SiteGround vs. FastComet

SiteGround versus FastComet, what do they have to offer? Which is the better web host? Let’s find out.

Signing up with a suitable web host is like finding the land for your farm. What is the point if everything gets washed away by a flood? The most beautiful and responsive websites would be useless if it’s hosted by a slow or insecure web host.

SiteGround is often regarded as the champion of web hosts. It has superb performance, and it’s certified by WordPress itself.

FastComet, on the other hand, is a relatively new web host. It is not big and this makes it uniquely suited for individualism in customer service.

Before you set up shop with SiteGround or hitch a hosting ride with FastComet, let’s analyze their strengths, defense, and differences. Then find out which will suit your needs better, but most importantly, which is the better web host. Pro tip: it’s the one that’s polysyllabic.

SiteGround vs. FastComet Overview

Founded in 2004, SiteGround has its head office in Sofia, Bulgaria. Fastcomet, on the other hand, busted into the hosting industry 6 years later in 2010 Fastcomet’s head office is in San Francisco.

As reputations go, SiteGround is known worldwide for five major things: Pocket-friendly prices, the best customer support money can buy, being multipurpose in the services they offer, arguably the best uptime and lightning-fast page load (if you are interested in more details about SiteGround in general, feel free to check our SiteGround Review, we’ll not go in-depth with the overview in this comparison articles as it should not influence your decision).

Fastcomet competes with them in many of these categories and is even better in some: Fastcomet surprisingly has even cheaper proving and absolutely no renewal upsell. They have the most comprehensive knowledgebase made simple with infographics. They also have great uptime and a record 10 datacenters than spans the whole world!

After seeing what both web hosts bring to the table, we decided that only meticulous comparison would do them justice. So we placed both web hosts under the lens to find out where they soar and where they fail. Make no mistake, we have a clear winner. But you have to stick around to find out.

Our clear and short examination will certainly help you select the one that suits your needs, and evidently, you’ll go agree with our verdict, as it’s backed up by data.

Performance Comparison

Customer support, extra features, and pricing don’t mean much if the web host drops the ball in speed and uptime. That is why we took the speed and response time test as seriously as we took Uptime. You don’t want your site to take forever to load, half of your customers will close the page. You also don’t want downtime at all, neither do we. So let’s get down to it.

Speed or “How fast does the entire website load?”

SiteGround or Fastcomet? We set up to find out by setting up speed and response time tests with dummy websites. Our speed test is a test of three parts. Speed and response time test by Pingdom, Bitcacha test and Load Impact test, here are the results.

SiteGround and FastComet tested with Pingdom

For the Pingdom test, we used real websites hosted by both web hosts with a page size of 1MB.

SiteGround Speed Test Result

The site hosting on SiteGround boasted a speed of less than 2 seconds in New York, London, and New Delhi. This is faster than most of any SiteGround Alternative and it’s a result we got Without any additional speed plugin, this is very good for a web host. Faster than 95% of websites hosted by other providers for a website with load (not dummy website).

Fastcomet Speed Test Result

Next, we checked for how Fastcomet USA servers respond with the same website after we migrated. Testing from the same locations, New York, London, and New Delhi, our site hosted on Fastcomet posted speed results of 2.9, 3.2 and 3.5 respectively. This is very slow compared to SiteGround but it isn’t at all close to the lowest we have seen.

Bitcacha Response Time Test

This is the most precise way to calculate the exact difference in the speed of both web hosts. Two web hosts, same website, same geographical area as hosting companies servers.

Which hosting is faster around the world? We made them go head to head in this table.

When the test results came in, we were shocked.

SiteGround outperformed FastComet in all the locations where they both have servers except in Singapore. SiteGround’s speed doubles that of Fastcomet in these places that we wondered if FastComet servers are of lesser build (they are, and we will get to that later). So we ran more tests and the results were the same. Of course, SiteGround lags behind in Dallas and Germany, two places where Fastcomet has servers but SiteGround does not.

