iFastNet is a popular premium web host that’s been around for nearly 25 years. One thing that’s great about iFastNet is that there are no gimmicks, no hidden fees, and no paying years in advance.
Features
iFastNet offers everything that your typical web host would offer, but for a much better price. It has quick SSD servers. It offers cPanel, the most popular control panel for managing your websites. And, they have customer support available around the clock.
All plans come with free domains, except for starter plans. If you opt to pay monthly, you can obtain a free domain for a year. If you opt to pay yearly, you can keep your free domain forever! How much you pay at once determines the domain you get. Paying monthly gives you cheaper and lesser-known domain extensions, such as .site and .info, while paying yearly grants you better-known domain extensions, including .com and .net!
If you want to use WordPress, it can be easily installed using the Softaculous installer, as well as over 400 other CMSs. With one click, you can have your website up and running within a matter of minutes!
All plans come with free SSL certificates. These are automatically installed and you do not even have to worry about it. SSL certificates are what give your website that shiny padlock in the address bar and “https.”
Plans and Pricing
While iFastNet’s plans may look a little bit expensive at first, they are some of the cheapest available. Most web hosts seem to offer ridiculously cheap plans for less than a dollar a month. However, these often require you to sign up years in advance, and you end up paying hundreds of dollars at once.
With iFastNet, what you see is what you get. Other than the Starter plan, the price you see is the price you pay! iFastNet doesn’t require you to pay years of hosting in advance, you can just pay monthly! If you decide you don’t want hosting anymore, it’s easy to just cancel at any time!
If you do opt for paying yearly, then you do get a 20% discount on plans, and you get to keep your free domain name forever! This price can be lowered even more by applying coupons or upgrading from Gilect free hosting to iFastNet Premium.
Starter
Starter is a great plan if you only have a single website. With 250 GB of bandwidth, your website will be able to handle plenty of visitors, and with 5 GB of disk space, you’ll be able to upload thousands of photos and videos to your website. Starter also comes with a free email address, so that you can look professional with an email such as [email protected].
Sadly, this plan only allows you to have a single website, and it does not come with a free domain. On the bright side, the plan is super cheap at $19.99 per year or about $1.65 per month. Unfortunately, you cannot pay this plan on a month-per-month basis, you need to pay at least a year minimum in advance.
Super Premium
Super Premium is probably enough for just about anyone. This plan also comes with 250 GB of bandwidth, meaning your website will be able to handle large amounts of traffic. The difference between this plan and the starter plan lies in the storage. While Starter plans amount to 5 GB of storage, Super Premium plans grant you unlimited storage! This means you can store as many high-quality photos and videos, and never worry about running out of space!
With Super Premium, you can create up to 20 websites, and you even get a free domain name! This plan only costs $4.99 monthly, although, if you pay a year in advance, you could get away with only paying $3.99 per month. If you want to lower this cost even more, there are some exclusive deals available right now, which can lower this price to just $2.99 a month.
Super Premium also nets you 100 email inboxes. Unless you are a large business with a high number of employees, it’s unlikely you will even need this many. But the option is still available to you if you need it.
Ultimate Premium
Ultimate Premium offers similar features to Super Premium, but with fewer limitations. You get unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email addresses, and unlimited websites.
Nonetheless, these spec bumps also come with a price bump. Ultimate premium plans are $7.99. While this may seem like a hefty price, keep in mind this is still much cheaper than other hosts, such as Bluehost. Bluehost plans start at $14.97 CAD and require you to pay at least a year in advance. Moreover, it only gives you a fraction of the features iFastNet provides.
If you don’t mind paying in advance, you can lower Ultimate Premium’s price to $6.99 a month. By applying discount codes, this can be further lowered to as low as $5.25 a month.
Usability
Signing up with iFastNet is fairly straightforward. Select a plan, enter your domain, and choose whether you want to pay monthly or yearly. After that, everything will be set up. You can easily access your details and log into cPanel in the client area.
