Fat Cow Review
FatCow are known as offering one of the cheapest possible web hosting plans that you can find online. But, do they sacrifice quality and services for the benefit of the cost?
This review will look deeper into what the package is they offer, what the features are in particular and why they are or are not useful, the prices you’re looking at and some additional topics that you need to know before deciding whether to pick FatCow for web hosting in 2017.FatCow are a well-known name within the web hosting world but it’s sometimes unclear on whether that means it’s right for you, so it’s important to learn more about the brand and what it is exactly that they’re offering.
- 99Performance
- 99Accessibility
- 99Reliability
- 99Cost
- 99Service
- 4.955.08099Overall
Detailed Review of Fat Cow Hosting
FatCow have a rather unique name, it’s not something that you’d particularly rush to back with your money and website. But, ignore the name, because they’re actually a hosting company that have been in operation since they founded in 1998. Since then, they’ve created a dedicated team that are always trying to create the best package for web hosting on a strict and tight budget.
They’ve always been proud of the fact that they’ve been able to revolve their entire company around one web hosting package that offers the best value in web hosting. More recently, they’ve introduced the Minimoo plan that is aimed at those that do not feel that they’ll benefit enough from the regular plan to make it worth the purchase, instead the Minimoo is just for those that essentially want to park their domain and get a single page online. FatCow as a company operate with the target audience of small business owners, both as individuals or groups.
As we just mentioned, they have the one main plan that has stayed the same price and will stay the same price year on year. The FatCow Web hosting plan is simple enough to have everything that allows someone to get up and going on the internet instantly without having to get complex.
When looking to build a website, you need to realise that you need hosting in order to make your website visible for others to see. FatCow is one of many services that allow people to get off the ground and running with a website without needing prior knowledge in web development.
For websites to be public and accessible, they need to be stored and run off of a server that is directly connected to the internet, which is where FatCow (and similar companies) come in. The web host just owns and maintains servers that allow for other people to keep their websites and have their websites online thanks to their servers.
Fat Cow Hosting Features
Speed
There’s a speed benchmark we look at when testing out a shared hosting solution. It’s a page load speed of 3 seconds. It’s because research has shown that a page load time that’s longer than 3 seconds, causes web visitors to become impatient and click away to another site. Results suggest up to 40% of visitors will click away and no business can afford to lose that much traffic.
Fat Cow isn’t great. It’s tested to load pages at around 3 seconds, often a touch quicker. It’s not anything exceptional, you can expect other sites that compare to the cost of Fatcow can be twice as fast.
Reliability
There is both a positive and a negative to the level of Uptime that is offered by FatCow. They actually don’t claim to have, or maintain, any certain number of Uptime (for comparison, hosting like iPage guarantees 99.99%). That’s the bad news, so it seems like they may not care that their servers could go down at any moment and so could your website.
However, this assumption does seem like it’s probably quite far from the truth. Their technical team behind the scenes do work 24/7 to ensure that they are rarely down at all and so that they can keep to an Uptime that’s impressive as some of their competitors.
It’s also important to note that Fatcow’s data centre does actually operate with a layered server meaning that if one of them crashes and goes down they’ll be able to get another one to replace it instantly. Fortunately, they seem to make this seem ideal since they have frequent and regular backups that minimises the risk of consumers realising anything has changed.
The data centre is said to be under professional surveillance 24 hours a day, every day, so you can sleep easy at night knowing that your sites are being protected and you’re not going to wake up to a total mess.
Customer Support
With FatCow you get a whole load of help and support options, so much so that it you’re probably smothered if anything happens to go wrong. Of course, we’re not complaining. It’s a great thing that you’re able to get help and support with a click of your fingers, it’s a horrible experience when you begin to find problems with your site and knowing that you have help is relieving.
So, all of the help and support options come free with the FatCow Web Hosting plan, and you get knowledge base, user guides and tutorials to follow. The user guides and tutorials are ideal for those that are new to making and producing websites and need a helping hand to get over the finishing line once they’ve started.
You’re also treated to the addition of 24/7 telephone, email AND live chat. So, if it’s a small problem then you get the privilege of live chat all day every day to figure out the issue, but if it’s something bigger then you can simply send a support ticket email and you’re likely to hear back with a solution within a day or two.
As with many other companies that are involved with web hosting, it’s unclear whether their customer support teams are inhouse or outsourced. But either way, they do seem to get the job done and it’s better to have 24/7 customer support than it is to not have it.
Conclusion
” if you want to know why Fat Cow are award winning then try them, you won’t be disappointed”
The FatCow Web Hosting plan is created with the customer put first. Rather than relying on the consumer having some already existing skills in website development, FatCow just turns a complex and complicated task into something that’s easy enough for someone who has no clue about websites to use.
From website creation in the first place to features that help you stand out from the rest, the FatCow package is thought to not only help you get a website online, but also act as a one-stop shop for all web needs with maintaining a successful website once it’s set up and underway.
It’s easy to sit here and slander FatCow for having quite a flawed plan in terms of support and technology. But, for the prices that they offer, it’s likely that the plan can suit a whole host of people, like beginners. Beginners are unlikely to really care about the complexity of more expensive plans elsewhere so wouldn’t mind the FatCow Hosting Plan.
