Fasthosts Reviews

Fasthosts is one of the best WordPress hosting companies. Based in the United Kingdom, Fasthosts has been around since 1999. They offer state of the art shared WordPress hosting plans, cloud hosting, and dedicated servers. Fasthosts runs more than a million domain names from their dedicated data center. They offer free domain, lifetime SSL, professional email, malware scanning and DDoS protection.

In this detailed Fasthosts review, we’ll put their promises to test. These are the areas we will look into:

• Performance: Speed is important for making a successful website. How fast is Fasthosts?
• Reliability: Will your website be reliably available without any downtime?
• Customer Support: Can you easily get help when you need it?
• Features: Do they have all the features and tools that you’ll need?
• Pricing: How much it would cost and can you save money with Fasthosts deals?

This is going to be a detailed Fasthosts review with comprehensive analysis of Fasthosts hosting. If you don’t want to read the full hosting review, here is the quick scorecard with our verdict right below it.

Bottom line: We found Fasthosts to be fast and reliable. Their hosting plans are flexible with good customer support and an easy to use control panel.

That being said, let’s get into the detailed Fasthosts review so that you can compare our test results and make your own mind.

About Fasthosts

Fasthosts started in 1999 as a small hosting provider. Soon after the launch it was named the second fastest growing IT company in the UK. Fasthosts operates their own state of the art data centers that run on renewable power and are located in the UK. Apart from WordPress hosting, they also offer cloud hosting, domain names, email, VPS hosting, and dedicated servers.

Pros and Cons of Fasthosts

Each hosting company has some pros and cons that you need to be aware of beforehand. In some cases, the advantages may outweigh the disadvantages. Similarly, some times a disadvantage may be the deal breaker for your hosting needs.

Before making a decision, you may want to review these Fashosts pros and cons.

Pros

Here are some of the advantages that make Fasthosts a reliable hosting provider.

• Super fast hosting: Fasthosts prides itself in running their own dedicated data centers. This allows them to optimize their servers to provide a faster hosting solution to the customers.
• Quick Customer Support: They offer 24/7 live chat, phone, and ticket based support with great response time and knowledgeable staff.
• Free SSL They offer free SSL certificate enabled by default.
• Website migrations They offer to migrate your existing WordPress websites from your current hosting provider.

Cons

As we mentioned earlier, there are some downsides to every hosting company. The following are some disadvantages of choosing Fasthosts as your host.

• Limited email accounts: Their Go and Plus programs come with just one mailbox of 2GB storage.
• Multiple sites: Go and Plus plan support only 1 website, you’ll need Advance plan for multiple websites, which will cost you slightly more.

Fasthosts Performance

Performance is what makes most users switch web hosting companies as their businesses grow. This is why we decided to run our own tests to thoroughly review Fasthosts’ performance.

Fasthosts Speed Test Results

Slower websites kill user experience and damage your website’s performance in search rankings.

That’s why we ran the website speed test first. For this test we used Pingdom and here are the test results:

Our test site loaded in less than half a second, which is excellent. However, this test alone does not show the full picture because our test site has no traffic at all.

Let’s fix that.

Fasthosts Stress Test Results

Next, we wanted to see how well Fashosts handles more traffic under peak hours. To measure this, we used a tool called K6 (formerly called Load Impact).

We gradually built up to 50 unique visitors at once to see how the server would handle increased requests from multiple connections at the same time.

Here is our first stress test result.

The blue line represents page load time and the green line represents the number of users on the site.

Unfortunately, Fasthosts’ security considered our stress test requests to be a DDoS attack and kept blocking them. We simply weren’t able to test the scalability of FastHost so it might be fine for smaller businesses but larger websites may run into challenges.

Fasthosts Response Time Test Results

Fasthosts data center is located in the UK, so we wanted to see how their servers would respond to requests from different geographic locations. To measure this, we used a tool called Bitcatcha and here are the results.

As you can see, Fasthosts response times remained excellent in all locations and were particularly exceptional in the European region.

Fasthosts Uptime Test

Next, we wanted to test if our test site goes down during all these tests so we set up an uptime test for it. Here are the results:

As you can see our site remained up with no downtime recorded during the test period.

