Founded in 1998, Fatcow has about a 15-year-long history now. Fatcow team is missioned to provide simple and user friendly services for customers, and they believe that old fashioned service still rings true today. No matter you want a web host or domain name for your business, Fatcow can help you.
However, compared with those best web hosting providers Fatcow still have some drawbacks in its performance and reliability. Actually, we prefer another web hosts HostMonster, which is more affordable and rich-featured than Fatcow.
HostMonster(http://www.hostmonster.com/) was founded in 1996. So far, it has provided services for thousands of business and personal websites, well-known in the affordability, starting at $3.95/mo, and 44% off the regular rate $6.95/mo/. Particularly, it provides rich features such as unlimited domains, unlimited bandwidth, $100 Google Advertising Offer, and supports the Ruby on Rails, Custom Cron Jobs, and SSH which Fatcow does not support. The chart below can help you make a clear comarison.
Features
Fatcow
HostMonster
Space&Bandwidth
Unlimited
Unlimited
Domain Name
Free
Free
AD Credits
$50
&100
MySQL Databases
PostgreSQL Databases
SSH
Money Back Guarantee
30 Days
Anytime
In the following article, I make the assessment in the aspects of Fatcow’s price, features, performance, and support, and also reveal some secrets behind the listed items on their homepage so that you can understand why we don’t recommend this company.
Price &Features
Fatcow offers most of features needed to build a website, such as free domain name, oodles of disk space & bandwidth, unlimited POP Mailboxes, and free website builders to help non-technical users to start a website easily. Fatcow supports most of common programming languages and techniques such as PHP 4&5, CGI directory, MySQL, Python, but it doesn’t support Ruby on Rails, Custom Cron Jobs, and secure shell (SSH) access.
Fatcow’s price starts at $4.08/mo which has attracted many customers, and it also guarantees 30 days money back to customers. It seems to be a very worry free service, but the followings are two hidden items about its price.
$4.08/mo is a promotional price for the first term – the renewal price regulates to $9.49/mo.
The money back guarantee is effective only when customers pay the money by credit-card when they sign up. That means if someone has paid money by PayPal or Check then it is not eligible for money back anymore.
Compared with Fatcow, HostMotion guarantees any time money back. As long as the users have any problems or feel a little unhappy, HostMonster tries its best to provide solutions for them.
Performance
Fatcow has two data centers separately located in the Boston and MA area. Both the data centers consist of thousands of servers and have the same network architecture. However, its speed is a little bit slower than HostMonster. We have monitored a website hosted with Fatcow for a couple of weeks, and have gotten a conclusion that the servers’ response time is 695 ms averagely, which is slower than 342ms of HostMonster. The chart is as below.
On the other hand, Fatcow’s uptime is much better than the loading speed, up to 99.9% according to our research. That means the customers can have an expectation of 15 minutes downtime for a month maximally.
Support
Fatcow’s support services are very user friendly. It provides many kinds of tools for users to choose. For example, they offer hundreds of knowledge articles and guides. These materials help nontechnical people to get started with their sites easily. If the users have urgent problems, they can also contact Fatcow’s support team via live chat, phone and email 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
Summary
Fatcow’s customer satisfaction is also not very good. Many complaints can be found over the Internet according to the two main drawbacks – loading speed and lack of SSH. So I highly recommend HostMonster to you here. No matter as terms of features, reliability, performance or support, HostMotion is really a “perfect” choice worthy of trying. Besides, with the high to 97.1% customer satisfaction rate, you can really rest assured.
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