FatCow Review

I've used a few different hosting companies in my time and I like to stick to the ones I know and like, Fatcow use to be one of them. The last few months I've had so much downtime it's been unbelievably frustrating. The customer service at fatcow basically - sucks! It's really bad, for example early this week I contacted support due to internal server errors and got told "Check your isp problems", that was it! That was the 'conversation'! I told them that all other sites work fine and i can't access my site or fatcows visitor stats.."Check your isp problems"! I use to love Fatcow but now I must admit I can't stand using it, it's almost hit and miss as to whether or not the site will load. This week, I'm changing hosting companies and hopefully Fatcow will be a distant nightmare. My site is www.seaorair.com - I wonder if it's loading?

First off pricing was not clear, I felt taken advantage of when I signed up. Second, servers failed repeatedly. When I called in to ask them to fix they blamed me. Unimaginable. Total disaster. I regret using them. Moving on now.

In my two plus years with Fat Cow I have had no issues, hickups or problems. Questions are answered quickly and with competent people. I am a new to having a web site and I must admit I had my reservations, but using Fat Cow has made the start up and ongoing management easy and even though it is a simple site with no e-commerce it still drives business to my golf shop.

The first issue I had with Fat Cow was when I noticed that I had an alternate domain designation of .ca It was first noticed when I was not getting any emails I called support and I was able to get into my control panel there it was discovered that my emails had a .ca at the end not a .com as I had requested when setting up the account. This was fixed on the emails but little to my knowledge it was still present in my domain central section, I only found out about this when I received a bill for domain listing from the company in Austria that controls the .ca domain designation. Fat cow support was of no help in discovering how this alternate domain was associated with my account. I would assume that some sort of log is kept to track this. I never registered it in the first place, it obviously was the account rep that set the account up. And now it is time for my renew and the cost is 3X what i paid for when 1st set up so I will be leaving for another.

They were pretty good the first month I had them (coincidentally during the 30 day guarantee period), after that everything went downhill. Their customer service reps are snobby and don't care to help you out too much. Their servers are very slow, especially from 6pm-4 am EST. When I asked them to look into this issue for me, they simply said "everything was working fine." Lastly, they have their own custom control panel that doesn't work very well, occasionally not committing the changes you made to the server.

Fatcow didn't even get any emails to me...I had to contact tech support where the rep argued that my paypal transition id was incorrect! Cut and paste straight from my paypal confirmation...sam rep took forever but finally sent email to an alternative email address....account logon info DIDN'kT work. Contacted tech support again...sloooooow responses and this rep asks if he should send the account logon info again....I asked if he intended to reset the password since the one they send DIDN'T work. He went negative and said that if I didn't send paypal trans ID again that he wouldn't do anything more. I am canceling and now fatcow says I have to login my account to cancel!!!!! And that they are going to keep $15 of my money....where is the 30 day money back guarantee????

I have used many hosting companies since 1998 and FatCow is one of the worst web hosting services I have ever used. Their prices are good but their shared hosting servers are WAY TOO OVERLOADED with too many sites and problems!!! My site was offline at least 3 times per week (for at least a few hours each time) due to their servers being too blocked up with traffic from too many sites on their shared hosting. So even if the prices of FatCow are low, you will end up paying much more in time, aggravation, and your website being offline constantly!!

I am pretty much ok with the web hosting service of fatcow, though file uploads and update times are inferior to other services. My main complaint is about their email service. It's really bad in my opinion. Their web client is really bad. Folders are presented as names with "." separating the folder hierarchy. Apple mail and the mailboxes aren't synchronized easily. Sent vs Sent Messages folders for example. The smtp server has constant problems and I've contacted customer support or hundred times. Certain letters aren't allowed in the password either. I was told that the n-th letter in my password was not allowed. I was a bit shocked that they knew my password in plain text.

FatCow has provided an excellent platform where I was able to put together a website quickly and easily with access to all the latest features at a price that can't be beat. They have given my small business with a limited budget the chance to compete with big budget competitors easily, effectively and economically. Thanks FatCow - I'm glad I made the "moove"!

I had issues just to get my domain name, after that I had DNS issues, never could get stable connect to site from overseas.