High-Quality, No-Frills Worldwide Hosting

Most hosting providers don’t take too long to tell you what their main draw is. Sometimes, it’s right there in the name. FastComet promises to be fast… like a comet.

The thing is, promises or not, reliably good speeds are the minimum you should expect from a top hosting provider. Does FastComet offer anything else to stand out from the competition?

I spent six weeks carefully testing and researching to discover just that. FastComet may lack attractive extra features like a proprietary hosting management panel or a built-in website builder, but it provides reliable hosting for beginners and outstanding customer support. The affordable prices (before renewal), intuitive account interface, and complete toolkit make it especially great for small to medium businesses looking for a well-rounded hosting solution.

Where FastComet really stands out, though, is its datacenter distribution in usually overlooked areas like Tokyo and Mumbai. If you’re looking for a host that will provide excellent performance in East and South Asia, FastComet is the clear choice.

Is FastComet right for you, or should you look for something more feature-rich? Keep reading to find out.

A Well-Rounded Set of Features With Few Standouts

FastComet doesn’t have any grave blind spots in the feature department. It offers a robust security suite, helpful migration features, and just about everything you’d expect from a modern, high-quality hosting provider. Though they are great on their own, when used in tandem, these features helped me set up and test my hosting experience painlessly.

Outside of very good data center distribution though, I struggled to find many standout features for FastComet. Though it lacks nothing important, it also doesn’t do much to give itself a particular edge over the competition, like Hostinger’s proprietary hPanel or InterServer’s cheap unlimited resources.

Excellent Data Center Distribution in Hard-To-Reach Locations

FastComet might not have the greatest data center density around the world, but its variety is still one of its greatest assets. See, while there are plenty of hosting providers that offer global coverage, you’d be hard-pressed to find an entry-level option with good loading speeds in regions like India, Japan, and Singapore.

Usually, if you want your website to provide good quality to these regions, you’d have to fork over a lot of cash for premium options like Google’s Cloud Servers. Fortunately, FastComet’s Asia-based servers aren’t just for show. As I found in my performance tests (more on that below), FastComet delivers excellent and consistent performance in these regions.

FastComet also supports easy integration with CloudFlare’s content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is a useful service for reducing your website’s worldwide loading times by creating cached versions of your site in multiple locations around the globe.

In other words, FastComet provides plenty of features to ensure that your website has good global reach, even in frequently overlooked areas. Considering its focus on global performance, though, it would be nice if the service was available in more languages than English.

Free Daily Backups for Extra Security

Website backups are an essential tool for ensuring your website security. A backup helps restore your site in case of a malware attack or data loss. This is why it’s so surprising that many hosts don’t offer automatic backups on their starting plans or only for an extra fee. Not FastComet, though. Even on the cheapest shared hosting plan, FastComet provides 7 free daily backups.

That number jumps to 30 if you decide to go for the FastCloud Extra plan, and the customer support service is always available to help you restore your site. That means that regardless of how much you’re paying, you can count on FastComet to restore your website and minimize the damage.

Expand Your Hosting Capabilities With FastComet’s Perks

Just because FastComet doesn’t offer the biggest feature catalog out there, it doesn’t mean that you can’t equip your hosting with a little extra. FastComet’s perks are discounts and integrations with third-party services that can help expand your capabilities.

In all honesty, I would’ve preferred full integrations with third-party services over discounts, but I’ll take what I can get.

If you want to improve your search engine rankings, all of FastComet’s shared hosting plans integrate with Attracta SEO, as well as giving you a discount of 30% for SE Ranking’s services. Besides that, you get a significant discount for the WP Rocket plugin, iSenseLabs OpenCart extensions, and the Sitecake page builder.

FastComet Features at a Glance

FastComet puts a lot of effort into making its proprietary account management interface easy to use. It’s sleek and well-organized, and it’s easy to find the tools you need at any moment. Though it doesn’t offer a proprietary hosting panel like some other hosts, FastComet gives you the tried-and-tested cPanel interface.

