JustHost and Fatcow are 2 well-known web hosts focusing on shared web hosting and offering VPS and dedicated packages as well. To know which one has done the better job in serving personal websites, we have made a comparison between them based on our independent review on the companies' reputation and their shared web hosting services.
The aspects we take into review to check the service quality are price, features, control panel, uptime, speed, and technical support. Details are presented as below.
Editorial & Customer Ratings
According to our review and testing, both JustHost and Fatcow have a good reputation in the industry and have been delivering quality services, but Fatcow lags behind a little when it comes to control panel and technical support. For the brief information about some of the most important aspects of the 2 companies, just read the following table.
Editorial Rating
Overall
Performance
Control Panel
Support
Website
JustHost.com
Fatcow.com
In addition, we have kept collecting real customers' ratings and reviews on the 2 companies' web hosting services. According to the current statistics, JustHost is rated 4.86 of 5, enjoying a 95.9% customer satisfaction rate, and Fatcow is rated 4.28 of 5, enjoying a 76.9% customer satisfaction rate.
Read the following chart for details about JustHost real customer reviews.
Price & Features
One of the common things between the 2 companies is that they both have a single shared web hosting plan serving personal websites and offer a large discount to cut the price down to increase sales.
Just Plan, JustHost's all-in-one package, is priced from $6.99/mo regularly. Now there is a 68% discount exclusive to visitors making subscriptions through the promotional link below, with which the actual price of the package is as low as $2.25/mo. $100 Google AdWords credits, $50 facebook ads credits and $25 Bing search credits are included for free.
Besides, the company also provides an anytime money back guarantee which allows customers to get a full refund if they cancel their accounts in the first 30 days and ask for a pro-rated refund after that period.
JustHost Promotional Link Activation
The reduced price of Fatcow shared package is now $49/year which averages approximately $4.1/mo. This price is quite affordable, but the regular one, which is also the renewal rate, is not as good as this one. When the initial term expires, customers need to pay $9.49/mo for account renewal, which is a little bit high for most personal website owners.
This package also includes free advertising credits for Google, Facebook and Yahoo, and a 30 days money back guarantee.
As for features, both of the companies provide unlimited disk storage, bandwidth and MySQL databases, while the most significant difference is the control panel their packages include. JustHost uses cPanel, the recognized #1 web hosting control panel with a graphic and powerful user interface, and Fatcow offers vDeck, a widely-used control panel that has a good fame but is regarded to be not as easy-to-use as cPanel.
Another difference is that Fatcow does not support Cron Job, which may lead to the result that some features for CMS like WordPress and Joomla cannot perform properly. For more details, read the table below.
Feature
Free Domain
Control Panel
cPanel
vDeck
Website Builder
PHP 5
MySQL 5
PostgreSQL
Shared SSL
SSH
Cron Job
SSH
Money Back Guarantee
Anytime
30 Days
Regular Price
$6.99/mo
$9.49/mo
Discount
68%
57%
Current Price
$2.25/mo
$4.1/mo
How to Claim
Link Activation
Link Activation
Uptime & Speed
JustHost promises to offer a secure and reliable hosting environment. All customers' websites are hosted on high performance quad professor servers housed in a state-of-the-art data center which features a UPS power back-up generator and 24x7 server monitoring.
Fatcow utilizes 2 data centers in Boston, MA area, both of which are equipped with 24x7 security, N+1 power and high quality servers. Every physical server in the data centers is clustered with another server that will take over if the primary one crashes, which inevitably reduces the downtime caused by hardware failure.
Both of the companies provide a guarantee of 99.9% uptime, and according to our own monitoring, they have kept that commitment. The real uptime in the past 30 days is:
JustHost: 99.99%.
Fatcow: 99.95%.
Although the 2 companies perform the same good in reliability, they do differ from each other in speed. As we have monitored, the server response speed of JustHost is much faster than that of its competitor. For detailed statistics in the past 30 days, read the following performance comparison chart.
Technical Support
JustHost and Fatcow are 2 leading web hosts dedicated to a high level of technical support to ensure that customers' questions are answered in the right time and in the proper way, so both of them provide customers with 24x7 support via 3 different channels: live chat, phone and email.
The small difference in this aspect is that for self-help technical materials, JustHost offers dozens of video tutorials which are not supported by Fatcow.
Conclusion
As JustHost wins a lot in price, feature and speed, and has a slight edge over its competitor in reliability and technical support, we personally recommend this company more for hosting personal websites. With the money back guarantee, the purchase with this company should be quite risk-free.
To learn more about JustHost, read JustHost review here or visit http://www.justhost.com/