s quite fast. They have tickets, which are great as you can go back and reference past conversations. I mean, most web hosting providers have this system nowadays anyway, so it’s not really unique to FastComet. It just works.

    Now, all that said – I did leave them in ~2014 or so because I had a website that was working properly, but one day when I went to load it – wasn’t. I didn’t have any auto-upgrades set in WordPress, so there wasn’t any reason for this. Then, support went to fix it, and made it even worse to the point they couldn’t recover it. So, I naturally left. This was after about 1.5 years of being with them at the time.

    Years later, I was looking for a new deal again, and figured I’d give them a second chance. I’m 6 months in to my 1 year of service and with about 10 sites on my account, everything’s been running smoothly. Mind you, I also make backups more frequently these days which you should do on ANY provider (say, you get hacked, the service disappears, goes out of business, crashes, you make a mistake, etc). But I’ve not had to use them.

    Support top notch, server speed freakin’ amazing. I’m not paid to write this (as claimed by the 1 star reviewers below…)… but they sure could give me a discount on my next year if they wanted lol.

    So again: FastComet or SiteGround are great options. FastComet is a bit cheaper, but equally speedy and good. They are two completely different companies (you can google that I’m sure.) so it’s not biased toward this or that. Just my experience.

    Kevin M

    1 — April 5, 2020

    Failed to provide security

    These guys buy fake reviews and as they are paying TrustPilot the fake reviews stays. The FACT is I have been paying $250 to their hosting service and every week my website is down at least 2-3 times. I have lost thousands of dollars in sales with these people. Also be aware, there is no customer service phone and it’s only from opening tickets. There is no one to reply. We have opened a lot of tickets and they never resolved our problem. All they do is to say “sorry we couldn’t reproduce the issue” on our end. I am sure you will find better services somewhere else.

    Josh

    5 — December 27, 2019

    Can’t complain at all

    I have 5 sites with FastComet. Love them. They have spent countless hours on tech support getting them to help me migrate sites and make changes to the server side. When the site slows down I put in a ticket to have it looked at. They install some “scripts” and it seems to work much better. They have always done right by me and I would recommend them to anyone! I’ve talked with a lot of techs and what I have noticed is that they have 2 types of staff that answers the chat sessions, sales and tech support. If you get a sales guy they don’t seem to know how to do everything but they point you to tutorials that do. After struggling, I hopped back on the chat lines and got a tech support guy who did it for me without any hassle.

    Anyway, I can’t imagine that all the other hosting companies would spend hours making changes to the server for you to help you out. If they do then that’s just crazy! I am in the service industry (excavation and such as you can tell from my site) and I bill out hourly on services that are not included. These guys go way above and beyond and don’t charge for what they actually give you.

    Good luck and God bless!

    Guy

    1 — September 3, 2019

    Do not use FastComet

    I have been with FastComet for 3.5 years. I will be leaving them this week.

    The reasons are as follows:-

    *I frequently don’t receive e-mails people send to my domains hosted with FastComet. Upon reaching out to support, they claim my e-mails are working fine. This has been an ongoing problem since I have been with them.
    *My websites are INCREDIBLY SLOW to load.
    *They advertised that the price would never change, yet here I am with the price of my plan being doubled.
    *Along with the price of my hosting plan doubling, they are removing features – unlimited storage, unlimited transfers, free GlobalSign SSL for life, and the price is not changing.
    *Upon requesting a refund for my remaining months with them, FastComet declined to refund me, claiming nothing has changed (when it quite clearly has), and that PayPal can only refund for up to 6 months (so… refund me directly?).

    Anil P

    5 — August 7, 2019

    Solid Platform

    Been using FastComet for a few years and a very solid hosting. They recently announced a price update but will stick with them because of the solid support, help with several site migrations and not nickel and diming every feature. Some hosts charge for backups, restoring backups, and even something necessary such as SSL. I can confidently say, from experience that FastComet is better than GoDaddy, LunarPages, HostGator and SiteGround.

    Anna

    1 — April 20, 2019

    Incompetent

    AVOID
    The worst hosting service I have ever seen – didn’t migrate my site properly. Site is blank – white letters on white background as background photos not migrated correctly. The team can’t see a problem and thinks this is how the site looks like. The 24/7 support consists of getting messages which explain to the user why there is nothing the staff can do. I migrated the website on Monday, it’s Saturday and nothing works. Don’t even try to call their support number cause people there can’t understand anything you say. Seriously, avoid. It’s makes more sense to pay a bit more for a decent service. Decided to go back to my previous provider – switched away cause i thought they were expensive but having tried fastcomet I can see they are worth the money. Never had any issues with the previous provider. Nothing but issues with this one. Really surprised that there are professional websites recommending these guys and believe these are paid reviews.

    Arthur K

    2 — April 16, 2019

    Not very good service

    I tried Fastcomet for a few days. There’s no phone support, only via a ticket system. I was setting up a WordPress multisite migration, and the virtual subdomains didn’t work. Tech support took 20 minutes to respond, recommending I manually add the subdomains to my account, which isn’t how WP multisite works. They had created one which worked, but the others didn’t and couldn’t be deleted either. I cancelled my service. Slightly better response than Dreamhost, which took 24 hours to respond via a ticket. Still searching for another hosting option. They’ve responded that my payment will be refunded, but it hasn’t shown up yet. (a day later) Hopefully they’ll honor that promise.

