Fasthosts Review

Detailed Reviews

FastHost is a website hosting company based in Gloucester(UK). The website hosting firm offers four different hosting packages to meet the needs of all kinds of users. Since its inception in 1999, the website has been able to offer variety of hosting solutions to its clients. Apart from web hosting they also offer Email hosting, domain registration, online backup and storage solutions.

Features

Fasthosts (like many other UK Hosting providers) offers UK based datacenters. The key features of the shared web hosting are discussed below.

Developer Friendly Hosting

The Fasthosts hosting's "Business Gold" and "Business Platinum" plans has been designed keeping the web developers in mind. The packages offer a good specification and functionality such as load balancing and unlimited databases. The customers also have access to the tools, features and languages required to build faster websites. Keeping focus on Linux, advanced support is offered for Python and Ruby on Rails using Web Server Gateway Interface.

Fasthosts doesn’t seem to offer budget friendly VPS Hosting for users, who wants better pricing and control but don't need dedicated server powers.

Control Panel

Fasthosts offers custom control panel for its shared hosting plans. It is clean and has been designed in a user friendly manner. You won't have to struggle to find your way around. The websites can be taken online in a matter of minutes. Mailboxes can be set up in an easy and fast manner.

For cloud hosting and dedicated server hosting, they offer Parellels Plesk control panel and surprisingly no support for cPanel. That could be downside for users who come from cPanel or prefer cPanel. Usually most hosting companies allows to select from all the leading control panel in case of cloud or dedicated hosting.

Website Publishing Tools

Even if you do not have a lot of knowledge of creating a website you can make a professional website without devoting too much time via the website publishing tools. You just need to follow a simple wizard and choose a design to publish your website. You will also retain full control of the structure of your website. Using online file manager you can upload files to your website with ease via a user friendly web based interface. You do not need to install any additional software for this.

Traffic Driver SEO Service

This tool is included free of cost in the Business Gold package. It submits the website to about 400 directories and search engines automatically. It also resubmits your website every week and with this tool your website is likely to appear in Google within eight weeks. The tool suggests you important keywords based on its own research. The tools also shows you where the website stands in the search results.

An independent graphical web stats package shows you from where your audience reached your website. It also displays the keywords that led people to your website. No software is needed to be installed to use it and it is compatible with all the browsers. You can also choose to get email reports of the traffic data.   

Third Party Apps & One Click Install

The website offers about 60 apps that can be installed with just a single click. If you want to set up a blog, you can select blog apps like WordPress, Chyrp CMS, Geeklog. Joomla, XOOPS, Drupal can help you with content management and Pligg, elgg, Oxwall can help you with creating social networking websites. If you want to sell your products or services online, ShopSite, OpenCart, ZenCart or Avactis are some of the shopping carts you can try. Similarly there are apps for photo galleries, mailing lists, live chat, wiki, website design and many more. These apps are absolutely free and easy to install.

Website Hosting Features

You can host three different websites with a single hosting plan. The website focuses on lower resource contention so that the scripts can be executed faster. Multiple servers are used by the FastHosts to make sure that your websites perform better as the load on the servers would be low.

The high concurrency limit for PHP scripts offered by the website makes your websites responsive. More memory is offered for PHP scripts which makes the websites with a lot of graphics a lot better. Whether you need MSSQL or MySQL, you will have an unlimited database.

Support

The website offers support via phone and online chat. The support is offered 24X7 every day. The website's support staff will be always ready to help you out. You can get in touch with the customer assistance team for any of your hosting problems and requirements. If you are not satisfied with your hosting package, you can ask for a money back within a period of 30 days. The website will refund your money along with the set up fee within 3 business days.