According to Google’s latest research, 53% of people will leave a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Out of 10 locations, the website we hosted on SiteGround responded in less than 3 seconds for 7 servers. Based on these figures, it’s clear that SiteGround is the winner in terms of speed. Fastcomet may have more servers but it seems in this case, number does not equal power.

Bitcacha rates SiteGround C+ and Fastcomet D.

Load Impact With High Traffic Test

It is good to know the pure speed of your web host as well as speed from various servers across the world. But what happens when there is peak traffic? This is why the Load Impact test is important. We tested the site with 100 different visitors at a time to see how they would hold under heavy traffic and now we know.

[Here insert a chart showing SiteGround spiked a bit but remained mostly consistent with 100 users, but Fastcomet’s speed plummeted a number of times]

The green line represents page load time and the blue line represents the number of users on the site. As you can see, the SiteGround test site performed really well up to 100 users, it spiked a bit, but we are OK with that. FastComet’s speed plummeted a number of times at 50, 80 and 100. This shows that if you plan to do black Friday sales where people would rush to buy your products, it would be safer to host your site on SiteGround.

FastComet vs. Siteground for Datacenters and Server Locations

Both SiteGround and FastComet have several datacenters location to get your site closer to your primary site clients. I guess it’s good then, that both web hosts allow you to select where you want your server to be when signing up with them. And if you do not yet know, you can still change your server location later after sign up.

SiteGround’s servers are located in Chicago, London, Amsterdam, Milan, and Singapore. Fastcomet is on another class of its own when it comes to datacenter locations. They have strategically placed servers all over the world in North America, Europe, and Asia. The specific locations are:

• Chicago – The United States (USA)
• Dallas – The United States (USA)
• Newark – The United States (USA)
• Toronto – Canada (CA)
• London – England (UK)
• Amsterdam – Netherlands (NL)
• And 4 more… (Click here to find the closest location for your audience)

They have 10 datacenters giving them an incredible web-like reach across the world and to your site users. Forget one ring to rule them all, 10 datacenters to rule them all.

CDN (Content Delivery Network)

Although it is good to have servers all over the world, it is even better if your web host grants CDN access. Both SiteGround and FastComet come with CDN. As a speed redundancy project, it helps to reach site owners’ clients in places with no datacenter like Africa.

Speed Optimization Accessories

Both web hosts provide SSDs across the board. FastComet has optimized servers and added speed optimizations like Aggressive GZIP compression, browser-optimized content, loss-less data compression, asynchronous resource loading, and Keep-Alive is active for all shares accounts.

Uptime

Looking for a web host? Uptime should be the first thing on your mind. It’s the number 1 factor of why people change their hosting providers. Like we always do, we signed up and created SiteGround and FastComet test sites and let us tell you something, they are both good. But, of course, one is better.

We monitored the sites on both web hosts for 12 months across 2 years. Just in case they decided to be good today and bad tomorrow and as we expected, they both had pretty good uptime. Fastcomet promises 99.9% uptime and they kept to it. SiteGround also performed exceedingly well and they are one of the best we have seen.

Average Uptime 2019

Average Uptime 2020

SiteGround has Superb uptime. For the few months, both web hosts maintained the maximum Uptime of 100 for 24/7/30 and we were thrilled. But as you can see above, both web hosts have months when their Uptime was less than 100% but still well above their promised 99%.

After taking the average Uptime, FastComet ended up having an average of 99.987%. This is good, but SiteGround’s 99.995% average is even better.

They are both in the 90th percentile in Uptime performance, but if you want to get nitpicky about it (which you have a right to, it’s your money after all), then SiteGround is way better than FastComet when it comes to Uptime and there are many reasons that may be responsible for this.

Datacenters Redundancy

In a bid to be transparent with the information they make available to their customers, SiteGround released a lot of their specifications. Some of these specifications include what their servers are made of and how they painstakingly built the best servers to cater to their community of users.

