There’s no MONTH-to-MONTH plan with FatCow.

They don’t offer 1-click backup, which is a shame…

Yes, it’s cute, and runs well, and presumably reasonably priced. However, each year is a fight over auto-renewal (which I always turn off), yet somehow it always winds up ON! Now they’re telling me I have two accounts (which I don’t) and insist on charging me to cancel an account which I don’t have. Good for long-term use when you never speak to them.

Jerry, what you said is absolutely right. Fatcow doesn’t have any security measures, and I am going through the same issue that you have faced.

While FatCow is relatively inexpensive, you need a pretty strong technical background to get the most out of their services. Sure, they offer some nice site building tools, SimpleScripts is great for installing apps, and CPanel is straightforward.
But heaven help the novice (such as myself) when your site is attacked and you find out FatCow can’t help you. There was so much malicious code spread around my site that I couldn’t track it all down on my own. I asked FatCow to wipe my site clean and let me start all over. They told me they couldn’t do that.
Being leery of future attacks, I asked what security options they offered. They don’t; instead they partner with SiteLock which I had to purchase separately (albeit at a member discount). Once that was purchased, SiteLock informed me that I needed to change a bunch of DNS settings that I didn’t understand or know how to get at. FatCow’s SiteLock tutorials are out of date so they’re no help and tech support can’t/won’t make the changes for me. It’s an awful lot of work for someone who just want to get a basic website up.
If they’re going to partner with a third party, the app setup needs to be much simpler. Hell, I’m not the techie, they are, so why do I have to do all things under the hood to make my site work; which it doesn’t yet since the crash a few weeks ago. The “cheap” hosting price won’t make up for the time I’ve spent trying to fix this mess. Thank goodness I don’t have a business site with them otherwise I’d be staring at a bunch of lost revenue.

^I am finding this is true for every hosting service.
Its even more frustrating that I cant seem to find a solid answer on what the usual rate will be in the future of my site.

For people who complain about SQL speed, it is because you don’t properly using caching. Enable the caching feature of b2evo and your site will be blazing fast!

I have one site on Fatcow and one on IPage. They are both equally good. I buy the cheapest – price change sometimes.

FatCow is a good hosting service but do not get pulled in by the idea it is cheap. The $3.15 per month hype is only for the first year, as I have just found out. The second year costs $190.8 or $15.90 per month. This was not made clear on signing up when nothing was said about special offer. To me to quote $3.15 per month without qualifying it as a special offer is nothing but a con!

Good site hosting with many bells and whistles. Very poor SQL speed and some templates (such as the wiki setup) are very sluggish to load (even after multiple visits to ’seed it’). Pricing jumps significantly after your first year, and they shut you down without warning weeks before your time is up. Very unacceptable billing practices.

Excellent speeds on a normal website, but if you’re planning on using its SQL databases (e.g. making a forums for the site), don’t go with Fatcow. Although the speeds are excellent for normal sites, the SQL is absolutely horrible. I’ve had loading times range from less than a second to 10 minutes for the forums on my site. I recommend a different host for SQL users.

I am afraid we had a very negative experience with Fatcow. We have experience with building websites and all that but to be quite frank
they are con merchants. If you are asked to put in a domain name to see if it is available and the site says they give you a free domain, then you would expect that domain name they said was available to be the one you could have…. well you can’t… they offer you the basic name that you put in with “fatcow.com” or some nonsense added to it- as your free domain….. NOT THE ONE THEY SAID WAS AVAILABLE AT THE BEGINNING