FastComet Reviews 2023: Are They Fast Like Comet?

Our expert review of FastComet focuses on Performance, features, support, and pricing.

FastComet, founded in 2013, offers all typical web hosting services ranging from Shared, WordPress, VPS, and Dedicated.

With “FastComet” as a name, I put their shared hosting on the test to find out whether they’re speedy, and coming next is the complete review of FastComet at Hostingstep.com.

FastComet Review: Summary

FastComet provides affordable shared hosting with stable uptime and performance. They offer a 45-day money-back guarantee and reasonable renewal prices.

This review will give you details of FastComet in terms of performance and features. 

What is FastComet?

FastComet is a managed cloud hosting with 24/7 support. FastCloud is the advanced cloud hosting platform used at FastComet to deploy your sites. 

It offers service from 11 data center locations powered by 24/7 expert support. FastComet handles your sites’ caching, site transfer, security, and CMS updates.

FastComet Pricing

FastComet plan starts at $3.95 per month. There is also managed VPS hosting at $59.99 per month. Here is a glimpse of all FastComet plans in brief.

• Shared hosting: Starts at $3.95 per month and renews at $9.95 per month.
• WordPress hosting: Starts at $3.95 per month and renews at $9.95 per month.
• Cloud VPS hosting: Starts at $38.95 per month and renews at $59.95 per month.
• Dedicated server: Starts at $104.25 per month, renews at $139 per month

The shared and WordPress hosting plan comes with a 45-day money-back guarantee. The VPS and Dedicated server plan come with seven day money-back guarantee. 

If you want the ultimate hosting experience, then FastCloud Extra is a great plan. It comes with many layers of caching mechanisms like Varnish, Apache Mod_Lsapi, Memcached, APC, and Opcache. This caching mechanism is available only on FastCloud Extra, priced at $5.95/month.

There will be some periodical deals where you can get started for low as $2.95/month. You can also pay with monthly billing instead of upfront yearly billing. However, the discounts on VPS/Dedicated plans are not that great.

FastComet Performance

1. Server Response Time

When it comes to checking the performance of hosting services, you may think speed is the only criterion to consider. However, there are many factors to be considered besides speed. Of course, it is always wise to start with the speed of the hosting service first. Speed or the Server Response Time is a crucial factor of performance for sure. 

I have my site hosted on the FastComet platform, and I have consistently monitored the server response time of my site using the Pingdom tool. According to the recent test, my FastComet site recorded an average server response time of 31 ms, which is comparatively better than the scores of many leading hosting services such as ChemiCloud, A2 Hosting, and Kinsta. Hence, FastComet sites are exceptionally fast. 

2. Uptime

Uptime is another essential aspect of performance, and without stable uptime, all efforts on the website will go in vain. Most importantly, downtime will drive potential traffic away forever. I have constantly been keeping up with the uptime of my FastComet website.

I recently tested my FastComet website’s uptime meticulously, and my site recorded an uptime of 99.98%. Most importantly, throughout the test, I didn’t notice even the slightest decline in the uptime. The host has maintained an excellent track record in terms of uptime. You can surely rely on FastComet for uptime.

3. Load Testing

As I pointed out earlier in this post, the performance doesn’t just end with server response time and uptime. We must also determine how far a hosting service can handle high traffic. Many websites experience sudden traffic spikes, and at times like these, a powerful hosting service can be the best relief. I perform Load Testing much more frequently on all the services I like to keep track of. In Load Testing, I pass on 500 concurrent traffic to a site and see how well it handles it or how fast the site responds. 

According to my last Load Testing on my FastComet site, my site recorded 323ms, which is a brilliant score.

4. Global TTFB

Do you want to have traffic for your site from multiple global locations just as many others do? In that case, you must ensure that the hosting service you choose has good TTFB across those places. As a part of the Global TTFB test process, I pinged my FastComet site from as many as ten global locations across the globe. 

My site recorded an average TTFB of 371.84 ms with a decent TTFB in all the places. The lowest TTFB was in Dallas, with 128.08 ms, and the highest TTFB was in Bangalore, with 679.46 ms. Hence, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that FastComet has a brilliant Global TTFB, and sites that look forward to targeting multiple global locations can make the most of this service.

