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Before I delve into a Fatcow hosting review, I need to preface it with this just for your own safety. You need to take web hosting serious.
I’ve seen hosting ‘review’ sites say exactly this: “If you have just a simple site any web host plan will do.” That’s a direct quote from a hosting review site!? This is the kind of logic that will inevitably cause you a lot of problems down stream. Your webost is fundamental to your website presentation, uptime, load speeds, not to mention your overall sanity. I can tell you from experience that you don’t want to accept ‘any web hosting set up’.
There’s a lot of $2-$3/month, mom-n-pop hosting companies that can inflict your site with slow load times, downtime, lost transactional data, site malfunctions to name a few. I know this is a FatCow hosting review but one thing to I’ve learned to keep in mind when it comes to hosting is that generally speaking cheap web hosting can often get expensive.
Fatcow defies the norm when it comes to cheap or budget web hosting. There are quiet few budget hosting providers out there that are just too small and don’t have solid business systems to ensure quality support and reliable uptime. I realized when conducting this Fatcow hosting review that surpringly they one of the larger hosting providers in the world and have maintained a respectable track record for over 12 years.
4 Critical Factors You Need To Evaluate Before Choosing ANY Web Hosting Company: 
1. Age Before Beauty: How long has the hosting company been serving clients? If less than 5 years I would look elsewhere even if their home page looks beautifully manicured. Time and experience allows hosting companies to get mature. Hosting companies that don’t have sound repeatable systems to solve problems don’t survive very long. Even though FatCow hosting is cheap, they’re good at solving problems quickly as they’ve been doing it since ’98.
2. Reliability: You need a minimum uptime performance of 99.95% for obvious reasons. Especially if you have a commercial website. Most hosting providers won’t advertise this stat which should always throws up a red flag for me. FatCow’s overall uptime is 99.99% and has been monitored since September of 2005. They utilize multiple GB connections with their servers that know how to balance the load with great efficiency. And though you should always have a local backup of your site on your own machine, FatCow will enable you to have a back up on its server as well. That means there’s little to no chance of you losing critical data or site content.
3. Customer Support: Similar to money, customer support is only important to the degree you don’t have it. If everything goes well with your sites uptime and presentation to daily traffic then in most cases you can get by for some time on marginal customer support. However, when your site(s) suddenly gets error messages, goes down unexpectedly or you find files infected with malware, adware, or the latest virus you must have a rapid response team to support you. I have had all the above happen and can assure you that a hosting company with a solid customer support system will have a quick procedure to get you up in running very quickly…as in within a few hours max.
FatCow’s support a.k.a. the “moo crew” offers live chat 24/7 for instant help whether it’s billing or a technical problem. They of course offer phone and email support as well. What makes their technical support unique is that they speak laymans terms. They work well with the ‘little guy’ and avoid confusing techno babble.
4. Easy to Use: Choose web hosting companies that use a cPanel hosting interface. It’s intuitive and what most of the internet and webmasters use. With Cpanel, you get a graphical interface (who doesn’t like pictures) making it easy to navigate, setup and managing files. Also you can setup email or webmail accounts, quickly create MySQL databases and install software and scripts using Fantastico (great for installing WordPress fast). FatCow’s prides itself in serving the common folk with an easy to use point-n-click interface like cPanel.
If you’re wanting to pay a minimal hosting fee without sacrificing quality or reliability, FatCow web hosting makes sense. It’s a smart choice for bloggers, and small business enterprises. And if you expand they’ll always have plenty of cheap space for rent.
NOTE: The FatCow text and image links are active coupon links. FatCow offers seasonal discounts to their hosting but most ‘FatCow Hosting review sites’ offer expired links that don’t pass any discount once you check out. I give you permission to ‘cuss me out’ if you find the same here.
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