FatCow reviews

Stay Away!

These guys are bad news. I am now looking for a new host. I've been with Fat Cow for about 5 years. All went well until the American technical support team was replaced by Indians. Fat Cow hosts my three websites, and one of them has been down for a week. The other two have been down in the past for weeks at a time. I just rebuilt one of them. Every time a problem occurs I am on the phone for hours with a variety of "technical support" people. Nothing is resolved. I can't imagine a worse web host!

can't get anywhere with them

I signed up with Fat Cow three weeks ago. What I thought would take about a day to finish has now taken three solid weeks of sitting at computer trying to figure out how to design the site. NONE of the tutorials work the way they show. None. When I ask for assistance or chat, same thing. Their Help tutorials are useless, their chats are useless, their help tickets are useless. Nothing works. I am afraid to cancel and go elsewhere I read there are hefty cancellation fees. I tried this to avoid spending $15,000 on building a website. I would definitely not recommend them to anyone. Their Weebly site builder seems to be a different version than I am shown anywhere else on the web, therefore completely useless to me. All I want is a simple blog!!! How hard can it BE??

Biggest Pro: There are none.
Biggest Con: That's what it seems like -- a big con.

support not availble

I had one domain in Fatcow for a year, i was happy when the year ended.
ALL the questions I asked, with technical support or sales were answered in a way that i just could not understand. there is (was?) no chat support and it took 24-48 hours to answer my questions. I moved to the "Hub" and very much like it.

Biggest Con: there is no support

FatCow hosting works for me.

I've got enough skill and knowledge to be dangerous. I use FatCow for my 2 websites and what I like most are two things. It's easy to use, and it's very, very reliable. I moved over from a microsoft live account and I've never looked back. And their pre-formatted templates are easy and good looking. And on the rare occasion I've need support, it was quick, easy and only required a short call. And of course, the problems were my fault.

Biggest Pro: Fast and Easty

Stay away from Fatcow

If you got lost hosting, if you got lost databases, I you didn't get emails about your hosting suspension, if you are trying to solve any kind of problems with their support in 2 months, if you are trying to transfer lost account's files to the new one and having 5 times more problems - that's fatcow.

If You're Not a Pro, Be Careful!

I'm NOT a pro! I'm a person who started out working with yahoo Geocities and learned a little bit about coding but that's it! I took on FatCow because it had a "star rating" on the review site I checked. It was Ok for most of my years there but in the Summer of 2012, I wanted to edit, as I do every year and BANG! The site editor I was using had apparently become defunct. I couldn't add sound. I couldn't even edit pictures on some of my pages. I contacted FatCow for help and they were unapologetic about the fact that the site editor I was using from their domain manager, was now OVER! (They claim they emailed customers using it 2 years ago...I don't recall that email). Anyhow, rebuilding my website was one thing but finding out that all the features available for free with the old site editor would now cost me an additional $100 was another! I was furious but when I complained to tech support and asked for some kind of compensation, I drew a blank. Hence, I moved to a new host. Man! Was that a hassle! They assume you know all the lingo and while I understand that to a certain extent, FatCow clearly wasn't going to cooperate with the transfer! I'm constantly communicating with my new host who is telling me "It's FatCow or TuCows responsibility..." etc etc.

All I can say is that if I was running this kind of business, I'd move heaven and earth to keep my clients. I wouldn't allow my tech support to treat them like they're morons just because they aren't experts! It took me 2 weeks to get out from under FatCow. I would never recommend them to anyone and I used to believe in this company!

Biggest Pro: Environment?
Biggest Con: Support is only as good as client's knowledge

FatCow support takes you for a ride

These guys are a joke. The website loads like a snail. Any request for info gets politely answered with a "we're working on it" and then closed with a "Our Network Operations team has fixed the underlying problem causing the performance issues you were seeing with your site". Twice in the row I got the same answer - word by word! What does that tell you ? Tells me that the customer support consists of a script that simply closes tickets using a set of keywords. Now that I have gone back and looked at the previous sites where I saw the positive reviews for FatCow I am coming to a conclusion that they have a great marketing/review writing team, cheap prices and not much else.

Biggest Pro: none
Biggest Con: slow to the point of ridiculous, customer service is a joke

Don't even think about signing up !

Had site down twice within the first week. Takes 34 seconds to get to the joomla admin login page - need I say more. Tech support gives the canned answer to check on your scripts, then they supposedly look into it, and wrap it all up by saying they solved the problem and closing the ticket.
Unusable!

Biggest Pro: cheap
Biggest Con: unbelievably slow!!!!!

I would not recommend Fat Cow on a bet

Caveat emptor. I ~thought~ that I had researched hosting companies when I selected FatCow. It was rated very highly on several "independent" reviews. Next time I will be ~much~ more thorough in my research. Here goes... Technical support at FatCow was very poor. They were consistently unable to debug or correct even simple problems such as erratic page redirection, and failed to understand the meaning of the word "intermittent." (They would try doing the same thing over and over again until it worked once, and then declare it fixed.) "Erratic" is also a good term to describe the performance of their Weebly site builder software, and their control panel more generally. The only way I got the site configured properly at ALL was thanks to suggestions that I got from the company that I originally purchased the domain name through. Most of the time just getting to the control panel requires that I go in and enter the control panel URL by hand because of page redirection failures. I encountered a number of intermittent hosting failures along with general lackluster page performance. FatCow's documentation was frequently wrong by just enough to make it difficult to accomplish anything. FatCow's choice of business partners is questionable. (Do bother to read about iPayment's reputation before you take FatCow's word for it and use them to do your credit card processing.) I knew that they did not offer csh access to the server, but I thought I could count on ftp and sftp access working properly, which they do not. The latest "upgrade" to the site builder software actually removed functionality. While as of this writing my site is still hosted there it will not be for long. As per the title of the review, I would not recommend FatCow on a bet. Yes, they are cheap, but you STILL don't get what you pay for.

Cheap, but TERRIBLE billing/support

Fatcow is ok/poor in terms of performance. There are days that my site is extremely slow, or periods of 10 minutes or so when PHP or MySQL won't work at all. These periods are very frustrating, but they don't happen that often.

HOWEVER -- their billing system is borderline fraud. I have been billed THREE times by accident! Once was a complete mistake, and two other times for renewals which I had cancel confirmations. Very shady because these did NOT include a email confirmation like normal. If I hadn't noticed on my credit card statement they would have likely just kept the money. Also -- be ready to cancel early if needed, because they love to RENEW you 2-4 weeks before you are do. They say it's to allow processing time. BS!

Also -- their TECH support is very slow. You have to get through 2-3 rounds of generic responses before you get to someone who can actually help you. Depending on if you email, chat or call -- you get put into a different system. Email and then follow-up with a call and good luck -- you will have to start from scratch. Once a DAY after I had resolved an issue on the phone I got an email back from email support stating that they were still busy looking at my problem and had escalated it and should have a solution soon. They obviously hadn't looked at the problem because it had been fixed for a day!

Biggest Pro: price for first year
Biggest Con: "accidental" billing, slow PHP, tech support terrible