5. Core Web Vitals

If you want to see your site rank higher on the search engines, you will need to strive to deliver an exceptional user experience alongside fast loading webpages. Yes, this is how it works now, and user experience has become an important ranking factor. However, it’s not worth working on user experience unless your site is hosted on a hosting platform with excellent Core Web Vitals. 

As per my last Core Web Vitals test, my FastComet site had a ‘Largest Contentful Paint’ of 568ms, a ‘Total Blocking Time’ of 0ms, and a ‘Cumulative Layout Shift’ of 0. Going by the results, FastComet certainly has a lot to offer regarding user experience, and sites can deliver the best user experience on this platform.

FastComet Pros

1. Reliable Performance

FastComet sites recorded an average response time of 321ms. I signed up with FastComet as a customer and got a hosting account. I installed WordPress and put the site to monitor for response time.

The performance is great as you can check from above data.

2. Impressive Uptime – 99.98%

FastComet sites returned a 99.99% uptime in the last three months. The official uptime commitment is 99.9%; however, our sites are performing better with 99.99%

The sites are monitored every 60 seconds once to monitor even a short downtime. There is also a secondary tool added to avoid false reports. Both of our tools reported the same number of uptime.

Is this uptime great? Yes. The company promises to offer a 99.95% uptime guarantee and achieving anything more than that makes the hosting reliable.

3. 24/7 Expert Support

FastComet commits 24/7/365 technical support for all customers. Unlike SiteGround, FastComet support is easily reachable via tickets or live chat. The company promises to offer 15 minutes response time for tickets; however, most of my tickets are attended in fewer minutes.

There is a no-account suspension policy for resource over-usage, and the team will notify you regarding the same. They have included a feature called Observer, where you can check the real-time usage of RAM, CPU cores, etc, which also reduces your time of connecting with a support agent.

Overall, FastComet delivers an excellent hosting experience with generous support, impressive performance, and uptime.

4. 11 Global Data Centers

FastComet provides its service from 11 data center locations, most by any other shared hosting company in the industry.

They have four North American locations, three in Europe, three in Asia, and one in Australia. The Complete List of FastComet data center locations are

• Chicago, United States
• Dallas, United States
• Newark, United States
• London, United Kingdom
• Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Toronto, Canada
• Frankfurt, Germany
• Singapore
• Mumbai, India
• Sydney, Australia
• Tokyo, Japan.

If you’re outside the USA, then FastComet will be a great choice as most big hosts never offer a data center option outside of the US & UK.

Which data center is best for you? Based on the above virtual map, you can choose a location. Choose Dallas for optimal content delivery throughout USA. If your site also gets traffic from Canada, then Chicago will be a good option.

5. Guaranteed Resources

FastComet provides guaranteed resources on all their plans, which is twice as high as their competitors. The list of resource allocation per package are

• FastCloud – 2 CPU Core, 2 GB RAM
• FastCloud plus – 4 CPU Cores, 3 GB RAM
• FastCloud Extra – 6 CPU Cores, 6 GB RAM

You can confirm the resource allocation from your control panel. The resource quotas are allocated per package too on a higher side, which is more than enough to run a high-traffic site on the FastCloud Plus or Extra plan.

You can log in into your cPanel and check the stats to confirm the CPU cores and RAM. If you’re just starting, the FastCloud $2.95/month is more than enough. Later you can upgrade to FastCloud Plus or Extra without any downtime.

FastComet Cons

1. No Free Domain Name

The company doesn’t provide you with a free domain name; however, it includes a domain transfer to transfer the domain to them, and FastComet will renew it for a year.

FastComet Features

Control Panel

Control Panels can be of different types, and while some popular control panels are WHM, cPanel, and Plesk, there are custom control panels with better usability and navigation. It is always wise to check what control panel a hosting service comes with since you may not be equally good at using all the control panels. 

However, FastComet comes with cPanel, and this offers users an excellent single point of control of managing the hosting account. Users can manage the databases, domains, PHP versions, and email accounts from one place on the cPanel.  

