Same day, same benchmark script, three UK servers. Geekbench 6, fio and iperf3 results in full — including the one where our £3.50 plan wins.
Benchmarked 31 August 2026 · YABS v2026-07-24 · VM6 Networks Ltd · ~9 min read
THE SHORT VERSION
- ▸2.55× the single-core CPU on our Ryzen tier, and 3.09× per vCPU on multi-core
- ▸8.8× to 13.6× the disk throughput depending on block size
- ▸1.44× the network throughput to London, at 1.4 ms lower latency
- ▸Our £3.50/mo budget VPS beats the Fasthosts plan on disk by 2.1× to 6.3×
- ▸Fasthosts win on published SLA, multi-year pricing and company size — and their network is genuinely quick
Fasthosts has been hosting British websites since 1999. Gloucester and Worcester data centres, a UK support desk, renewable-powered facilities, over a million domains under management. They are a serious company and nothing below is meant to suggest otherwise.
What this page does is narrower than a pros-and-cons listicle: it puts verifiable benchmark numbers side by side, from runs performed on the same day with the same version of the same script, and says plainly where each platform wins.
How we tested
All three results come from YABS version v2026-07-24, run on 31 August 2026. YABS bundles Geekbench 6 for CPU, fio for disk (mixed 50/50 random read and write at four block sizes) and iperf3 for network throughput.
| VM6 UK AMD G4 | VM6 UK Xeon M | Fasthosts VPS M+ | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Ryzen 9 9950X (Zen 5) | Xeon Gold 6230 | EPYC-Milan (Zen 3) |
| vCPU | 2 @ 4,292 MHz | 1 @ 2,095 MHz | 4 @ 2,596 MHz |
| RAM | 3.8 GiB DDR5 | 1.9 GiB | 3.7 GiB |
| Location | Coventry, UK | London, UK | Worcester, UK |
| Price / month | £11 | £3.50 | £10.99 |
Raw output: VM6 Ryzen · VM6 budget · Fasthosts, published independently by VPSBenchmarks
Note the vCPU counts. Fasthosts allocated four cores; our Ryzen plan had two and our budget plan had one. We have not adjusted for that — instead we show per-core figures so you can judge it yourself.
CPU: Geekbench 6
| Metric | VM6 AMD G4 | VM6 Xeon M | Fasthosts M+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single-core | 3,326 | 1,008 | 1,306 |
| Multi-core | 5,866 (2 vCPU) | 1,003 (1 vCPU) | 3,795 (4 vCPU) |
| Multi-core per vCPU | 2,933 | 1,003 | 949 |
Verify: VM6 Ryzen · VM6 budget · Fasthosts
The Ryzen plan is 2.55× faster on single-core and 1.55× faster on multi-core using half the cores. Per core it is 3.09× ahead.
Our budget Xeon is slower than Fasthosts on single-core — 1,008 against 1,306, so they are about 30% ahead. We are not going to dress that up. It is older silicon at 2.1 GHz and it costs £3.50 a month. What is worth noticing is that per core, the £3.50 plan edges theirs: 1,003 against 949. Their multi-core advantage comes from having four cores, not from each core being quicker.
Why single-core matters most. Nearly everything people actually run is bottlenecked on one thread at a time: a PHP request in WordPress, Laravel or WHMCS; MetaTrader 4 and 5 and their Expert Advisors; a Minecraft main game loop; an individual MySQL query; an npm install. If that is your workload, the Ryzen plan finishes in roughly two-fifths of the time and the spare Fasthosts cores sit idle while it happens.
Disk: fio random read and write
| Block size | VM6 AMD G4 | VM6 Xeon M | Fasthosts M+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4k | 1.55 GB/s (378.8k IOPS) | 330.6 MB/s (80.7k) | 160.4 MB/s (40.1k) |
| 64k | 8.78 GB/s | 3.58 GB/s | 997.0 MB/s |
| 512k | 12.78 GB/s | 6.41 GB/s | 974.5 MB/s |
| 1m | 13.13 GB/s | 6.11 GB/s | 967.1 MB/s |
This is the widest gap in the test, and the one most visible day to day. The Ryzen plan runs 8.8× to 13.6× ahead. The 4k figure is what matters for databases: 378,800 IOPS against 40,089. Any ORM-heavy application, busy WooCommerce store or cPanel box with fifty sites lives in exactly that access pattern, and the difference between those two numbers is the difference between queries returning from disk and queries waiting for it.
And here is the result we did not expect. Our £3.50/month budget VPS beats the Fasthosts plan on disk by 2.1× at 4k, 3.6× at 64k and 6.3× at 1m blocks. Older CPU, yes. Slower storage, no.
The reason is architectural rather than clever. Our budget nodes run local NVMe with a short path to the disk. The measured Fasthosts throughput is consistent with a shared enterprise pool with per-instance rate limiting — an entirely reasonable choice for a host managing thousands of tenants, trading peak speed for predictability across the fleet. It just means the ceiling is lower.
