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FastComet Vs SiteGround Introduction

FastComet was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in San Francisco. The hosting company has over 50,000 active clients worldwide. The service is well known for its excellent performance, security, and support. 

FastComet WordPress

SiteGround was established in 2004 and is trusted by 2,000,000 domains. The service offers easy website management and is exceptionally fast and secure. Further, the service comes with many advanced tools and features.

This post will walk you through the various important aspects of the two services, including pricing, performance, and features. Reading this post till the end, you will have excellent clarity about the two services and the way they work.

FastComet Vs. SiteGround: Pricing

FastComet comes with 3 different shared hosting plans, and they are based on the number of sites, SSD Space, Unique visits per month, CPU Cores, and RAM. You can start for as low as $3.95 per month, and here are all the plan details: 

  • FastCloud: $3.95 per month, Single site, 15GB SSD Space, 25,000 Unique monthly visits, 2 CPU Cores, and 2 RAM
  • FastCloud Plus: $5.95 per month, Unlimited sites, 25GB SSD Space, 50,000 Unique monthly visits, 4 CPU Cores, and 3 RAM
  • FastCloud Extra: $9.95 per month, Unlimited sites, 35GB SSD Space, 100,000 Unique monthly visits, 6 CPU Cores, and 6 RAM

Now, get FastComet Coupon code and enjoy 60% OFF on all plans. Customers can have the following features in all the plans:

  • Free Website Transfer
  • Daily Backups
  • Free Cloudflare CDN
  • Let’s Encrypt SSL
  • BitNinja Server Security
  • Multiple PHP Versions
  • Unlimited Email Accounts
  • 24/7 Human Support

SiteGround has 3 shared hosting plans, based on the number of websites, webspace, and monthly visits. Customers can start for as low as $4.99 per month with SiteGround. Here are the plan details: 

  • StartUp: $4.99 per month, 1 website, 10 GB Web Space, 10,000 visits monthly
  • GrowBig: $7.99 per month, Unlimited websites, 20 GB Web Space, 25,000 visits monthly
  • GoGeek: $14.99 per month, Unlimited websites, 40 GB Web Space, 100,000 visits monthly

The following features are available in all plans:

  • Free SSL
  • Daily Backup
  • Free CDN
  • Free Email
  • Managed WordPress
  • Out-of-the-box Caching
  • Unlimited Databases
  • 100% renewable energy match
  • 30-Days Money-Back

FastComet Vs. SiteGround: Performance

Server Response Time

When it comes to testing the performance, we have to consider a lot of factors such as server response time, uptime, load handling capacity, global TTFB, and Core Web Vitals. I will get to all these factors one by one for the two services.

Let me start with the server response time first. As a part of the test, I hosted a site on each of the two platforms. I have been consistently monitoring the server response time of the two sites using the Pingdom tool. 

As per the last server response time test, my FastComet site recorded an average server response time of 322 ms, while my SiteGround site recorded an average server response time of 660 ms. Hence, FastComet has a much better speed than SiteGround.

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Uptime

Uptime is another very important aspect of performance. I have constantly been checking the uptime of my FastComet and SiteGround sites. According to the last uptime test, my FastComet site recorded an uptime of 99.99%. However, there were two outages during the test, and the downtime lasted for 2m 34s. 

On the contrary, I found SiteGround with a stable uptime of 100%, and most importantly, my SiteGround had no outages during the test. Hence, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that SiteGround has better uptime than FastComet, even though FastComet also has pretty good uptime.

Load Testing

It is also extremely crucial to find out if the hosting services can handle high traffic. This is especially important for online stores that have a constant risk of traffic spikes. I have constantly been performing load testing on my sites hosted with these services by sending 1000 concurrent traffic in 1 minute. 

In the recent load testing performed on these sites, both FastComet and SiteGround sites scored 45 ms in Clients Per Test (1000 Clients in 1 min). That’s certainly a good score, making both FastComet and SiteGround very reliable in terms of load handling.

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Global TTFB

Global TTFB is another aspect that you need to pay close attention to, especially if you plan to host a site that would rely largely on multiple global locations. I have been testing the Global TTFB of all the hosting services that I usually keep up with. I use ten global locations to ping my sites hosted with these services. 

In my last Global TTFB test performed on my FastComet and SiteGround sites, my FastComet site recorded an average TTFB of 371.84 ms with a decent TTFB in all the ten places. The site recorded the lowest TTFB in New York with 20.35 ms and recorded the highest TTFB in Sydney with 696.6 ms. 

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My SiteGround site recorded an average TTFB of 861.03 ms. However, the service had a TTFB of more than 1 second in 4 places. Hence, FastComet has a leading edge over SiteGround in terms of Global TTFB.

Core Web Vitals

Site ranking depends a lot on the user experience they deliver these days, and that’s why sites have to work hard on user experience. However, nothing will work unless a site is hosted on a hosting platform with decent Core Web Vitals. This is where the Core Web Vitals test comes into play. I have been testing the Core Web Vitals of various hosting services. 

