Fasthosts Alternative: Without The Renewal Cliff
If you are looking for a Fasthosts alternative, the number that matters is not on the advert. Their introductory rates are among the lowest in UK hosting and the step up at renewal is among the steepest, several times the price you signed at. The second thing worth knowing is that every Fasthosts datacentre is in the UK.
What Changes When The Intro Term Ends
The rate you sign is the rate you keep
No introductory term, no step up at month seven. What we quote is what the invoice says in year three.
A US region as well as a UK one
Dallas and the UK, on hardware we own. If any of your audience is American, they are served from America rather than across the Atlantic.
The WordPress work comes with it
Updates, plugin conflicts, malware cleanup and fixes, handled by us. Daily backups and free migrations are table stakes; the work afterwards is the difference.
FastCow Against Fasthosts, Over Two Years
One year in, the comparison looks very different. Two rows go to them.
How this was put together. Everything on the FastCow side is ours to stand behind. The Fasthosts side is drawn from their own site and from dated reporting of the United Internet acquisition. Sources: fasthosts.co.uk and the United Internet acquisition. Last reviewed August 2026. Introductory terms change constantly, so flag anything stale and we will update it. You can read the rest of our host comparisons too.
What You Are Paying For In Year Two
Once the introductory rate ends, a Fasthosts plan and a FastCow plan are much closer in price than the adverts suggest. At that point the question stops being what it costs and starts being what is included, so here is the honest list.
The WordPress maintenance
Core, plugin and theme updates run by us, and fixed by us when one of them takes the site down. That is the work, and it is the whole difference.
Cleanup after a hack, not just detection
Malware detection tells you. We scan daily, clean up automatically, and put an engineer on the install afterwards.
A second region
Dallas as well as the UK. Only worth something if some of your audience is outside Britain, and worth a lot if they are.
LiteSpeed and Redis on every plan
Server-level caching so a cached page never starts PHP, and repeated queries answered from memory rather than MySQL.
None of it depends on which tier you pick. See where the hardware lives and what runs on it.
When Fasthosts Is The Better UK Choice
For a British audience they have a strong hand. Here is where it beats ours.
Every visitor you have is British
A Tier IV facility in Worcester on renewable energy, with a UK support team on the end of a phone at any hour, is a strong package for a UK-only audience. Our US region buys you nothing in that case.
You want UK phone support at 3am
Round-the-clock phone cover from a UK team is genuinely useful and plenty of businesses will pay for it on its own.
The first term is what matters
If the site is a campaign, a launch or a test that will be gone inside a year, their introductory pricing is far cheaper than anything we sell.
Leaving Fasthosts On Your Own Timetable
There is no rush and no reason to waste what you have already paid for. Tell us when your term ends and we will build the copy ready for that week.
Send The Login And The Renewal Date
We audit the account and work back from your term end, so the move happens when the money runs out rather than before it.
Approve It Whenever You Like
The rebuilt site sits on a private address for as long as you need. It costs you nothing to leave it there while the old term runs down.
Switch The Week It Expires
You change the DNS, the certificate issues itself, and Fasthosts serves right up to the last day you paid for.
No Group Above Us, No Renewal Cliff Below
Those two facts are the same fact. Steep renewals exist because a business needs the average revenue per customer to climb, and that need usually comes from somewhere above the hosting company. We have nowhere above us for it to come from.
No parent company
Privately owned and self-funded, with no listed group setting targets for what your account should be worth next year.
So no renewal cliff
One rate, quoted once. There is no introductory subsidy that has to be earned back from you in month seven.
Self-funded
No funding round, no investor timetable, and no pressure to raise prices on somebody else’s schedule.
Not for sale
Built to keep. You will not read that your host has been acquired and that your terms are changing.
One rate, quoted once, on every plan and in every year. FastCow Hosting Limited, 39 C/O FastCow Hosting, Jefferson Close, London, England, IG2 6RZ. Nobody above us needs your renewal to be bigger. About the company and why it is priced like this.
Compare The Two-Year Cost, Not The First Month
Send us your renewal date and what the price steps up to. If you are still inside a cheap introductory term, the honest answer is usually to wait.
Fasthosts Alternatives, Answered Honestly
Mid-term and wondering whether to move now or later? Tell us the dates.
Talk to us →It rises, often by a lot. Their introductory offers run on short terms at rates as low as pennies a month, and the standard rate afterwards can be several times higher. The offers are real; the thing to check is the renewal line rather than the headline. FastCow has one rate that does not move.
United Internet, the German listed group, which bought Fasthosts in 2006 and also owns IONOS. Fasthosts still runs its own UK datacentres and its own UK support team, so the acquisition is old news rather than a recent change.
Not for hosting. Their facilities are UK-based, including a Tier IV datacentre in Worcester opened in 2022 and a London presence, all ISO 27001 certified and on renewable energy. FastCow runs Dallas as well as the UK, which matters only if some of your audience is not British.
In the first term, no, and not close. From the renewal onwards it usually flips, because their standard rates climb steeply and ours do not move at all. Send us the renewal quote and we will work out the two-year cost side by side.
No. Fasthosts carries on serving while we rebuild the site on a private address for you to check. The only thing that changes anything is the DNS update, and you make that when you are satisfied.
Yes, on every plan, and you can restore them yourself from the panel. We also offer hourly backups at $20 a month per site if a day of lost orders would hurt.