Fasthosts Website Builder
It’s super unlikely you want to spend hours upon hours building your own website. Before you know it, you’d be spending time coding and programming when you never thought you would. Fasthosts is the opposite - now you can build a website easily without the hassle of learning HTML or JavaScript. All you need to do is sign up for a plan and pick out the template that works best for your business.
- Interested in Fasthosts? Check out its website here
The moment you’ve handed over your details, you’re encouraged to set up your package, and that includes registering a domain name. If you already have one, you can click on “Use a domain registered with another provider”, otherwise you need to get one there and then. You can’t continue on until this is done. Unlike some other website builder services, you cannot piggy back off a free name for a while, but if you’re serious about creating a web presence, you’d have to get yourself a proper name anyway. Just make sure you’ve settled on one you’re happy with before proceeding further.
- Also check out our roundup of the best website builders
Plans and pricing
Fasthosts offers three main web hosting plans on their website. You can try any of the plans free for up to 30 days. There’s also a deal on the website where you get 50% off any plan for the first three months. Here’s a quick overview of the three main hosting plans:
The Ignite plan costs $2.95 per month and includes basic SEO tools, two separate databases at 1 GB each, up to 10 GB of storage space, unlimited bandwidth, and hosting for one website. As one of the cheaper plans available, it’s a great place to start if you have a small business or even want to showcase a personal writing or photography portfolio.
The Momentum plan costs $5.90 per month. It comes with double the amount of storage space - 20 GB, and advanced SEO tools. It also comes with your own domain name for one year (something you need to purchase separately with the Ignite plan). This plan is great for larger businesses or websites with a larger team running them.
The Ultimate plan costs $11.80 per month. On this plan, you can create up to 100 websites, have 120 GB of storage, and it includes over one thousand email addresses. If you need lots of storage and want to host many websites, this plan is really affordable for how much it offers.
Interface
Once you’re ready to start, you begin by choosing from one of the many templates on offer. You can preview them to see what they look like beyond the thumbnail representation, or click on ‘Use’ to select it. As there are so many options to choose from, it’s good to see you can narrow the search down by Category, such as Business, Portfolio, Store or Blog. Don’t worry if it’s the wrong choice: you can change the look of your pages as often as you like.
You have many text editing options, where you can change the size and color of your content, add a background color, add links, a divider, etc. Pretty much everything you’d expect from a text editor. Adding multiple pages is done via the ‘Pages and Styles’ menu (top left). From there you can duplicate an existing one (Fasthosts refers to it as ‘cloning’), create one from scratch, reorder them or delete those you no longer need.
Features
The blogging section is separate from your other pages and doesn't count toward the ‘10-page maximum limit’ were you to choose the ‘Essentials’ package. The functionality is very similar to the Text boxes you can add to pages and which we’ve explored earlier. This also regretfully includes the frustratingly convoluted way of editing images. If you’re planning on migrating from Wordpress, you’ll be pleased to know that Fasthosts has a ‘Wordpress import’ option. You need to export your post from Wordpress first.
The ecommerce section offers everything you need to get started, as long as you’re planning on selling physical products - this service doesn’t support digital downloads. If this aspect of online business is crucial to you, Fasthosts offers a different service called eCommerce Builder.
The competition
There’s plenty of web hosting options out there - Bluehost, Hostgator, and Cloudways to name a few. What stands out the most about Fasthosts is how easy it is to customize everything. All the content you add to your page is done one section on top of another, and many offer you customizability options to make each section work as you need it to. For instance, the slideshow lets you choose its duration, whether you want it to loop automatically, show image descriptions, allow the viewer to pause playback, etc. It’s quite comprehensive.
Final thoughts
Fasthosts is an established web hosting company that offers a good website builder - everything from basic pages to blogging and ecommerce. However, there are some limitations which can really annoy potential clients, depending on their needs, like image formatting, and shipping rates. But if your needs are simple, you can create an effective website extremely fast. Drag and drop the sections you need, customize the interface, add videos and sell products. Everything just works.
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