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FatCow Review: Web Hosting |
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| Low cost plan with good reliability; easy shopping cart creator; green host; 55% exclusive discount | ||||||||||||||||
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[Editor's note: NextAdvisor visitors save 55% off of the regular price of $8.25 per month when they visit FatCow from a link on the NextAdvisor.com site. There is no coupon code necessary.] FatCow is a good bargain. While its performance is not perfect, it performs well considering the price. Pricing At $3.67 per month for a 2- or 3-year plan, FatCow is among the cheapest web hosts we've reviewed. A single-year plan is $4.67, still relatively cheap given that domain registration is free for life, though you must be sure to activate FatCow's Domain Guard for that. If you want to keep your registration data out of the public record, we recommend 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 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. Interface 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. Features 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. Performance Our testing proved FatCow to be fairly reliable, but a little slow in all areas. See the chart below for details. For uptime, higher percentages are better. For all others, lower numbers indicate better performance. FatCow test data:
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| Cheapest Price: | $3.67/mo |
| Storage/Data Transfer: | Unlimited |
| Money-Back Guarantee: | 30 days |
| Domain: | Free for life |
| Support: | Email, Phone, Chat |
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