FatCowReviews of fatcow.com

Customer Service is terrible. The individual people are courteous and responsive, but the process is ridiculous and starts at the corporate level. No matter what you need, it takes 24 to 48 hours. I paid to have them migrate a site for me. They put it at some ridiculous domain. If you call back to ask them to fix it, tack on another 24-48 hours for someone to respond. Support personnel are not based in the U.S. and it's hard to communicate at times. FatCow doesn't cooperate with awesome plugins like Backup Buddy which helps when you want to move your website to a different location/host. I will not ever recommend them to any of my clients.

I had some bad experiences with Fatcow. I have to use it as a webmaster. 1. Fatcow charges costs for three years in advance which I think is unreasonable. 2. Fatcow lets you pay invoices but it is unclear to me what their services are all about. 3. Their customer service does not do what it promises. I tried to change credit card information. They said they would send a confirmation e-mail but they just don't do it and the credit card information remains unchanged. I need to call again and again. 4. Their webmail is annoying to me. I can only access it with Windows Internet Explorer 6 or higher. I usually work with Chrome but it won't work at Fatcow webmail. To access webmail I need to enter my login name and password more than once. The time it takes to view my webmail is very long and I need a lot of patience. I had to work with Fatcow as a webmaster on behalf of somebody else so I am not in charge to work with this. For myself I would choose to avoid Fatcow at any time.

My early experience with FatCow was very good. The price was low, everything worked well, customer service was available 24/7, and any problems I had were always quickly resolved. After the initial special offer period ended, I had to go up to paying full price. This was still reasonable enough, and I paid up front for three years. Three years later, they sent me an email saying that my hosting was about to be renewed for another three years. I checked the price. It seemed awfully high. I checked what I paid three years ago. The price had more than doubled. No warning, no explanation, no apology. I then spend a load of time with their support and retentions people, negotiating a lower price. This I finally got, but not after they had taken up a significant amount of my afternoon and put me in a bad mood for the rest of day. They clearly hoped that I would not pay much attention to the original email, and just let them go ahead and take this money from my account so I don't have to think about it for another three years. They hope that you will not remember what you paid three years ago, and I'm sure that getting you to pay three years at a time is part of this whole rouse. Probably in a lot of companies, this email is seen by someone who has no idea what the cost was three years ago and is supposed to just assume that everything is proceeding as normal. I feel this is a bit of scam, and it's particularly unpleasant to have this happen with a company that I previously appreciated and trusted. I have renewed with FatCow, reluctantly, as I am too busy at the moment to do anything else. But now I have the next three years in which to find a hosting company that will treat me with a bit of respect, as I can't stay indefinitely with a company that has tried to con me in this way.

As others have said previously, the initial service was ok, the appeal of the 24 hour chat was good, however as time has gone by things have been getting worse and worse. Firstly if you are not in the US, the prices can be stupid, as instead of performing a currency conversion at the checkout it just changes the currency symbol, so you have to pay more in £??? and no option to pay in $ and have the bank convert it. Secondly the support, while it was good at first, it has become obvious that the support centre buried in the heart of India is becoming over used, wait times have become 30 minutes + for live chat and 24-48 hours for a support ticket, when your website is down for no reason this is not acceptable !!! Thirdly the number of random background changes has become unbearable, permission changes on random wordpress files???? yeah thats really going to be me messing up my own site!!! or the pitiful uptime we have had this year. Enough is enough with this bunch of jokers, we have now moved our sites away to a much more reliable host who respond to support tickets within 5-10 minutes at busy times!!!!

Suspend sites for no reason - Weak uptime. My sites have been down time and time again. Insanely expensive and no refunds Push so many redicilous tools you dont need and then charge the joint for them. Slow customersupport Messy controlpanel

I can't begin to tell you how clunky and how unreliable Fat Cow is... just horrible horrible customer service The "free domain" option must be chosen at the start of the sign up...or you lose it...although the site does not tell you that. Everything is convoluted and hard to deal with. I have spent hours on the phone with customer service, never the same person, nothing gets done. Speak to a supervisor? 20 minutes on hold with horrible music At one point all sites were down and they lied saying would be back up in "an hour"....a day later it came back up Expect to be "on hold" forever on the phone...get jerked around....no one knows what they are doing. On line chat....wait and wait to chat with whichever person in India is up next, expect to get more wrong information The interface of the cpanel is full of useless Mojo junk all trying to get you to spend more money constantly. Fat Cow is a huge joke

Half of the time, people visited my site, they were redirected to some 3rd party advertising site, i suspect is run by fatcow, so they firstly stole half of my traffic, and when i complained, they shut down my site with no reason. They dont answer your questions, mostly because they dont understand english very good in the poor part of India where the support is located. Im actually happy they shut down my site, so i could find me a real provider

This review was previously positive. However, its been changed to negative. The hosting I've had with FatCow has been reliable. There have been no issues with the speed and uptime. However, I've found their control panel cumbersome. Sometimes you'll need to reload pages just to get information that you'd expect to be loaded instantly and other such issues. cPanel would be better. I also had some issues setting up the account and there was no information anywhere on the site as how it should be set up (MySQL.) However, I was happy to stay with them and not take the time to move domains, files etc. But today I have just got an email requesting payment for almost three times the original package price. This is two weeks after it was actually due; I never got an email telling me it was time to renew. This is about 40% of what I am paying for a 32GB dedicated server with OVH - for a cheap reseller package. I was previously with HostGator, which was about the same price as FatCow, but without the upsell. So I will be moving elsewhere and it is unlikely I could ever be drawn back, with such predatory pricing schemes.