Creating a New Account with FastComet

To create a new account with FastComet, all you have to do is go to its website, select the ideal hosting plan, and click on Get Started. Then, you’ll have the option to register a free domain (with select top-level-domains (TLDs) like .store, .tech, or .site) or use one you already own. After that, you’ll simply have to input your details in the Account Information section.

Then, scroll down to where it says Product Information and double-check your chosen plan, data center, and renewal period. You can also choose to add extras to your plan, such as a search engine optimization (SEO) audit or domain registration for top level domains (TLD) like .com and .net.

After that, it’s just a matter of entering your credit card or PayPal details, checking the “terms of service” box, and clicking the checkout button. You’ll get access to FastComet’s client area as soon as your payment is processed.

Connecting a Domain and Installing WordPress

The first time you access your FastComet client area, you’ll get access to a handy Getting Started walkthrough to guide you through the process. Since you take care of domain registration directly through the sign-up process, you don’t need to worry about the process of connecting a domain. That said, if you want to register or connect a new domain to your FastComet account, all you have to do is click on the Domains tab in your client area.

To create a WordPress site, it’s just a matter of selecting your hosting plan on the Home tab and clicking on the Access cPanel button. On your cPanel, simply click the WP toolkit tab followed by the Install WordPress button. After that, you just have to follow the instructions on the screen.

Free Managed Transfers for a Smooth Transition

If you already own a website, you won’t have to worry about the details of making the transition to FastComet yourself. On every one of its hosting plans, FastComet offers at least one free managed website migration. The key word here is “managed.” All you have to do is provide your previous control panel URL, account, and password, and the FastComet team will take care of migrating your site securely to its own servers.

On the FastCloud Plus and FastCloud Extra plans, you get up to 3 free website migrations. If that’s not enough, FastComet can transfer additional websites for a modest fee.

Though each of FastCloud’s shared hosting plans technically classify as cloud hosting, there’s a lot more emphasis on the shared part. Shared cloud hosting means (as the name implies) that you will be sharing server resources with other users. The cloud-based infrastructure means you’ll have greater downtime protection and built-in redundancies. However, if several other websites on the same shared server sustain prolonged spikes in traffic, it may still impact your site.

As your website grows, you might want a full virtual machine with dedicated resources. Luckily, FastComet offers fully managed virtual private servers (VPSs). Once again, “fully managed” means you won’t have to worry about the technical aspects of server maintenance, so you can get the full benefits of a cloud VPS without having to configure it yourself.

Hacked Websites Recovery

FastComet offers proactive monitoring and a robust security suite. If your site is somehow ever on the receiving end of a malware attack, you’ll get free technical support and security patches to ensure it isn’t vulnerable to the same kind of attack again.

I might already have spoiled the results a little, but yes, FastComet is very fast. Thanks to its 11 data centers around the globe, it’s also one of the best hosts if you want to get a good performance in South and East Asia.

What I’m sure I haven’t spoiled yet, however, is how I got to these conclusions. Here at WebsitePlanet, we pride ourselves on having one of the most meticulous processes for reviewing hosting providers out there. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty, you can check out this in-depth article.

The short version is this: We built a site with everything a respectable, modern landing page should include, like large images, scrolling effects, and calls-to-action. Then, we hosted it using FastComet’s FastCloud plan, and measured its performance for a month.

For this host in particular, I wanted to check if it’s as viable in the US as it is in Asia. So, after two weeks of testing with a datacenter in Newark and a monitor in Chicago, I asked the FastCloud team to change my website’s datacenter location to the one in Tokyo and started monitoring local performance there. FastComet’s performance grades in the US were good, but in Tokyo, they were great.

GTmetrix

We use GTmetrix to test the local performance of our sites. In this case, I set an hourly monitor over a period of at least two weeks for each region. In the US, our site maintained respectable typical loading speeds of about 1.7s and kept well below the 2s mark for almost all instances.

In Tokyo, the results stayed well below the 1.5s mark during most of the testing period. If you’re an eagle-eyed viewer, you might have noticed something important. Namely, that Newark isn’t Chicago. That means that the monitor for Japan was literally closer than the one in the US. Could that explain the speed difference?