Their data center servers were built by skilled and professional developers. They make use of customized Linux containers that prevent overheating and arrest any problem before it occurs. They also have an in-house technology that monitors the performance of the servers and alerts them to any potential problem.

Unfortunately, we do not have any knowledge of how FastComet servers are built or by who. It is probably a topical server with good security, but not as much proactive monitoring like that of SiteGround. All we know is, they need to do better. Both companies do offer a refund if you ever notice your website hosting Uptime drop below 99%.

Website Security

You may have the best website in the world that brings in thousands of dollars every day. But on the day you get hacked or attacked by malware, just like a snap of a finger, everything disappears and you are left to start again. That’s how important Security is, and more often than not, the security part of the comparison weighted quite a bit in our final decision, as it happened in our SiteGround vs. InMotion Hosting Comparison for example.

To prevent this from happening you need a web host that takes security seriously. Both SiteGround and FastComet try to ensure that you have secure hosting experience, and they do not lag behind in the acquisition of the latest security technology.

They adopt account isolation through CageFS and Cloud Linux which makes sure that even if somehow a website on the same server as yours were to be infected, it would be isolated and the malware will not affect your website. SiteGround also isolates corrupted websites completely, keeping you safe.

Both web hosts have optimized WAF (Web Application Firewall) for all your CMSs like Magento, WordPress, and Joomla. WAF protects your website from 99% of all unauthorized login attempts. Since both web hosts also use cPanel, they benefit from the login security features provided by the industry-standard control panel which include IP blacklisting, SpamAssassin, firewall and more.

Extra Security Features

Both web hosts give Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates and they boast of live 24/7 monitoring and security team. They can contain hacks in minutes, scan, and clean the affected user account.

Fastcomet has its own security partnership in the form of BitNinja which stops script injections, DDoS, and XSS attacks. SiteGround also partnered with Sucuri.net to create SG Site Scanner. SG Site Scanner, through in-depth analysis and threat detection, scans the publicly available link of your website and tries to mark malicious activities, and this is just the tip of the SiteGround security iceberg.

SiteGround’s own advanced account isolation and the proactive monitoring tool is in collaboration with Guardian by 1H. This provides a fortress-level defense system that very few web hosts can boast of, in 2022. When the Guardian discovers any malicious attempt or activity, it contains it in 500 milliseconds and inhibits its progress. This is done in half a second! Considerably faster than even the cPanel defense system.

SiteGround also recently launched Bot Protection for WordPress which detects and suppresses any malicious login attempt as well as brute force attacks on your website through captcha challenge.

Backups and Restores

Both web hosts provide 30 days backup and anytime free restore. If you, however, want to do something a bit risky and will require an on-demand back up, they’ve got that covered too. Let me make this clear now, if Backup and restore was a single category on its own, Fastcomet would win flawlessly. They offer a free daily, weekly and monthly backup. If you also want an older version of your website, you can request this with just a few clicks.

They store these backups off-site and will restore for you anytime you request and they do this for all of their plans. Having a limited customer base definitely has its perks. This is even inconceivable for other web hosts. With SiteGround though,  you have to pay $29.95 for on-demand backup if you are on their StartUp plan. Their higher plans offer a free on-demand backup each.

FastComet vs. SiteGround for Ease of Use and Beginner Friendliness

Is it easy to set up an account and get started? For both SiteGround and FastComet, as easy as a hot knife cutting through butter. Fast and simple account setup. They allow credit and debit payment options.

Now to hosting. Let’s see which web host makes life easy for you.

Both web hosts make use of the familiar cPanel, although SiteGround’s cPanel has been modified to be more beginner-friendly. Fastcomet offers free site transfer but so do 99% of well known hosting companies, such as SiteGround or HostGator.

We have seen complaints that SiteGround’s site transfer is buggy and you can not do it yourself. Complaints have also been directed at Fastcomet’s site transfer for taking too long. Some large sites may take more than 30 hours.

