FatCow offers reliable service and great control panel .But the non-existent support team and sales team hurt the company. Without support, who would even need a web hosting company.

FatCow recently redesigned its web page. Previously, it had a poor interface, but its new website is a big improvement over the old one. Plans and information can now be easily accessed using a clearer interface. However, it isn't always the home page that makes your buying decision, it is their level of support, features and reliability. With FatCow, they fail to meet those criterion.

Websitesource Reliability

With FatCow, our testing website was up most of the time, however, during periods of time when the site was down, we had a difficult time contacting technical support. Technical support would not answer the phone and this was during both peak and non-peak hours. We were wondering if this company even provides tech support. We also sent them an email to confirm our problem and it took a few days before we received a proper response. Overall, the service has been reliable, but the tech support has not.

Price and Cost Effectiveness

FatCow provides Miva Merchant on all web hosting accounts, but their web hosting accounts start at $13.96. Miva Merchant, is the most popular and powerful e-commerce shopping cart software for websites. It not only provides users with an easy to use configuration tool, it also allows the merchant to easily setup an online store in just a few hours. A unique feature of FatCow hosting packages is that it includes the option of adding multiple domains into a account for a nominal charge. This itself is a huge cost savings especially if you host several domains.

Website source Data Center

FatCow is fully connected via redundant connection to Qwest, GTE and GlobalCenter. These are all tier 1 providers, and since they have redundant connection, if one or two of these providers go down, your website hosted on their machines would remain up.

Control Panel

FatCow uses a proprietary control panel made by 4siteinternet. Much to our surprise, it comes loaded with a huge number of features and the navigation menus were easy to understand and use. Icons are created for each features in the control panel and easy to access help information are next to each feature.

Customer Relations and support

Customer relations need major work. So far our contact with customer service has been poor. Null responses and no phone call pickups make this company's support possibly the worst in the industry. Even though they claim to offer 24/7 Chat support and sales, they fail to show up when we access those features. To make matters worst, we were told that they would be available in a minute, but instead they never showed up even after an hour.