iFastNet Review 2024: Does It Meet Our Standards?

Fast-Loading Web Pages and Great Uptime – There Must Be a Catch, Right?

When you first land on iFastNet’s homepage, you’ll see that the website isn’t as polished as some of its rivals. It even looks a little… well, tacky.

Other than that, iFastNet seems to have a lot to offer. The company’s head office is located in Newcastle, and although there doesn’t seem to be any verifiable information about where its data centre is located, I’m assuming that its servers are also based in the north of England.

iFastNet offers a variety of hosting options, including a range of shared hosting plans, VPS, and dedicated servers (which all use NGINX and CloudLinux for better performance). I signed up for the Super Premium hosting plan to see for myself what it’s like to host a website with iFastNet – and spent several months evaluating everything from performance to customer support.

The TL;DR of my experience with iFastNet is that there’s a lot to love about this UK-based host, but its support is pretty basic. If you’re new to hosting and are looking for help getting started, iFastNet isn’t for you, I’m afraid. You’d be better off with a more user-friendly host, like Hostinger or GreenGeeks.

All the Essentials, but Nothing That Really Stands Out

iFastNet offers all of the features that I look for in a web host, including unlimited SSD storage on all plans except the Starter plan, which only offers 5GB. There is a bandwidth limit of 250GB on the Starter and Super Premium plans (which is pretty unusual these days). If you think you’ll need more, you’re best opting for Ultimate Premium, the only shared plan offering unlimited bandwidth.

You can host multiple websites on any plan except Starter, and basic security features are included with all of them. iFastNet uses ModSecurity to protect your account against malicious attacks and malware, and also enables Hotlink Protection on all domains. This means other websites can’t drain your bandwidth by embedding your files (particularly images) in their pages.

Free SSL Certificates

I’ve been surprised by how many UK web hosts don’t offer free SSL, so I was glad to see that all iFastNet hosting plans come with free SSL certificates provided by Let’s Encrypt. You can easily issue certificates to all the domains in your account.

Free Website Transfer

If you’ve already got a website hosted with another provider, you may appreciate iFastNet’s free website transfer service. Just note that your previous host must either use cPanel or allow you to make a full backup of your hosting space. Also, iFastNet doesn’t support transferring your website if it’s been built with a website builder.

If you’re not sure how to make a full backup of your existing hosting space, iFastNet will do this for you, but you’ll need to provide your FTP login credentials. This can all be arranged by submitting a support ticket.

Cloudflare Support

All hosting plans with iFastNet include Cloudflare for faster page loading speeds and better protection from bots and DDoS attacks. This can easily be activated in cPanel.

Free Domain Name(s)

iFastNet advertises that you get up to 21(!) free domains, depending on the plan you choose – but before you get excited about such a bonus, you need to understand what it really means. First of all, if you already have a domain name, you can choose to forgo this perk and get about 20% off your plan – so this isn’t really “free”.

In addition, these free domain names don’t include domains with the .com extension, unless you opt for the yearly Ultimate Premium plan.

You can choose one standard domain extension (.biz, .eu, .info, .co.uk, or .us) and the remaining free domain names are bonus extensions of your main domain name, that include oo.gd, uk.nf, cc.nf, and other odd extensions that even I have never encountered before. You don’t actually get to choose 21 different domains.

Frustrating Experience with Separate Support Registration

Signing up with iFastNet is straightforward, but it’s not particularly beginner-friendly. You’re responsible for installing WordPress and enabling SSL certificates. This isn’t managed hosting, of course, but many of the UK hosts I’ve tested offer automatic WordPress installation even on their unmanaged plans.

Managing Your Account and Using cPanel/Plesk

I have to admit that I wasn’t impressed by iFastNet’s account dashboard. It felt dated and too sparse. That’s not necessarily a bad thing (I hate a cluttered account dashboard), but there weren’t even any prompts to get me started when I first signed up.

I also didn’t like that you have to create a new, separate account  at the support.ifastnet.com website to submit support tickets. It felt like an unnecessary extra step. If support needs to be on a separate site, iFastNet should at least offer single-click authentication from the dashboard.

For the management of your actual webspace, iFastNet uses cPanel, so if you’re familiar with that, you’ll have no problems. If you’re new to cPanel, however, iFastNet has a cPanel demo on its website that you can explore (risk-free!) before you decide to purchase web hosting. I like this feature because cPanel certainly isn’t right for everyone, and this way you’ll know before you commit.

Connecting a Domain and Installing WordPress

iFastNet uses the Softaculous installer. With the latest version, you have a couple of options: you can use the “Quick Install” option (which I don’t recommend unless you’re really short of time) or go through the standard installation process.