Domain Registration

SiteGround does not offer free domain, you have to register for a domain and subsequently pay for it every year. Fastcomet, on the other (higher) hand, offers a free domain for life!  Who does not want a free domain for life?

1-Click Installs and SiteBuilders

Fastcomet has drag and drop and one-click publishers. Various beginner-friendly tech as well as 40+ widgets (for texting, audio, and video) and literally hundreds of page and site-building templates optimized for any device. Both have the Softaculous one-click installer that comes with cPanel but SiteGround comes with built-in Weebly site builder.

cPanel

Both web hosts utilize the fast and responsive panel with varying levels of sophistication and lucidity.

Website Migration

Both web hosts have website migration option but Fastcomet provides free migration for every shared hosting plan and three for the higher plans while SiteGround only has free migration for the higher plans. Fastcomet also offers domain migration in addition to site migration.

Website Staging Environment

Both websites have a convenient staging area that allows for previous during the live push production.

FastComet vs. SiteGround for Customer Support and Reliability

You would think Fastcomet’s relatively small number of customers would allow it to serve them better and you would be right. Every customer gets special attention and they get it quickly. SiteGround has one of the best customer support in the business and their growing number does not prevent it from serving them better.

Everyone is migrating to SiteGround every day and no one has complained that their customer service dropped in efficiency, speed or effectiveness. SiteGround is definitely doing something right. But we are here to decide which is better.

Knowledgebase

Both have expansive and accessible tutorials and knowledgebase on their websites and database. But, this is the first we have seen where a web host has a more detailed and easy to understand knowledgebase than SiteGround. Do you want to be convinced?  Open Fastcomet website,  just don’t believe anything they say about their speed. Lies,  all of it.

Plans and Pricing Comparison

Shared  Cheap Plan

SiteGround StartUp: $3.95 per month, can host one website. It can handle up to 10,000 unique visits per month, and it comes with Essential database and Email offers.

Fastcomet’s equivalent is the StartSmart at $3.95 a month which gives you one site on 15GB of storage space, 2GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores. It also comes with a single free migration. It allows a maximum of 25,000 visitors per month.

Shared Medium Plan

SiteGround GrowBig: $5.95 per month and can host multiple websites. It also comes with a free SSL Wildcard for 1 year, all 3-levels of the SuperCacher, and staging environments for both WordPress and Joomla (As you can see in our SiteGround vs WP Engine Comparison, other hosts offering these features charge quite a bit, but not SiteGround). It comes with a premium database and Email offers.

For this medium level,  Fastcomet has ScaleRight; ScaleRight goes for $5.95 per month you can host as many sites as you wish on 25GB of space. 4 CPU cores and 3GB of memory. It comes with three free migrations. It allows a maximum of 50,000 visitors per month.

Shared High-End Plan

SiteGround’s highest plan is the GoGeek plan: $11.95 per month and can host unlimited websites. It has 30GB of space for up to 100,000 visits per month. Enjoy priority support, PCI compliance, and one-click Git repo creation. It comes with a geeky database and Email offers.

Fastcomet’s answer to GoGeek is SpeedUp; SpeedUp at $9.95/mo and get yourself a real beast. Other than the 35GB cap on storage and three free migrations, you get 6 CPU cores and 6GB of RAM. It also comes with Varnish, LiteSpeed LSAPI, APC, OPcache, and Memcached care. It allows a maximum of 100,000 visitors per month.

It’s is worth noting that all Fastcomet plans come with unlimited email and unmetered bandwidth.

