BEST WEB HOSTS (2009)

FatCow

Features:

FatCow Plan
Fatcow makes a strong statement to embark on, by offering unlimited Disk Space, Bandwidth, Email Accounts, Databases and Add on/Sub/Parked Domains. Along with that they also provide a Website Builder which was quite impressive, a program to set up an online cartPowerplay and Shared SSL). They also allow the customer to (supporting major credit cards, renew their domains automatically (provided your credit card information is known to them forehand), point their domains and change the registrar. These features act as a chief plus point for FatCow over many other web hosts preset on the internet. They also take Server backups on a daily basis, which ensures the fact that your data with FatCow is secured. Fatcow also provides wordpress, Galley2, phpBB, Joomla and 2gb of Carbonite Online backup. The one downside here would be the fact that FatCow neither has cPanel nor Fantastico, meaning if you happen to be a novice, you will have to struggle through the tedious process of installing other scripts.
With this plan they also offer a free domain name.

MiniMoo Plan
FatCow has fundamentally offered this plan for those who haven’t yet begun with their Website and would like to show a custom “coming soon” or “For Sale”  page. It also offers some crucial features including Newsletter management, WebMail (1 account provided), a ‘coming soon’ page etc. This package is great for selling your domain etc. At only $5 per year its very afforadable!

Plans and Pricing
Currently FatCow.com offers 2 plans, the FatCow plan costing $66/year, and the mini moo plan costing $5/year. Considering FatCow regularly provides various discounts and offers, it would be advisable to keep a watch at their feature pages (Here). The prices at FatCow happen to be pretty low, but they come at a cost of lack of cPanel and Fantastico. Also you must register for 1 year at minimum, which also is one of their few drawbacks.

Customer Service & Reliability
This is where things loosen up a bit as fat as FatCow’s Professionalism goes. We contacted their Live Support 3 times, where we had to approximately wait for 2-3 minutes before we were connected to the Sales/Tech person. It took them roughly 2-3 minutes again, to reply to our queries, which many a times were not the answers we required, or were incomplete. This acts as a major drawback as far as FatCow’s steadfastness is concerned. One thing though, that we noticed was that there were relatively very few complaints from the customers with FatCow web hosting, as we have seen with other web hosting services.

Overview

Features: 4/5
Plans & Pricing: 3.5/5
Customer Service & Reliability :3/5
Overall Score: 3.5/5. [Recommended]

In one piece, FatCow provide some solid features along with decent pricing and extremely high reliability, but with the condition of registering for 1 year at least, devoid of cPanel, Fantastico and a high-quality customer care service.