As per my last Core Web Vitals test, my FastComet site recorded a ‘Largest Contentful Paint’ of 0.690 s, a ‘Total Blocking time’ of 0.021s, and a ‘Cumulative Layout Shift’ of 0. My SiteGround site recorded a ‘Largest Contentful Paint’ of 0.876 s, a ‘Total Blocking Time’ of 0.006s, and a ‘Cumulative Layout Shift’ of 0. 

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FastComet has the lower Largest Contentful Paint than SiteGround. In addition, SiteGround has a lower Total Blocking Time than FastComet. However, going by the results, both FastComet and SiteGround have good Core Web Vitals. Therefore, sites hosted on these platforms can certainly get a lot of help for enhancing the user experience for their visitors.

FastComet Vs. SiteGround: Features

Data Center Locations

Datacenter locations play a very important role in hosting since hosting a site from the closest server to a site’s audience is considered the best practice for fast site loading. However, this is only possible if the hosting service you choose has many data center locations to choose from or at least the closest data center location to your audience.

FastComet comes with 11 data center locations across the US, Europe, and Asia, while SiteGround has 6 self-owned data center locations across the globe. Of course, 6 to 11 data center locations are a good number of server options. Still, even then, you must always make sure that the hosting service you choose has the best data center location for your target audience. 

CDN

CDNs or Content Delivery Networks are extensively used these days and are very effective in improving the speed of sites. FastComet and SiteGround offer FREE Cloudflare CDN on all plans, giving sites various advantages such as reverse proxy caching, auto script minification, image optimization, and 155+ global locations to distribute static content. 

This drastically reduces the bandwidth usage and server’s CPU usage, which eventually helps the sites load at a blazing fast speed. 

Staging

Staging is a handy feature to test different modifications on the copy of your live site and push the finalized changes to the live site. That way, your live site remains unhampered. 

FastComet offers this feature for FREE on all its plans, and customers can create a Staging site from the Softaculous Apps Installer from the cPanel. The process is pretty straight and simple. It takes about just a couple of clicks to create a Staging site, test the changes, and it is equally simple to deploy the changes to the live site. 

On the other hand, SiteGround has a much dedicated Staging feature in place with GIT integration. However, the Staging feature is missing in the StartUp plan. As far as usability goes, it is exceptionally simple to create a staging site on SiteGround. In addition, pushing the final changes to the live site is also ridiculously simple.

Backup

Before you can go ahead with hosting a site, you must make sure that the hosting service you choose has a reliable backup system. Unless you have a good backup system in place, you are at constant risk of losing your site anytime. 

I looked into the backup feature of FastComet, and I was quite impressed. FastComet has FREE automated daily backups on all plans, and customers can easily restore a backup copy anytime they like. 

SiteGround has an equally good backup system with automated daily backups available on all the plans for FREE. In addition, customers can easily find the 30 recent backups with SiteGround to restore anytime they want.

Security

Website security is a very crucial aspect and must be given adequate attention. Sites are vulnerable to dreadful online threats such as DDoS, Bruteforce, and other malware attacks unless your site is hosted on a platform with the best security setup.

As I looked into the security features of the two services, I was impressed with both. FastComet security features traffic encryption by Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates, Web Application Firewall, and Malware Scan alongside FREE BitNinja security on all plans. 

SiteGround, on the other hand, uses a custom web application firewall, AI Anti-Bot System, Let’s Encrypt SSL, and Linux containers alongside Google’s high security. Another important thing to consider about the two services is that none of the services had any security issues so far. Hence, you can largely count on these services for website security.

Support

No matter if you are a newbie or an expert, it’s quite likely for you to run into some technical difficulties at some point while you are trying to manage your site. While it’s pretty normal to get locked away by some technical complexities, you must ensure you don’t remain stuck for long, and that’s when a good support service comes into play.

FastComet has a great customer support team that has done a remarkable job over the years, backed by the most experienced and dedicated executives. Many reviews have ranked the FastComet support among the 1st and 2nd position in the industry. The FastComet support is extremely fast and comprises 24/7 assistance through live chat, tickets, and phone. 

SiteGround also has a dedicated support system to assist the customers with their technical difficulties. If we look into the track record of the Siteground support service, it has done a commendable job so far. The SiteGround support team assists the customers through 24/7 live chat, phone, and tickets.

Key Highlights

  • FastComet comes with affordable pricing and more resources than SiteGround.
  • FastComet has better server response time and Global TTFB than SiteGround.
  • FastComet has 11 data center locations, while SiteGround has 6 data center locations.
  • The staging feature is missing in SiteGround’s StartUp plan.
  • Both offer FREE CDN, FREE Automated Daily backup, reliable security, and support.

Summary: Based on our experience, FastComet offers better value for money than SiteGround. The only reason one can choose SiteGround is their control panel which is better than cPanel.

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