Cloud and VPS Hosting

SiteGround Managed Cloud Plans and Pricing

SiteGround has four cloud hosting plans with increasing price and sophistication: Entry, Business, Business Plus, and Superpower. All of them provide 5 TB of monthly data transfer, and even the basic Entry plan is very powerful, as seen below:

• The Entry plan comes with 24GB CPU Cores, 40GB RAM at $80.00 disk price.
• The business plan comes with 36GB CPU Cores, 60GB RAM at $120.00 disk price.
• The Business Plus plan comes with 48GB CPU Cores, 80GB RAM at $1600.00 disk price.
• The Super Power plan comes with 810GB CPU Cores, 120GB RAM at $240.00 disk price.

FastComet Unmanaged Cloud Plans and Pricing

• FastCloud at $2.95/month: It contains a website starter kit: Single Website, cPanel & Softaculous, and 15GB SSD Space. No free private DNS, no free GlobalSign Private SSL, and no Addon domain or KeepAlive. It also has no Free Dynamic SSL seal. Has 7 daily backups.
• FastCloud Plus at $4.45/month: Website Starter Kit, Advanced Features, Multiple Websites, cPanel & Softaculous, and 25GB SSD Space. With free private DNS, free Dynamic SSL seal and unlimited Addon domains. It comes with speed optimizations like Cloudflare CDN Caching, Mod_Expires, JavaScript bundling, Browser optimization, Cache header optimization, Aggressive GZIP, Lossless data compression, Asynchronous resource loading, and AutoMinify. Has 7 daily backups and multiple PHP versions 7.3, 7.2, 7.1, 7.0, 5.6. GlobalSign Private SSL is free for 1 year.
• FastCloud Extra at $5.95/month: Offers Website Starter Kit, Advanced Features, RocketBooster, Multiple Websites, cPanel & Softaculous, and 35GB SSD Space. With free private DNS, free Dynamic SSL seal and unlimited Addon domains. Has 30 daily backups and multiple PHP versions 7.3, 7.2, 7.1, 7.0, 5.6. GlobalSign Private SSL is free for life.

Also comes with all of the essential features as well as complete five layers of caching & speed optimizations: Varnish, Apache Mod_Lsapi, Memcached, APC, OPcache, Cloudflare CDN Caching, Mod_Expires, JavaScript bundling, Browser optimization, Cache header optimization, Aggressive GZIP, Lossless data compression, Asynchronous resource loading, AutoMinify, KeepAlive.

All cloud plans come with free SSH access, free domain transfer, website transfer, and site Setup, speed and performance, guaranteed resources, SSD file storage, MySQL on SSD, optimized server setup, free CloudFlare CDN, network firewall, web application firewall, Brute-force protection, exploits, and malware Protect, free daily and weekly backup and restore, power/network/hardware redundancy, OpenSource Application Support, E-Commerce optimized, Apache 2.2/2.4 web server, Nginx support, custom php.ini support, Bash/Perl/Python support, MySQL 5.1/5.6, Free FFMPEG support, Free SSH Access, 24/7/365 server monitoring, technical support and system administration support as well as fast response.

FastComet Managed Cloud Plans and Pricing

• Cloud 1 at $50.95/month: Offers Single 2.50GHz Core, 2 GB ECC RAM, 50 GB SSD Space, 2 TB Bandwidth, and 2000 Mbps Network Out.
• Cloud 2 at $59.45/month: Offers 2 x 2.50GHz Cores, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD Space, 4 TB Bandwidth, and 4000 Mbit Network Out.
• Cloud 3 at $76.45/month: Offers 4 x 2.50GHz Cores, 8 GB RAM, 160 GB SSD Space, 5 TB Bandwidth,  and 5000 Mbit Network Out.
• Cloud 4 at $118.95/month: Offers 6 x 2.50GHz Cores, 16 GB RAM, 320 GB SSD Space, 8 TB Bandwidth and 6000 Mbit Network Out.

Reseller Hosting

SiteGround has two different kinds of reseller options. The traditional reseller and the credit system reseller. Fastcomet does not seem to have any reseller hosting option.

