FastCow is a premium managed WordPress hosting provider that is currently hosting 25,000+ websites globally. It is ideal for website owners who are looking for premium WordPress hosting.
We started testing their F1 plan priced at $21/month from May 2026, and as of August 2026, we’ve collected 100 days of performance data (May 16 to August 24, 2026, 144,000 checks) across five different tests.
We’ve compared the performance of FastCow with its competitors like WP Engine, Kinsta and Rocket.net in each section for the same 100-day time period.
Note: Our FastCow review is based on our testing of FastCow’s F1 plan. The performance figures are measured data; the recommendations reflect our editorial assessment of those results. Unless stated otherwise, everything here applies to the F1 plan, while other FastCow plans may produce different benchmark results.
Performance Overview
FastCow records an average response time of 456ms, 99.98% uptime, a 43ms load test with zero errors, a global TTFB of 376ms, and a WPBench score of 9.3/10.
FastCow Review: Performance Tests in Detail
TTFB Response Time
| Figure | Value |
|---|---|
| 100-day average | 456 ms |
| Best daily average | 374 ms |
| Worst daily average | 512 ms |
| Spike ratio (worst ÷ average) | 1.12 |
FastCow recorded an average response time of 456ms. We have collected this response time based on 100 days of testing with the test site pinged every 60 seconds from 19 North American locations through our testing tool.
The best daily average and worst daily average stand between 374ms and 512ms, which indicates the spike range is often tight with no massive spikes. This indicates the server is stable and not overloaded. Usually, in the case of overloaded servers, we see the worst daily averages go around 900-1000ms.
Methodology: We use the Pingdom synthetic monitoring tool to measure the average server response time. The FastCow test site is pinged from Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Matawan, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle, St.Louis, Tampa, Washington, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. This runs 24/7, generating 1,440 datapoints per day, 144,000 across the May 16 to August 24, 2026 window.
Uptime
| Figure | FastCow USA |
|---|---|
| Uptime (exact) | 99.9846% |
| Outages | 5 |
| Total downtime | 22 minutes |
FastCow recorded an average uptime of 99.98%, which is excellent. The company offers a 99.9% SLA and the uptime we captured is within the range.
Methodology: We use the same Pingdom synthetic monitoring tool to measure uptime. The test site is pinged from 19 North American locations at 60-second intervals. We keep a threshold of 30 seconds and if the site is unresponsive beyond that, it is marked as downtime.
Load Handling
| Host | Avg response under load | Errors | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| FastCow USA | 43 ms | 0 | Clean full run |
FastCow offers clean load handling in our test. We sent 0-100 concurrent visitors to the site and it recorded a 43ms response time with 0% errors, which means it handled all 100 visitors without any downtime or slowness. The scores are on par with other managed WordPress hosts.
Methodology: We send 0-100 concurrent users to the test site’s homepage for 60 seconds and then the average response time is measured. The lower the response time, the faster the performance. Our load test is done from the US East location using the Loader.io tool.
Global TTFB
FastCow offers a decent Global TTFB score. It comes with a premium CDN powered by BunnyCDN, but it does static-only caching and doesn’t offer Edge caching.
It records a 376ms global TTFB score tested from 40 international locations. The score is excellent for hosts with static CDN, but the hosts with Edge caching offer faster response times, delivering faster loading times.
What does this mean to you? If you are running a US-only site, the Global TTFB score doesn’t matter as the origin server and the visitors are located in the same region (North America). But if your site receives global traffic, then I recommend you use Cloudflare APO instead, which costs $5/month to get faster global load times.
Methodology: The FastCow test site is pinged from 40 global locations across America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, and the TTFB of every location is collected to produce the final average global TTFB.
Server Hardware Test
| Host | WPBench score |
|---|---|
| FastCow USA | 9.3 |
FastCow achieves the highest server hardware score among the managed WordPress hosting providers in this comparison. It scored 9.3, and the closest competitor is Kinsta at 8.8.
The server hardware test is done using the WPBenchmark WordPress plugin, which runs a series of 21 individual tests to test the hardware performance like CPU, Database, Memory, WordPress core and Network speed. This test is crucial because hosting companies highlight their server resources on their sales pages but often put cap limits on customer accounts. Some managed WordPress hosting companies might cost $25/month, but often the server hardware score is average, around 6 to 7.
