FastComet provides data centers around the globe and is thus an attractive host for users from East or South Asia. It also has each of the fundamentals you would certainly expect from a strong host (though it doesn’t go through on way too many bells and whistles). FastComet is a good option for those who have just started but want to target an international public when you combine the outstanding customer support and ease of use
The TL;DR here is that hosting providers rarely take long to let you know what they focus on. If You Call a Jam: Well, some things are just right in the name. FastComet, as speedy… like a comet.
Promises or no promises, consistently good speeds are the absolute base level to be expected from a leading hosting provider. But does fastcomet have something more that makes it powered of competition?
I spent the past six weeks rigorously testing to find out. While the lack of some flashy extras, like a proprietary hosting management panel or in-house website builder, is definitely a strike against FastComet, it does deliver solid and reliable hosting for those starting on their web publishing journey. Small-to mid-sized businesses will benefit the most from this well-rounded and flexible hosting solution, although large enterprise networks can certainly get a lot out of it at a good price.
However, what sets FastComet apart is the fact that they have data centers located in cities which most other hosting companies ignore like Tokyo and Mumbai. If you’re looking
High-Quality, No-Frills Worldwide Hosting
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.
Great distribution of data centers in remote areas.
FastComet may not have the most data centers globally, but its diverse selection is still a key strength. Many hosting providers have global coverage, but it’s difficult to find an entry-level option with fast loading speeds in countries such as India, Japan, and Singapore.
Normally, to ensure high-quality service in these regions, you would need to invest in expensive options like Google’s Cloud Servers for your website. FastComet’s Asia-based servers are not just for show; they are functional and reliable. In my performance tests, FastComet consistently performs well in these areas.
FastComet supports easy integration with CloudFlare’s CDN. A CDN speeds up website loading times by storing cached versions of the site in various locations worldwide.
FastComet offers many features to help your website reach a wide global audience, including frequently overlooked regions. It would be great if the service was offered in more languages beyond just English, given its emphasis on global performance.
Free Daily Backups for Extra Security
Backing up your website is crucial for keeping it secure. Having a backup of your site is important for restoring it in the event of a malware attack or data loss. Many hosts do not include automatic backups on their basic plan or charge extra for them, which is surprising. FastComet is not the subject. FastComet offers 7 free daily backups on their most affordable shared hosting plan.
Choosing the FastCloud Extra plan boosts the number to 30, with customer support always ready to assist you in restoring your site. No matter how much you pay, FastComet will restore your website and reduce the damage.
Expand Your Hosting Capabilities With FastComet’s Perks
Backing up your website is crucial for keeping it secure. Having a backup can help you recover your site if it is affected by malware or experiences data loss. Many hosts do not include automatic backups in their basic plans and may only offer them for an additional fee, which is surprising. Not FastComet. FastComet offers 7 free daily backups on their most affordable shared hosting plan.
If you choose the FastCloud Extra plan, the number increases to 30, and customer support is available to assist with site restoration. FastComet will restore your website and minimize the damage, no matter how much you are paying.
Expand Your Hosting Capabilities With FastComet’s Perks
Although FastComet may not have the largest feature selection, you can still add additional features to your hosting plan. FastComet offers discounts and integration with third-party services to help enhance your capabilities.
I would have rather had full integrations with third-party services instead of discounts, but I will accept what is offered.
FastComet’s shared hosting plans come with integrated Attracta SEO to help improve your search engine rankings, along with a 30% discount for SE Ranking services. Additionally, you receive a great discount on the WP Rocket plugin, iSenseLabs OpenCart extensions, and the Sitecake page builder.
FastComet Features at a Glance
| Free domain name? | ✔ |
| Free SSL? | ✔ |
| Money-back guarantee | 45 days |
| Uptime guarantee | 99.9% |
| Managed hosting features? | ✔ |
| Data centers | 3 in the US, 2 in Europe, 1 in Canada, 2 in Asia, 1 in India, 1 in Australia |
An Incredibly Smooth and User-Friendly Hosting Experience
FastComet works hard to ensure that its exclusive account management interface is user-friendly. It is streamlined and tidy, making it simple to locate the necessary tools quickly. FastComet does not have its own hosting panel, but provides the familiar cPanel interface.
Creating a New Account with FastComet
To make a new account on FastComet, just visit their website, choose your hosting plan, and click Get Started. You can choose to register a free domain with certain top-level domains like .store, .tech, or .site, or use one you already have. Then, input your details into the Account Information section.
Next, review the Product Information section to confirm your selected plan, data center, and renewal term. You have the option to include additional services in your plan, like an SEO audit or registering top level domains such as .com and .net.
Then, you just need to enter your credit card or PayPal information, agree to the terms of service, and click the checkout button. Once your payment is processed, you will have access to FastComet’s client area.
Connecting a Domain and Installing WordPress
When you log into your FastComet client area for the first time, you will be provided with a helpful Getting Started walkthrough to help you navigate the process. You don’t have to worry about connecting a domain because you register it directly during sign-up. To register or connect a new domain to your FastComet account, simply click on the Domains tab in your client area.
To make a WordPress site, choose your hosting plan on the Home tab and click the Access cPanel button. To install WordPress, click on the WP toolkit tab, then click on the Install WordPress button on your cPanel. Afterward, follow the instructions displayed on the screen.
Free Managed Transfers for a Smooth Transition
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.
Managed Cloud VPS Plans for Extra Performance
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.
4.7
Performance
Good Performance in the US, Incredible Performance in East Asia
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 mostmeticulous 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.
What I found: FastComet managed typical fully-loaded times of about 1.7 seconds in the US and 1.2 seconds in Tokyo. Though that 0.5s difference is enough to affect search engine rankings and comeback rates, it is still a good result.
It also delivered 100% uptime, even while my test site was being moved to a new datacenter – likely thanks to the cloud-based infrastructure.
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.
4.7
Support
Fastcomet’s Customer Support Is Nothing Short of Excellent
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.
4.8
Pricing
Cheap Starting Prices, With Steep Renewal Fees
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.