Dedicated Servers

SiteGround can accommodate two types of website owners that demand high-end hosting: dedicated and custom-built server users. They have three plans for them: Entry, Power, Super Power and enterprise hosting (where you basically contact them and tell them all that you need). Entry, Power and Super Power all have 10TB of bandwidth per month and run on Xeon processors.

Fastcomet does not play with its dedicated hosting users. They pay king-sized and they get king-sized features and attention:

• DS 1 at $118.15/month comes with 2x AMD EPYC 7501 Cores, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD Space, 4 TB Bandwidth, cPanel/WHM/Softaculous, and 4000 Mbit Network Out.
• DS 2 at $143.65/month comes with 4x AMD EPYC 7501 Cores, 8 GB RAM, 160 GB SSD Space, 5 TB Bandwidth, cPanel/WHM/Softaculous and 5000 Mbit Network Out.
• DS 3 at $194.65/month comes with 8x AMD EPYC 7501 Cores, 16 GB RAM, 320 GB SSD Space, 6 TB Bandwidth, cPanel/WHM/Softaculous, and 6000 Mbit Network Out
• DS 4 at $269.65/month comes with 16x AMD EPYC 7501 Cores, 32 GB RAM, 640 GB SSD Space, 7 TB Bandwidth, cPanel/WHM/Softaculous, and 7000 Mbit Network Out.

Hidden Fees and Upsells

SiteGround’s Domain prices start from $15.95 but you can try their shared hosting plan for just a month unlike in Fastcomet where you can not sign up for less than a year. When you choose to sign up for a month, SiteGround will require you to pay a setup fee of $14.95.

Although unlike SiteGround, Fastcomet offers the same renewal fees as sign up fees, that is only for their shared hosting plan. For both dedicated and VPS hosting, they also make use of the strawman technique to draw you in with low priced only to hike the price on renewal. Fastcomet,  you were supposed to be different, not join them.

SiteGround vs FastComet for Extras

SiteGround has the following exclusive extra features:

• SiteGround supports Mod_perl, Plexum, HTMLDoc, PDFLib, MS SQL or ColdFusion.
• SiteGround has the Weebly Site builder.
• They offer free and easy installation of a shopping cart of your choice, such as Magento, osCommerce, PrestaShop and more.
• White-Label hosting and client management.
• Easy collaboration.
• Transfer of site to other SiteGround clients.
• Free SSH, FTP, and SFTP.
• Many more technologies supported
• On your account, you can also use multiple gallery and PHP libraries, PHP encoders and other technologies like GD library, ImageMagick, CURL, Zlib, Zend Optimizer, ionCube, SourceGuardian, Mod_rewrite, .htaccess, Smarty Templates, php.ini
• Unlimited sub and parked domains.
• They sponsor and send employees to hosting events like Word Camp.

FastComet, on the other hand, comes with:

• Unlimited Email.
• MySQL Database.
• A free domain transfer.
• FastComet cPanel, fast and responsive.
• Many applications are available.
• A single free migration with StartSmart and three for ScaleRight and SpeedUp.
• Advanced users can use a wide array of developer tools like WP-CLI, bash, Drush, Laravel, Genesis, and Symphony which are available across all shared plans.
• GIT comes pre-installed.
• And they have a free domain for life!
• For shared hosting plans, Fastcomet has the sane renewal fees as sign up fees.  Finally,  one website that isn’t greedy!

Similar Extras for both FastComet and SiteGround

• Both support easy, one-page sign-up process and credit card payment method (there are other options available through chat).
• Both web hosts provide quick account activation.
• Both allow you to choose your server location on sign up.
• Both possess the industry-standard cPanel dashboard.
• Both allow the installation of Apps and CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, etc.) using Softaculous.

SiteGround vs. FastComet: Our Pick

SiteGround owns customer service, security, speed, and uptime. It doesn’t matter what other things Fastcomet has, it has failed to deliver in the most meet the most important metrics. SiteGround officially puts Fastcomet in the hosting dirt.  We hope this puts an end to the SiteGround versus Fastcomet argument for good.