However, FastCow achieving the highest score indicates there are no restrictions added to your account. What does this mean to users? Say you are running resource-hungry WordPress sites, WooCommerce stores or LMS sites. A low hardware score indicates a slower backend during high workloads, making the site slower for both website owners and visitors. With a score of 9.3, FastCow is an excellent host to run any complex site at better speed.
FastCow vs Competitors
| Metric | FastCow | WP Engine | Kinsta | Rocket.net |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Avg response time | 456 ms | 375 ms | 416 ms | 319 ms |
| Best / worst day | 374 / 512 ms | 282 / 463 ms | 355 / 547 ms | 244 / 371 ms |
| Spike ratio | 1.12 | 1.23 | 1.31 | 1.16 |
| Uptime | 99.9846% | 99.9798% | 99.9886% | 99.9950% |
| Outages | 5 | 2 | 3 | 2 |
| Total downtime | 22 min | 29 min | 16 min | 7 min |
| Load test avg | 43 ms | 27 ms | 36 ms | Not testable |
| Load test errors | 0 | 0 | 0 | Not testable |
| Global TTFB (cached) | 376 ms | 65 ms | 477 ms | 66 ms |
| WPBench | 9.3 | 6.5 | 8.8 | 7.5 |
| Price / mo (annual) | $21 | $27 | $30 | $25 |
| Price / mo (monthly) | $25 | $30 | $30 | $30 |
Summary:
The first thing to compare is pricing. FastCow offers the most affordable pricing among its competitors for both monthly and annual pricing. With low pricing, FastCow also offers you the highest server resources at 9.3 compared to WP Engine with 6.5, Kinsta with 8.8 and Rocket.net with 7.5.
When it comes to Global TTFB, WP Engine and Rocket.net are better as they come with Edge caching. However, FastCow outperforms Kinsta, even though both these hosts offer a static-only CDN. Summarizing what we’ve shared earlier, if your origin server and target audience are within the North American region, the Global TTFB score doesn’t matter. But if you have a global audience, WP Engine and Rocket.net are ideal choices.
Load Handling performance is almost similar to WP Engine and Kinsta. Any host that handles 0-100 concurrent visitors under 50ms is equally good. We can’t test Rocket.net due to their security restrictions.
Uptime performance is close among all the hosts, with Rocket.net topping at 99.9950%, Kinsta next at 99.9886%, and FastCow third at 99.9846%.
FastCow offers a strong response time of 456ms. Google recommends up to 800ms TTFB response time as Good, and FastCow is good to go here.
Who Should Use FastCow?
If your target audience is in the USA and you want consistent response times and reliable uptime, choose FastCow.
If you are looking for premium managed WordPress hosting like WP Engine or Kinsta, then you can sign up for FastCow to get similar performance at a somewhat affordable price.
If you are looking to host a resource-hungry WordPress site that requires the maximum server resource allocation to handle massive workloads much faster, FastCow is the right choice.
If you are tired of monthly traffic limits per plan on WP Engine or Kinsta and want a host which offers no ceiling on traffic, FastCow is for you.
Who Shouldn’t use FastCow?
If you are looking for a service to cater to your visitors in Asia-Pacific, FastCow is not the best for you as it offers service from US and UK data centers only.
There is no edge caching CDN, so the global speed might not be appealing for sites with global traffic.
About FastCow
FastCow was founded by Sal Patel in 2023. He has been working in the industry for a decade with multiple hosting providers before founding FastCow. It offers services through two of its data centers in Dallas, USA and London, UK.
The company is privately owned with no VC involved. The company claims to have its own hardware like AMD EPYC Compute and NVMe storage and is not a reseller of other cloud services.
It includes all essential features like free backups, SSL certificates, 24/7 live customer support, developer tools like SSH and WP-CLI. It is powered by a custom control panel which is neat, simple and easy to navigate between options. It is one of the very few managed WordPress hosting providers to include email hosting on all its plans. It also integrates Cloudflare and Slack to manage your sites within its dashboard.
