Fatcow VS GoDaddy -Personal & Small Business Hosting Comparison

Fatcow and GoDaddy are two preeminent web hosting providers in the public eye. Owing to the fact that they share some similarities to some extent, it is bemusing to distinguish their services from each other.

Hence, we write this comparison between Fatcow and GoDaddy to help you have a clear understanding and get the differences of their services figured out. In below, we mainly center on these aspects including prices, features, performance and technical support.

Overall Rating

To begin with, we display a table of their overall ratings, which is worked out on the basis of our real hosting experience and hundreds of reviews from verified customers of these two companies respectively.

The above table reveals that both these two companies haven’t achieved high recognition. To be specific, Fatcow is rated 3.5 out of 5 stars in features, reliability and performance whereas GoDaddy obtains 3 out of 5 stars in reliability and technical support. Telling the truth, all their ratings are not very remarkable in the field.

Price

Fatcow develops one unique package named as Original Plan for shared web hosting services with its price starting at $49.00/yr for billing cycles including 12/24/36 months. As for a monthly subscription, the price is $5.00/mo.

By contrast, GoDaddy comes with 3 upgradable packages that are called as Economy, Deluxe and Ultimate. Its price is starting at $3.49/mo, $4.49/mo and $7.49/mo respectively. Please note that these prices are only available for a 12/24/36 month subscriptions. In below, we have made a clear table of their specific prices of different billing cycles for your reference.

When it comes to money back guarantee, both of them provide a 30 days money back guarantee with which you are able to get a refund if you cancel their services within the first 30 days. Nonetheless, please note that the money back guarantee of Fatcow is only valid for credit card payments, which gives about rise to obstruction for customers who pay via other channels.

Feature

The Original Plan is offered with a large number of core features such as unlimited disk space, bandwidth, domains, subdomains, email accounts and FTP accounts, etc.. By contrast, GoDaddy comes with unlimited bandwidth and different amounts of resources including websites allowed, disk space, MySQL databases, email addresses, Fotolia photo credits and so forth.

For example, the Economy includes 1 website, unlimited bandwidth, 100 GB disk space, 10 MySQL databases, 100 email addresses, and 10 Fotolia photo credits. For your convenience to check detailed information of their features, we have listed them in the following table.

As to the control panel, Factow develops its own custom control panel which enables you to manage all aspects of your hosting plans such as administration of websites, emails, domains, and accounts. By comparison, GoDaddy utilizes the cPanel with which you are capable of accessing all the hosting features and settings you need to get the management of the websites simplified.

Performance

To guarantee 99.9% uptime, Fatcow situates 2 state-of-the-art data centers in Boston. Owing to hundreds of high performance servers, power generator and physical security measures, this company successfully fulfills its pledge of 99.9% uptime.

Different from Fatow, GoDaddy owns totally 9 data centers in the Europe, US and the Asia-Pacific region which are equipped with advanced facilities and fully redundant UPS power systems. After we have personally hosted 2 websites on their servers respectively in the past 3 months, we have come out specific statistics of their uptime in the following list.

• Fatcow: delivers 99.95% uptime on average.
• GoDaddy: delivers 99.93% uptime averagely.

In addition, we also have launched a real time monitoring of their server response time using Pingdom with a 5 minutes interval. In accordance with our recording statistics, Fatcow takes 695ms whereas that of GoDaddy is 784ms. Please refer to the following chart for detailed statistics.

Technical Support

As two world-renowned web hosting providers, both these two companies offer technical support powered by hundreds of highly professional and experienced technicians. With their on-site 24×7 assistance, you are able to get responsive support all the time. In addition, you can also appeal to some other resources for help including knowledgebase and video tutorials.

Nevertheless, there is a defect of support offered by GoDaddy for its lacking of live chat without which some non-native speakers are incapable of seeking prompt help to get their pressing technical issues settled with high efficiency.

Conclusion – Both Are Not The Perfect Choices

From what we have compared above, both these two companies are proven to be mediocre web hosting providers. Fatcow is more feature-rich, while its competitor is more affordable. However, in consideration of their limitations in some aspects, we objectively think that both of them are not worth going.

Based on our real hosting experience and thousands of comments from verified customers, we recommend the following companies for their services of affordable prices, rich features, great performance and responsive technical support.