    Trev P

    2 — March 4, 2019

    Incompetent support

    I tried to move a client to fastcomet but had several issues that their support was unable to resolve. Even their level 2 support seems to not have a clue how to administer a server. My main issues were:

    1. Server was unreachable for 2.5 minute periods at least 5 times/day (ssh sessions dropped, 404 page serves, etc). I provided exact times of the outages of the monitoring I setup but even after 4 days they could not even confirm the issue. Initially they denied it existed then after escalating to level 2 support said they were “working on it” without ever confirming the issue. I provided exact times of the outages and suggested searching the syslogs for events at those times but after 4 days they had no new info, only that they “were working on it”, never updated the ticket with any details or information on ANY progress.

    2. They were unable to redirect webmail, cpanel, etc to https so users do not accidentally use insecure login methods. All this even after I provided the exact apache rewrite statements (that only affect our domain name) and a link to cpanel’s docs on where to make this change. They basically don’t understand apache rewrite statements or simply don’t care about security at all. They repeatedly provided incorrect information (such as they can’t install our ssl certs for those shared locations, even as they were already installed and working, default for autossl in cpanel).

    3. Roundcube tables was corrupt on install. The error did give the exact problem (database table corrupted) and they were able to fix it within 1 day but no ticket updates before the fix was implemented.

    Overall I did not find their support very good. Communication was terrible (just “we’re working on it” until it was fixed or they said no fix was possible.) They were unable to fix most issues for days, if at all. In the end I’m migrating away because they cannot provide reliable service (several 2.5 minute outages a day).

    Ernest

    3 — December 18, 2018

    Uptime isn’t true

    I hosted my website in their server, i agree they got good customer support and one of the best and their price is cool. The uptime isn’t true, my website keeps going off and on and when i complained they said it’s DDOS attack, but this has happened for nearly a month plus. They need to improve on that.

    Olivier

    2 — November 17, 2018

    Performers who don’t care

    Well… We definitely aren’t happy using fastcomet services. As a digital agency, hosting is a must and finding a good partner is definitely extremely important. Let’s start with the pro’s by saying that they look to be indeed nice performers and the SAV is reactive.

    We don’t know what happened for us but we send to them 44 tickets in one year. Mainly optimizations asks obviously but last months only problems.

    In my opinion they gave us a blacked IP on our DS2, a dedicated server. We faced a amount of problems with our customers identified as spam sender so they weren’t able to send / recieve a simple mail.

    The optimization they have done on our eshops working on prestashop is simply a joke. They forced a “cache” which makes actualisation of the content purely and simply impossible.

    The thing I hated in their reaction is that they always put the blame on us, saying it’s not our fault, you’re using prestashop which is a huge system and that’s it. Well…. when the backoffice takes 8 sec to load by touching nothing in the core of presta. We can send them a ticket…

    Anyway, after the last mess we faced with the blacked IP, they told us we had to buy an extra addon as spam expert ( +-30$ / month) juste to be able to send mail what we did to save the face for our customers. But I’m really sceptic about keeping our collaboration with fast come.

    Too bad because I thought this started well.

    Attach just a short view of the tickets, hopefully for them, I’m running on a 13 inches!

    Zach

    4 — May 14, 2018

    Off to a slow start

    First off I would like to correct a couple falsehoods within createawebsitenow.com overview of Fastcomet.

    1. The price plan

    What is in the picture posted here and on Fastcomet is inaccurate. When you go to register on Fastcomet, you will find those prices only apply if you buy 3 years hosting paid in full. And if you do not, that 9.95 plan goes up. I could only afford to pay for one year in full up front and for the rocket premium plan and I paid 11.95 a month. Should you choose to pay monthly, it keeps going up. Also migration might be ‘free’, but Fastcomet charges an install fee of 19.95 unless you pay in full a minimum of 1 year of hosting.

    2. Free domain name for life

    If this is true I was never offered it. I have my domain through someone else already, but still would have been nice if they had offered.

    3. Migration in a hour?

    I do not think so. As I am wrighting this, it has been over 30 hours and still not complete. I have no ETA either, just support saying: “We are still working on it, please be patient.” This is very disappointing. No one wants to have their site to be down that long. I sent out a mass email to my network users (about 6K) informing them the site would be down for a few hours, giving some extra padding for unexpected issues. 30+ hours is a joke. I migrated the same network before in under 5 hours. And I ran into issues. Also, Fastcomet has access to my host and a full backup of my network hosted in the cloud. So I cannot see how in the world 30+ hours is acceptable. If support were to give me a solid reason I might be able to help, but when I asked what the hold up was, I did not get a straight answer.

    Regarding all the other pros and cons pointed out in this article by websitesetp.org, I could not tell you. If my site ever finishes migrating (Oxwall software), maybe I can run my own test and post a more thorough review.

    One of the plus sides dealing directly with Fastcomet support/tech services is that they are very fast to reply and friendly. I wish I could say the same for their migration process.