Fatcow Reviews
FatCow is probably the biggest Green Hosting company around, suitable for small businesses and for personal use as well. Has some great built in features like One Click Installation of popular scripts (WordPress, Joomla, etc).
FatCow has also earned our “Best Shared Hosting” award.
FatCow is a big name in web hosting services. They have been around since the earlier days of web hosting – since 1998 – and have managed to keep satisfying customers and grow their business ever since. FatCow keeps customers happy by making web hosting services simple, cost-effective, and reliable. FatCow focuses on small-to-mid sized business customers, but the services that they offer are also cheap enough to satisfy the average individual as well. FatCow goes out of their way to avoid complicated “techno-babble” and pricing schemes. They offer a one-size-fits all plan (and it really does fit nearly anything), or a very simple plan called MiniMoo that includes nothing but a homepage and an e-mail address. FatCow’s focus on simplicity and user-friendliness puts them a step ahead of most web hosting providers.
FatCow Webhosting Features
FatCow’s one-size-fits all plan is “beefed” up with essential services and features. This is a true “one-size-fits-all” plan, because it includes unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited e-mail inboxes with webmail, spam filtering, and newsletter tools. Of course, these generous features are accompanied by all the useful services that facilitate development and implementation of modern web applications – PHP, CGI, MySQL (unlimited databases!), and Python are all supported by default. Each new plan that is purchased includes a free domain name (about a $10 value), and is backed by a money-back guarantee.
FatCow’s hosting also offers all sorts of extra services and perks that assist with getting a website or online store setup, then publicized. FatCow accounts have tools built-in that allow point-and-click web design, easy assessment of analytics, easy use of Google webmaster tools, shared SSL for secure eCommerce, and all the payment and security features needed for online business activities. Plus, FatCow offers auto-installation of popular bulletin board, blog, content management, and eCommerce applications. As an added bonus, FatCow offers one of the most lucrative packages of advertising credits available in the webhosting industry at this time: $75 dollars of Google AdWords credit, $25 dollars of Yahoo/Bing Search Marketing credit, $50 Facebook Advertising credit, and completely free Yellowpages.com listing. Websites hosted with FatCow also benefit from free access to HubSpot’s Website Grader system, which helps you tweak your page to maximize search engine hits, and improve the number of viewers your site receives.
Of course, if you don’t need all the bells and whistles yet – FatCow also offers a very simple package with nothing but a homepage and an e-mail address. This sort of site won’t attract very much attention, but it can be useful as a placeholder when first dealing with a company’s startup concerns.
FatCow Support
FatCow’s support team (they call them the “Moo Crew”) follows a policy they call the “HeiferCratic Oath” (a pun based on doctors’ Hippocratic Oath). This policy ensures that FatCow’s support team goes above and beyond what you could expect from any of their competitors. Firstly, FatCow might be the only budget hosting company that reaches out to new customers directly, and makes sure that they understand the benefits and features of their new hosting plan. Every new customer gets a phone call from a support agent within their first week of service. Further, the telephone support that FatCow offers (available 24/7) is quite phenomenal. In addition to running a call center around the clock in the USA, FatCow’s call center maintains an average call answering time of under 1 minute. This means that when you have a question, concern, or problem, you can speak with a real human being within seconds. The support staff will either correct any problem that you have immediately, or if it takes some time, they will follow up with you when the task is completed. In addition, the support team takes customer satisfaction very seriously. Each interaction with technical support is followed up by a short survey, which is always evaluated to ensure that the support team is doing their job well. If you ever feel like the support team isn’t living up to their oath (and their managers agree), they will credit you for the cost of one month of hosting service.
FatCow Uptime and Hardware
FatCow’s hosting services provide a high degree of stability, uptime, and redundancy. FatCow’s datacenter is run by 100% green wind energy most of the time, though it can rely on alternative backup power sources in the case of power outage. The datacenter uses the most advanced load-balancing techniques to ensure that websites and services can be accessed in a reliable manner. The datacenter is served by multi-gigabit connections, which means that visitors to your website will always be able to view pages and download data at breathtaking speeds. To prevent the loss of crucial data, FatCow carries out automated daily backups of all the information contained on their servers, so even if hardware does fail, your website and data are not lost. Plus, all hardware (and the datacenter itself) are monitored by staff 24/7 for security and stability issues.
Other FatCow Advantages
Unlike many budget hosts, FatCow has been around for quite some time. They have a well-established record of quality and reliability, which offers a peace of mind that many web hosts cannot. Further, FatCow happens to offer a lucrative referral plan – affiliate referrals pay up to $100 for each referral, and individual referrals from one customer to another potential customer pays for $10 in future hosting service. FatCow even offers discounted reseller options for entrepreneurs that want to dabble in reselling webhosting services to other businesses or individuals.
FatCow Coupon Code and Pricing
At the time of writing, FatCow is offering 50% off hosting plans by using the code 50OFF when signing up. This cuts the usual price of hosting ($7.33) down to $3.67 a month – an extreme bargain.
FatCow Overview
FatCow offers tremendous value for the prices that they charge, especially in terms of support services and advertising credit. But most of all, FatCow’s proven track record establishes them as a safe haven for hosting your website. At the prices that they are asking, passing up a FatCow hosting package would be crazy.
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I tried FatCow for webhosting a local political campaign site based on reviews like these. The price was decent – $44 for a year.
The campaign was successful, and I took the site down afterward. Unfortunately, I did not cancel the account, and it autorenewed at _$107_ for a year. When I went to cancel it, they told me there would be a $35 cancellation fee. When I said I didn’t remember seeing that when I signed up, they said it’s in “Terms and Conditions” – buried with a ton of legalese.
Anyway, fool me once and all that. I told them I thought their policy was misleading and abusive, and I won’t be back.
(PS- They also take _forever_ to answer their phone – it took three tries to get this cancelled since one time I had to leave after ~20 minutes on hold and the other time I was cut off after a similar wait time.
Avoid.
I’m using their services now. All seem good now. Support takes about 5 minutes to solve your problem and technical support is not really 24/7 but is not bad. Price is good (88$ for 2 years hosting service without any addons). Space and traffic is “unlimited”, it’s ok for PHP, images, some videos or music but maybe not ok for large business sites (as they said in their TOS). Speed is acceptable (medium speed for oversea sites, i’m in SEA now – it’s ok from Singapore). They use VDesk 4 as web hosting control panel, it’s ok but less convenient than CPanel (I think they should use Cpanel, it’s really really the best webcp on Linux). The mySQL server is shutting down sometimes, maybe because they restart it. So i continue to use their hosting at the moment.
I have had a Fatcow account for two years now, and have been overcharged by them several times. The first time, they charged me twice for the hosting account. The next time, they charged me twice for the privacy option for my domain. Now they are trying to charge me again, but won’t even tell me what the charge is for! They don’t even answer my response–they marked the support ticket closed even though they didn’t do anything! I think they are trying to scam their customers.
I have been using fatcow for a month. When started, few things doesnt work on their server, so i have to contact them and they fixed it.
Although often get thing that dont work as it should, they response quite fast to fix it.
So will continue to use it at the moment.
Regarding Fatcow, the good thing I have to mention is that this hosting company maintains daily server backups to ensure that data can be restored in the event that data is lost – which is not often seen in budget hosting. In addition it goes one step further by providing a backup generator system to ensure that data is not lost in the first place. Thats a point which justifies the overall rating with 5 stars.