Fasthosts.co.uk review

First impression

Fasthosts is a seasoned and trusted hosting provider based in Gloucester, in the South Western part of the UK, that's been around since 1998. Back then, a 17 year old A-Level student named Andrew Michael couldn't find a suitable, cost-effective, and reliable hosting service to support his IT project, so he decided to create his own - and Fasthosts was born.

They power more than 320,000+ websites and 10,000+ servers from their own, purpose-built "green" data centers, all of which are ISO 27001 certified for security and ISO 50001 for power management. Apart from being a popular domain registrar, they offer a range of hosting solutions, including Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Server Hosting, and in 2019 they became the first UK provider of Microsoft Exchange 2019 emails. 

Signing up with Fasthosts is fast and hassle-free, and new customers will receive a free domain name, free migration, and a complimentary SSL certificate on most plans.

Trial Period

Fasthosts offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on their Shared Hosting. Customers can also take advantage of a 1-month free trial on their Online marketing tools.

Billing Cycle

They offer affordable hosting plans that are billed monthly or annually and are subject to a 12-month contract. VPS clients can also take advantage of discounted rates of 5% on a 24-month term, or 10% on a 36-month, term should they commit for longer.

Fasthosts accepts all major credit cards and PayPal as payment methods.

Control Panel

Fasthosts Shared Hosting comes standard with their own, award-winning Control Panel, from where customers can easily manage their sites, domain names, email mailboxes, and servers, as well as their account details. For VPS and Dedicated Server Hosting, users will have Plesk.

Limits

There are four options to choose from on their Shared Hosting plans, namely Start, Grow, Scale, and Pro. Their entry-level plan comes dirt cheap initially. They will only bill you 50p for the first 6 months and after that, the price drastically increases to £5 per month. This plan will give you a free domain name, 100GB SSD storage with 15 databases, and a single email address. Grow will give users 2x free domains, 250GB SSD space as well as a free 1-year SSL certificate, whilst Scale and Pro come bundled with 3x domains, 350GB SSD space, 3x Lifetime SSL certificates, and 5x free domains, 500GB SSD space, 5x lifetime SSL certificates respectively.

Their VPS Hosting has various options, that range from 2 vCPU, 2GB RAM with 80GB SSD space on the VPS M plan, all the way up to 8 vCPU, 24GB RAM with 240GB SSD space on the VPS XXL RAM package.

All plans come standard with unlimited bandwidth and a promise of 99.999% server uptime.

Website builder

Fasthosts has their own website builder that customers can use free of charge for the first month. For the most part it is a “drag and drop” builder that comes with a wide array of templates that is easy to customize without any coding or technical knowledge.

Security

Fasthosts will include a free SSL certificate with their Grow, Scale, and Pro Shared Hosting packages, but unfortunately, you will need to pay extra for Antivirus and Anti-Malware protection, a feature I feel should come standard in this day and age. This is only included in the backup plans that will set you back an additional £7.00 ex VAT per month for 50GB.

VPS plans come bundled with a customizable firewall, DDoS protection, a complimentary 256-bit SSL certificate, as well as a 2GB free Cyber Protect Basic backup solution powered by Acronis.

Their data centers, all UK based, are ISO 27001 certified and all Fasthosts accounts are protected by 2FA as an extra layer of protection.

OS

On the Fasthosts Shared Hosting packages, customers will have the option to choose between Windows or Linux operating systems. As for their VPS or dedicated servers, Linux-based operating systems like CentOs7, Ubuntu 20.04 / 22.04, Debian 10/11, Alma Linux OS 8, or Rocky Linux 8, are available for free of charge, but Windows Operating Systems will cost you extra.

Support

Their experts are on hand 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, should you run into any problems and need technical assistance. Most TrustPilot reviews rave about their excellent support, although it felt pretty average to me. Help is available 24/7 by phone, as well as a ticketing system and live chat, which is only available from Monday to Friday between 09.00 AM and 08.00 PM GMT, and customers will generally get a quick reply back from them - less than a minute in my case.

Fasthosts resellers will have their own designated support site through their own reseller control panel.

Customers can also check the System Status on their website for any updates on known issues or outages.

Conclusion