Fasthosts Hosting Plans & Features

Fasthosts offers a variety of hosting plans for different needs. This includes shared hosting, WordPress hosting, Email hosting, Website builder, and more.

Their main offering is WordPress hosting which is available in three plans. Each plan comes with a free domain name, lifetime SSL, and unlimited free migrations from your existing WordPress host.

WP GO: This their entry level plan and it comes with 25GB storage, 1GB database, 2GB mailbox, and supports 1 website.
WP Plus: This mid-level shared WordPress hosting plan includes 50GB storage, 2GB database, 2GB mailbox, and supports 1 website. It has enhanced performance to handle more traffic.
WP Advance: This is their high-level shared WordPress hosting plan offering 1TB storage, 10 databases 1GB, 10 mailboxes 2GB, supports 10 WordPress sites.

The Go plan is a bit limited, but the Plus plan seems good to start a new WordPress website. Both Plus and Advance WordPress plans have more server resources and you can increase those resources from your hosting control panel.

Fashosts Hosting Plan Features

Next, you would want to compare the features offered by Fashosts for their hosting plans. Apart from the limitations of each plan, here is what’s included in each hosting plan offered by Fasthosts.

• 1-Click WordPress installer
• Free website migrations
• Free domain and SSL certificate
• 24/7 Ticket, phone, live chat support

You’ll manage your hosting plan using the Fasthosts custom control panel. This is a cPanel alternative and may look different than other WordPress hosting companies.

Support and Customer Service

Fasthosts offers 24/7 customer support service via email tickets, phone, and live chat.

The live chat support is available from Monday to Friday between 09.00 AM and 08.00 PM GMT.

They also maintain a comprehensive Knowledge base and a forum on their website where you can post your questions. The support team is active in the forums, and most questions are answered within 24 hours.

Customer support staff is knowledgeable and eager to help. Live chat response times are fast and email tickets are mostly answered in less than 24 hours.

Self help literature is extensive and allows advanced users to easily fix things on their own without contacting customer support.

Conclusion: Is Fasthosts Right for You?

Now that you have read through our entire Fasthosts review, you might be wondering whether Fasthosts is the right web host for you.

After reviewing and testing Fasthosts thoroughly, we believe that they are a reliable WordPress hosting service.

They offer flexible hosting plans, easier upgrades, and faster servers. They are located in the United Kingdom which makes them a particularly good option for users located in Europe.

However, limited live chat hours and slower email / phone support makes them a little less suitable for absolute beginners.

We recommend Fasthosts to DIY users who want affordable prices, high uptime guarantee, and are comfortable figuring things out on their own using the comprehensive knowledge base.

Ready to get started with Fasthosts? Click here to select your Fasthosts plan today.

Fasthosts Coupon

Fasthosts is offering WPBeginner users an exclusive 80% discount on WordPress hosting with a free domain name and SSL certificate.

Simply use WPBeginners’ exclusive Fasthosts coupon code to claim your discount. All you have to do is click on this link to purchase and the discount will be automatically applied.

Frequently Asked Questions About Fasthosts

Following are a few of the commonly asked questions (FAQs) about Fasthosts.

1. Where is Fasthosts based?

Fasthosts is headquartered in the United Kingdom and their data center and servers are also located in the UK.

2. Is Fasthosts good for WordPress?

Fasthosts is good for WordPress websites. They offer a WordPress hosting plan that makes it super-easy to make a WordPress website.

3. Does Fasthosts use cPanel?

No, Fasthosts doesn’t use cPanel. Instead, they have their own custom control panel that offers similar functionality.

4. Does Fasthosts offer email service?

Yes, Fasthosts offers email service. With their WP Plus and WP Go plans, you’ll get one 2 GB mailbox. WP Advance plan allows you to host 10 WordPress websites and you can get 1 2GB mailbox for each site. Additionally, you can purchase email service as an addon to your WordPress hosting plan.

4. Can I cancel Fasthosts hosting?

Yes, you can cancel Fasthosts hosting. They offer a 30-day money back guarantee for all their shared hosting and WordPress hosting plans.

Ready to start with Fasthosts? Get 80% off on your Fasthosts plan by clicking here to sign up for Fasthosts. The discount will be auto-applied.