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FatCow Review: Web Hosting Review |
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| Low cost plan with reasonably good reliability; easy shopping cart creator; green host; 50% exclusive discount | |
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[Editor's note: Next Advisor visitors save 50% off of the regular price of $7.33 per month when they visit FatCow from a link on the NextAdvisor.com site. There is no coupon code necessary, just click "Visit Website" or "Go to Site".] At $3.67 per month, FatCow is among the cheapest web hosts we reviewed. Domain registration is free for life, though you must be sure to activate FatCow's Domain Guard; it's not automatic. If you want to keep your registration data out of the public record, we recomend buying domain privacy for an additional $8.99 per year. It's one of many companies that offers "unlimited" storage and data transfer, which is a pretty safe offering given how small most websites are. FatCow is a good bargain, but as you'll see below, its performance is not perfect and is probably better suited to the beginner with a personal site, rather than a small business. On the plus side, FatCow has recently added the Weebly Drag and Drop Builder to its site building offering. It's extremely easy to use, and has a number of options for creating a nice-looking, dynamic site (though you'll pay extra to add an ecommerce component). The free version limits you to six pages, but it's easier to use than the CM4all Website Creator that's also included. FatCow offers an easy shopping cart solution with Shopsite, one of the more intuitive shopping cart creation programs we used. Wordpress is nearly standard with all web hosts, and the "one-click" installation was easy to get through. Unfortunately, the first installations of our CM4all site and Wordpress blog were not installed in the right place. It took a call to their support line to fix it. While not the most professional support that we've encountered, they were able to solve the problem quickly. They offer support through live-chat and email as well. Premium support with a unique toll-free number and a customized console is available for an additional charge. In common with many other web hosts, there's not a consistent feel among the various components we used, as they employ a number of 3rd party applications to provide functionality. This may be a bit of an obstacle to beginners, as there's a clunky feel to the overall experience. But again, this is not out-of-the-ordinary for a low-cost web host. Our testing proved FatCow to be reasonably reliable, but a little slow in all areas. During our four-month test period, FatCow fell at the lower end of the server response time test, taking an average of .673 seconds to download our 88KB file (the average for all tested was .518 seconds). FatCow's uptime was not terrible, but it was below the 99.88% group average, coming in at 99.69%, or just 9 hours of downtime for our four-month test period. It was in our large-file download test that we saw the greatest hit. Our 77MB test file took an average of 4 minutes and 56 seconds to download, the slowest of all hosts we tested. FatCow's heavy discount does come at some cost. FatCow offers a 30-Day full refund and prorated refund after that. If you cancel within 30 days, FatCow says you can choose whether or not to keep the domain (if you do, you will be charged $20 for the domain registration). It should be noted that refunds after 30-days will be charged a $35 cancelation fee which includes the cost of the domain registration. FatCow is a great bargain and doesn't leave users tied into a multi-year contract to get a good price, something we really respect. Potential customers will need to decide if the cost balances with the performance issues. |
| Cheapest Plan: | $3.67/mo 1 year (after 50% discount) |
| 1 Year Plan: | $44.00/yr; $3.67/mo (after 50% discount) |
| $ Back Guarantee: | 30-day full refund, prorated after; $35 termination charge (includes domain) |
| Domain: | Free for life with Domain Guard activation |
| Support: | Email, Phone, Chat |
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