We will be honest, iFastNet is a bit more of a do-it-yourself platform. If you have never experienced web hosting before, there might be a small learning curve. Other web hosts might offer managed hosting, but this often comes at a higher price tag and barely provides any more features than iFastNet, if at all.
Thankfully, iFastNet has its support team available around the clock. If you ever get stuck on something, then a support agent will happily assist you. Unfortunately, iFastNet does not offer phone or live chat support. They only offer a ticket system. However, they respond extremely quickly, often in just a minute or less. iFastNet’s ticket support is much quicker than most other hosts’ live chat, which usually just put you on a waiting list for hours or give vague responses that barely help.
Performance
iFastNet has partnered up with CloudFlare to offer CloudFlare railgun. This supercharges your website speeds by delivering a cached version of your website from a nearby data center.
Additionally, iFastNet guarantees that your website uptime is 99.9%. This means less than a half-hour downtime per month. In our testing, however, we found that the uptime remained at 100% for several months at a time. If you want to make sure that your website is always available, choose iFastNet.
Coupons and exclusive deals
Gilect has partnered with iFastNet to provide some of the cheapest deals available! By using our exclusive coupon code “GILECT” you can get an additional 25% discount! The best part is that this discount is recurring, and it discounts each payment made. This means that if you were paying $4.99/month, you’d now be paying $3.75/month.
Here’s a tip to get the cheapest possible prices: pay yearly and apply our coupon code. By doing this, you can get Super Premium for as low as $2.99/month, the price of a coffee, and Ultimate Premium for just $5.25/month, less than the price of a carwash. If you opt for the starter plan, you can get away with paying as low as $1.25 a month, probably the cheapest hosting in the world.
Do you need paid hosting?
We’ll let you in on a little secret companies that don’t want you to know: you don’t necessarily have to pay for hosting. That’s right, if you’re just starting out for the first time, have a smaller website, or are just messing around, completely free hosting is also available! What a steal, what’s better than paying absolutely nothing?
Using iFastNet’s state-of-the-art hosting infrastructure, Gilect is able to provide hosting without a price tag attached to it! This hosting is completely free, instant to set up, and doesn’t try to profit off your website—A.K.A., there are no advertisements placed on your website.
Of course, there are some reasons that you may want to pay for hosting. If you have a large website that receives high volumes of traffic, you may want to consider forking over a couple of dollars. However, it doesn’t hurt to try free hosting. You can sign up at any time, no credit cards are required. If you do decide you want more, you can upgrade at any time!
Because of the partnership between Gilect and iFastNet, Gilect allows you to seamlessly upgrade your free website to iFastNet’s premium plans. This way, you only have to pay for what you need when you need it!
Comparison to other hosting providers
| Provider | iFastNet | Hostinger | Bluehost |
| Similarly priced plans | $4.99/month ($2.99/m for 1 year term) | $11.99/month ($2.99/m for 4 year term) | $14.97/month for 3 year term ($2.95/month for first term) |
| Free domain | Yes, 1-Year or For Life | Yes, 1-year | Yes, 1-year |
| Disk Space | Unlimited SSD | 100 GB SSD | 10 GB SSD |
| Bandwidth | 250 GB | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Free SSL | Yes, unlimited | Yes, unlimited | 1-year |
| Websites | 20 | 100 | 1 |
| 100 inboxes with unlimited storage | 100 inboxes, 1 GB each | 5 inboxes | |
| Industry leading cPanel | Yes | No | Yes |
The price-to-value comparison with iFastNet versus other hosts is a no brainer: iFastNet offers the best value. And for just $7.99/month for the Ultimate Premium plan, iFastNet knocks the other two hosts out of the park.
If you are still looking for a web host, stop here. In 2023, iFastNet remains one of the best web hosts available for the lowest costs on the market. You can easily get started with iFastNet for as low as $2.99.