One thing I like about the standard installation process is that you can open the “Advanced Options” tab to set up automatic updates of WordPress core, plugins, and themes. You can also choose to pre-install one of a selection of pre-packaged themes. This method takes longer than the quick install but gives you more control over the setup of your website – and you don’t have to go back to set updates later.

Fast and Reliable Hosting You Can Depend On

I always spend a lot of time testing performance in order to judge the value of a web host. Most hosts make big claims about the speed of their hosting (iFastNet advertises its plans as “superfast”), so I like to challenge them with my own rigorous tests!

iFastNet actually lives up to its name. Overall, it was the second-fastest out of all the UK hosts I tested, delivering a very impressive page loading speed average of 0.7 seconds. Google recommends a maximum loading time of 3 seconds, and iFastNet is more than three times faster than that baseline. Its reliability is close to perfect, too, with an average of 99.998%!

I’m going to do a deep dive into all the tests I performed, so things are going to get a little technical. If you’re short on time, feel free to skip ahead to read about my experience with iFastNet’s support.

Still here? Okay, so first I want to explain a little about how I test web hosts. (You can find a full guide with all the details about how we do performance tests here.) For my iFastNet tests, I purchased the Super Premium hosting plan and installed WordPress. I use the same customised theme to test all providers – it has non-optimized HD images and text and looks pretty much like your average landing page.

You’ll see some review websites that test performance based on the basic WordPress installation, but testing a blank website isn’t going to give accurate results. This is why I use a test website that looks and behaves like your website might. I use non-optimized images to see if the host’s support team will give me optimization advice. (Spoiler alert… iFastNet didn’t even bother to respond to my question!)

The website was online at autonomous-shoes-uk-q.co.uk for several months so I could repeat tests at different days and times. Our original plan was to keep all of our test websites online so you could run your own tests – but as one of our tech team pointed out, any of the hosts could have made behind-the-scenes changes to skew the results. To prevent this, we took our sites down once all the test results were in.

Limited Support Options Can Leave You On Your Own

After those really impressive performance results, I found myself hugely disappointed by iFastNet’s support services. Or, should I say, lack of support services. There isn’t even an option for live chat or telephone support, leaving you reliant on an outdated  knowledge base and the slow-to-respond ticket support.

Let’s talk about the knowledge base first. If you’re expecting to find all the help you need here, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. Not only does it offer very little help – it’s also very outdated. For example, an article entitled “Changing PHP version” lists PHP 5.3 as iFastNet’s default version. I sincerely hope this isn’t the case, as PHP 5.3 hasn’t been supported for years!

Likewise, when I searched for help with WordPress, I came upon the entry in the screenshot below. The advice isn’t terrible (W3 Total Cache has a lot of users and some great reviews), but the entry is years old and the link isn’t even clickable!

Next, onto the ticket support. In the screenshot below you’ll see my exchange with the support team when I (posing as a beginner) asked for help installing WordPress. First, I waited around fifteen hours for a response that wasn’t automated. Second, that response was virtually no help at all. I was just told to use Softaculous. Now, I know where to find Softaculous and how to use it, but if you’re new to WordPress, this response wouldn’t be helpful.

I contacted iFastNet’s support team on other occasions to ask about installing my theme and about optimizing my website. Unfortunately, iFastNet decided these questions weren’t worthy of a response.

Budget-Friendly Hosting with a Very Limited Refund Policy

Compared to other UK-based hosting companies, iFastNet is pretty average. Its hosting plans are affordable – and you can net even bigger savings if you opt to pay annually instead of monthly. You can also pay every three months or every six months, but there are no discounts to be gained from those options, so you’re better off choosing monthly if you don’t want to commit to a yearly plan.

iFastNet also has an option to buy your hosting without the free domain name included (which is useful if you already have a domain name and don’t need a new one). These plans are around 20% cheaper than the plans that include the domain name.

One thing you should know about iFastNet is that they display their prices in USD ($) and there’s no option to change the currency on their website. So if you decide to pay monthly, you’ll need to keep in mind the changing exchange rates.

iFastNet lacks a proper money-back guarantee. I mean, it does have one, but only for a week, after which there is a strict no-refund policy. Also,there are no refunds after your annual plan renews – not even during the first seven days – so don’t forget to disable auto-renewal if you want to end your annual contract.

Cancelling Your Account

Although it didn’t take long in the end, cancelling my account with iFastNet was not as straightforward as other UK hosts I’ve tested. At first, I couldn’t find any cancellation options in the account dashboard, nor was there any information in the knowledge base.

However, when I reached out to the support team, I received a swift response, and the cancellation was processed once I’d confirmed that I’d taken manual backups of my files. The whole process took less than 15 minutes – one of the fastest response times (for ticket support) out of all the UK hosts I’ve tested.