Well, yes, and no. Physical proximity will definitely affect loading times. But when it comes to data center locations, a couple hundred kilometers shouldn’t have any significant effect on loading times. Still, I wanted to know for sure. I ran GTmetrix with a monitor in Busan, which is roughly the same distance from Tokyo as Chicago is from Newark. I got a result of 1.4s, which is well into the normal range for the Tokyo datacenter’s performance.

The overall results still point to the Tokyo data center performing better.

Sucuri Load Time Tester

The Sucuri Load Time Tester is our go-to tool for testing our website’s global performance. I’ll say it, reach isn’t FastComet’s strong suit. Though the loading times for North American regions were very respectable, performance got significantly worse with distance.

Surprisingly, the Tokyo datacenter not only delivered better local loading speed, but better worldwide performance too. Using the Tokyo datacenter, my site achieved loading speeds of under 3s all over the world.

This might not be the most impressive result I’ve seen, but you should take into account that this is without using a CDN. Though setting one up can be a bit of a hassle, it’s a must if your site is intended for a global audience.

UptimeRobot

We use UptimeRobot to test vendors’ server uptime. A high uptime percentage is not only essential to a good user experience, but many hosts provide uptime guarantees as part of their offering. FastComet is no exception, with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

FastComet delivered a perfect 100% uptime through the entire testing process. That’s including the period during the datacenter transition, which is as impressive a result as I could ask for.

FastComet offers a lot of options for contacting customer support. If you need to, you can use live chat, ticket support, email, and phone support, all of which claim to be available 24/7. I wanted to test the quality of FastComet’s support for myself, so I tried contacting it through as many channels as I could in the most varied time window possible.

I started out by calling the sales number, pretending to be a potential new customer. It took less than a minute for a support representative to pick up, and when they did, they were able to answer every one of my questions, which ranged from the software specifications of FastComet’s servers to its multinational support and CDN integration.

Now, as part of the testing process, I also contacted live chat support about two weeks in to request my website be transferred from the Newark datacenter to the Tokyo one. The response was also near-immediate, though not as satisfying. The support representative informed me that for that kind of request, I’d need to submit a support ticket, and then provided me with the necessary steps to follow.

So, I submitted my technical support ticket in the middle of the weekend, not expecting to see a response until the following Monday. I got an answer in less than 20 minutes. Besides being efficient, the answer was also comprehensive, with detailed instructions on exactly what I needed to do to change datacenters and what that implied.

When I asked the agent to move all of the contents of my account to the Tokyo datacenter, they informed me that it would require some additional work on my behalf to change my site’s nameservers. “Not a problem,” I thought, as they also provided me with easy-to-follow and in-depth instructions to do just that. Turns out it wasn’t necessary, as some time later I got a message informing me that my support agent had already done all the work for me.

All in all, this was a very positive experience. Not only does FastComet offer a variety of support channels and wide availability, but on every occasion, support exceeded my expectations with its speed, thoroughness, and accessibility.

FastComet offers 3 different tiers for its shared hosting plans. The cheapest available option is FastCloud Basic, which costs $1.79 per month for a single website and 15GB of SSD storage space. The next plan up, FastCloud Plus, gives you access to unlimited websites and 25GB of SSD storage. Finally, FastCloud Extra gives you access to 35GB SSD and a 300% performance boost (or so FastComet claims).

If you’re looking for something more advanced, FastComet also offers 4 managed cloud VPS plans and dedicated server hosting. These are competitively priced with a decent range of features.

Whichever plan you choose, pay close attention to its renewal price. While FastComet’s initial prices are lower than the industry standard, the renewal pricing can be as high as five times the original. Even after renewal, FastComet is still a fairly affordable provider, and I’d say it’s worth its price. However, you should know how much you’ll really be paying if you’re planning on sticking with it for a long time.

FastComet offers a 45-day money-back guarantee, which is quite generous, even compared to similar budget hosting providers. I recommend that you sign up for a yearly plan and test it out for at least a month. If you do decide that it’s the right hosting provider for you, you can ask for a refund and then sign up for a triennial plan, which will give you the discounted initial rate for the greatest amount of time.