Try it on your own workload
Every VM6 VPS comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee, so you can run YABS yourself and compare against the numbers on this page before you commit to anything.UK VPS from £6/moBudget VPS from £1.75/mo
Network: iperf3 to Clouvider London
| Metric | VM6 AMD G4 | VM6 Xeon M | Fasthosts M+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upload | 8.79 Gb/s | 918 Mb/s | 6.10 Gb/s |
| Download | 7.69 Gb/s | 906 Mb/s | 6.12 Gb/s |
| Latency to London | 6.01 ms | 7.60 ms | 7.41 ms |
| IPv6 on tested instance | Routed /64 | No | No |
Credit where it is due: Fasthosts’ network is genuinely fast. Six gigabits to London from a mid-tier VPS is a strong result and far better than the 1 Gbps ports still common at this price. Anyone telling you Fasthosts is network-limited has not measured it — and if you saw an older version of our own comparison table claiming they run 1 Gbps ports, that was wrong and we have corrected it.
Our Ryzen tier is ahead on both throughput and latency, but it is a 1.4× gap, not a tenfold one. Our budget tier is on a 1 Gbps port and loses this comfortably. If sustained bandwidth is what you are buying, do not buy the budget tier.
Price, and what you get for it
| VM6 UK Xeon M | VM6 UK AMD G4 | Fasthosts VPS M+ | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price / month | £3.50 | £11 | £10.99 |
| Contract | None | None | Monthly, or 1/2/3-year prepay |
| Introductory pricing | No — standard rate | No — standard rate | Yes, steps up at renewal |
| vCPU | 1 | 2 × 4.3 GHz | 2 |
| RAM | 2 GB | 4 GB DDR5 | 4 GB |
| NVMe | 40 GB | 100 GB | 120 GB |
| IPv4 / IPv6 | 1 / — | 1 / routed /64 | 1 / — |
| DDoS protection | Included | Included | Check current terms |
| Daily backups | Included | Included | Addon upgrade |
| Money-back | 14 days | 14 days | Check current terms |
Our full range: budget from £1.75/mo (1 vCPU, 1 GB, 20 GB) up to £12/mo (2 vCPU, 8 GB, 100 GB); Ryzen from £6/mo (2 vCPU, 2 GB, 50 GB) up to £72/mo (6 vCPU, 32 GB, 800 GB). Need a guaranteed core rather than a shared one? Pin a physical Ryzen core for £5 per core per month.
On the Fasthosts price. We have not put a figure in the table, and that is deliberate rather than evasive. Fasthosts advertise introductory rates that step up at renewal, plus 12-month, 2-year and 3-year prepay terms that each carry a different effective monthly cost. Quoting one number without saying which it is would be misleading, and the third-party price tables you will find for them are unreliable. Check the standard rate on their own order page. What we can state without qualification is that our prices are standard rates: £3.50 and £11 are the same numbers in month one and month forty.
Which of ours, if either
Ryzen tier, from £6/mo. Production WordPress and WooCommerce, MetaTrader and trading EAs, game servers, databases, cPanel and agency hosting — anything where a human is waiting for a response.
Budget tier, from £1.75/mo. WireGuard and OpenVPN endpoints, Discord and Telegram bots, Pi-hole, Uptime Kuma and monitoring agents, Tor relays, learning Linux. Also, on the strength of the disk numbers above, anything disk-heavy but not CPU-heavy or bandwidth-heavy: log aggregation, backup targets, file sync.
Neither. If you need a five-nines SLA in a contract, or a FTSE-scale supplier, or you are prepaying three years — go with Fasthosts and do not feel bad about it.
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Frequently asked
Is VM6 faster than Fasthosts?
On benchmarks run 31 August 2026 with YABS v2026-07-24, our Ryzen tier is 2.55x faster on Geekbench 6 single-core (3,326 vs 1,306), 1.55x faster on multi-core despite having half the vCPU count, and 8.8x to 13.6x faster on fio disk throughput. Our budget tier is about 30% behind on single-core but 2.1x to 6.3x ahead on disk. Both sets of results are publicly verifiable.
Why compare a 2-core plan against a 4-core plan?
We matched the plans on RAM (3.8 GB against 3.7 GB), which is the more meaningful pairing for real workloads. Fasthosts happened to allocate four vCPUs. We publish per-core figures so you can normalise it yourself: 2,933 Geekbench multi-core points per vCPU against 949.
Is the cheap VM6 VPS really faster on disk than a mainstream Fasthosts plan?
On these runs, yes. 330.6 MB/s against 160.4 MB/s at 4k blocks, and 6.11 GB/s against 967 MB/s at 1m blocks. The budget tier’s CPU is older and its port is 1 Gbps rather than 10, so it is not faster overall. It is faster at disk.
Does Fasthosts have a fast network?
Yes. The benchmark shows roughly 6.1 Gbps to London in both directions, which is well above the 1 Gbps ports still common at this price point. Our Ryzen tier measured 8.79 Gbps, so we are ahead, but this is the closest of the three tests.
Can I migrate from Fasthosts to VM6?
Yes, at no charge. Open a ticket before you order and we will plan it with you. Most single-site migrations finish inside an hour. If you use cPanel, our free WebDeck panel can pull accounts directly over SSH.
What is YABS?
An open-source benchmark script that runs Geekbench 6, fio and iperf3 and prints a standard report. The VPS community uses it because the output is hard to fake: Geekbench results upload to a public URL that anyone can inspect.
VM6 benchmarks run 31 August 2026 using YABS v2026-07-24 on production nodes. Competitor figures are sourced from independently published YABS results, linked in full above. VPS performance varies by host node, tenant activity and time of day; a single benchmark run is a snapshot, not a guarantee. Competitor pricing and feature sets change frequently and are not ours to guarantee — verify with the provider directly. All trademarks belong to their respective owners; these comparisons are independent and not endorsed by or affiliated with the providers named.