CDN

CDNs or Content Delivery Networks have turned out to be very effective in improving the load times of sites, and that’s why CDNs are extensively used all over the globe these days. FastComet uses Cloudflare and offers it for free on all the plans. With Cloudflare, sites have the advantage of static content delivery to their target audience across 155 global locations. 

Besides, Cloudflare provides sites with the benefits of auto minification, image optimization, reverse-proxy caching, and gzip compression. All these drastically reduce the bandwidth and server’s CPU usage. 

Staging

Staging is a convenient feature to test many crucial changes before applying them to a live site. As far as the Staging feature in FastComet goes, it is straightforward, and users can create staging sites using the Softaculous App Installer in the cPanel. 

After users finish testing the various modifications, they can push the changes in just one click using the Push to Live button. The feature is available for free in all the plans, and besides, users have the FastComet team to assist them if they face any difficulty during the staging process.

Backups

You need to take backup very seriously, for you can’t think of hosting a site without a proper backup system in place. Without a decent backup system, the chances are that you will lose your website files unexpectedly at any time. However, FastComet has a very reliable backup solution.

The host offers automated daily and weekly backups for free on all plans. When it comes to restoring a backup copy, it is unimaginably simple. 

Security

With the increasing number of Bruteforce and DDoS, website security has been very challenging these days. However, FastComet has done a remarkable job in terms of site security so far. 

If we look into the host’s security system, it looks extremely robust, backed by traffic encryption by Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates, Web Application Firewall, and Malware Scan to protect the servers from malicious traffic, DNS, and HTTP/S DDoS attacks. Further, FastComet gets the security more powerful with the BitNinja security solution.

They’re also quick to launch the new PHP 8.0 into their platform, which brings many security improvements.

Support

FastComet has a very dedicated and reliable support team, and this has been an important reason behind FastComet’s popularity over the years. The FastComet support team is exceptionally knowledgeable and friendly in assisting the customers. The support comprises 24/7 live chat and ticket support. 

Most importantly, connecting to the live chat hardly takes a minute, and tickets are resolved in 10 to 15 minutes. This kind of support service is hard to find with any other hosting provider, and it wouldn’t be wrong to say that FastComet has the best support team in the industry.

For me, the tickets are usually responded to within five minutes and the screenshot is one such example. They also provide you WordPress support like the above queries and in terms of support, I’m pretty sure, they are far better than many renowned hosts.

FastComet Review – Do I Recommend?

FastComet offers real value for money. Like, they don’t ask for yearly payment (although there are great savings), their response time is better than many managed WordPress hosts, their support is quick (they also included live chat support now).

If you look at the feature, you can get automated daily and weekly backups, free SSL/CDN, ease to the dashboard where they brought the most important features of cPanel in it. You actually don’t need to login into cPanel to perform regular works.

FastComet is not great in all aspects as the load testing results are great but not the best. Unless you have a high-traffic site, this won’t be a big issue, so that you can ignore these cons.

Apart from that, they’re a solid host for beginners who’re looking to get started for an affordable price.

Frequently Asked Questions 

Is FastComet good?

FastComet sites reported a powerful performance and uptime reliability. They also offer affordable hosting at $2.95 per month. Overall, FastComet provides good value for money.

Where is FastComet based?

FastComet, founded in 2013, was headquartered in San Francisco, California, the United States of America. 70+ employees are working at FastComet, operating in 11 data centers with more than 50,000 customers worldwide.

What does FastComet do?

FastComet provides many hosting services for its customers. They have got shared hosting, VPS, WordPress, and Dedicated Server hosting. All the plans come with 45-days money-back guarantee.

How to get FastComet coupon?

The easiest way to get a discount is to check the official site and click on the banner to view the maximum discounted pricing. The company offers discounts on Shared hosting but coupons for VPS and Dedicated hosting aren’t available all the time.

Who owns FastComet?

Dimitar Petkov is the Chief Technology Officer at FastComet. The company was a privately-owned, independent web hosting company that started in 2013.