The review of FatCow web hosting is based on their price, reliability, page loading speed, hosting features and customer service, from our editors’ true experience hosted with them and their verified customer feedback all over the world.
FatCow has been offering budget-friendly web hosting service for many years. Established in 1998, this company has attached much importance on customer satisfaction and quality hosting solution for more than 15 years. At present, they have won a good reputation in this industry.
Overall Rating
In order to give customers a visual convenient check, our editors have added an overall rating chart before presenting a detailed review on FatCow.
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Reputation
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Features
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Speed
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Reliability
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Support
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Price$3.15/mo, 61.4% off $8.17/mo regularly
According to this chart, FatCow has done a good job in respect to technical support and price. However, in regard to feature and performance, they are not as good as some elite web hosting providers in the market.
Price & Discount
Fatcow comes with one unique package for shared web hosting called as Original Fatcow whose price is $3.15/mo after a bigger discount of 61.4%, which is available for 12/24/36 months billing cycles. As for the monthly subscription, the price is $5.00/mo. In effect, these prices are affordable compared to the industry average. However, its renewal price is $8.17/mo, which is a little bit more expensive than some other affordable hosting providers, like InMotion Hosting.
| Price |  |
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|---|---|---|
| Regular | $6.99/mo | $8.17/mo |
| Discounted Price | $3.49/mo | $3.15/mo |
| Discount | 50% | 61.4% |
| Money Back | Anytime | 30 Days |
And also, according to some complaints we have received, there are customers feeling dissatisfied with the hidden fees and ambiguous refund policy. To be specific, some customers complain that Fatcow charges unexpected fees that range from few dollars to dozens of dollars after they sign up the services, which is because that this company has not clearly disclosed specific charge for each product. Thus, you can only make things clear after you sign up and log into the control panel.
In addition, this company has not listed non-refundable products in detailed terms and condition. As a result, Fatcow may deduct 50% to 60% of your fees by telling you certain products are not refundable.
Feature
Like many other web hosts, FatCow provides unlimited disk space, monthly bandwidth, MySQL database, and email accounts. Besides, they offer FTP access, shared SSL, free domain name registration, website builder and social networking credits. They also have almost all the advanced applications, such as WordPress, Gallery2, phpBB, GBook and Joomla.
However, FatCow doesn’t have some competitive features such as cPanel, Cron Job, and SSH. In the following, we have presented a feature comparison chart.
| Feature | |
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|---|---|---|
| cPanel |  |
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| Free SSDs | |
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| Ad Credits | |
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| Money-Back Guarantee | 90 days | 30 days |
| Cron Job | |
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| SSH | |
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Reliability
Fatcow utilizes 2 top-notch data centers that are well equipped with N+1 power, on-site security monitoring and physical security measures to ensure a stable and smooth hosting environment. This company uses 100% DELL servers which means every part of the server is produced and assembled in DELL factory. They also use BGP connection to routers whose purpose is to make sure the websites running properly and uninterruptedly.
Objective statistics speaks louder than complaints that are not confirmed. Therefore, in order to obtain impartial data, we have personally hosted 2 websites on a server, together with launching a real-time monitoring by using Pingdom with a 5 minutes interval. In accordance with the statistics we have recorded, Fatcow delivers 99.95% uptime averagely. Please check the following chart for detailed information.
Loading Speed
As page loading speed is one of the most essential factors for a successful and prevail web host, our editors have carried out a performance testing with FatCow and InMotion. As a result, the site hosted with FatCow is 193% slower than that hosted with InMotion. Check the detail in the following.
Customer Service
FatCow has a good reputation in customer services. The same as many web hosting providers, they offer 24×7 support via phone call, live chat and email in case customers have any problems to be solved. All the employees in FatCow are equipped with professional knowledge and skills. Before officially serving for customers, employees have to go through a special training. All of their staffs have more than 4-year support experience.
However, many webmasters write to us with negative comments. Specifically, they complain much about the email service and FTP, which takes at least 5 times for the description to the technicians but still nothing is done for improvement. Furthermore, the FTP speed is not stable, especially in business hours, not to mention the uploading speed which is under 30k/s.
Conclusion
It is true that FatCow is a fast, reliable and trustworthy hosting , however, considering their cost-effectiveness, page loading speed, our editors highly recommend the following 3 alternatives.
