FatCow Review

FatCow was founded way back in 1996 and offers many services including web hosting, marketing and, some other tools. Unfortunately, halfway across their journey they were snapped up by Endurance International Group (EIG) but the acquisition has led to its lengthy survival.

While cute, their marketing spiel may be confusing for users who are new to web hosting and struggling with original terminology. For example, they have renamed shared web hosting to ‘The Original FatCow” for some reason and unlimited resources are labelled as “oodles”. That aside, FatCow offers some basic features that are fairly decent.

Shared hosting plans come not entirely cheap but offer unlimited resources and a free domain name. Unfortunately, their decided to offer a standard server-based SSL instead of even the basic Let’s Encrypt or something better. This may result in some unusual glitches when users are trying to implement some things, for example the configuration of some email clients.

Perhaps the biggest drawback of hosting with FatCow is their extremely aggressive upsell tactics. For newbies it might be a significant distraction, while veterans of web hosting will find it horribly intrusive and annoying. They will try to get you to sign up for almost anything they can sell ranging from app trials to free software – then hope you’ll forget to cancel the trials and get charged.

FatCow is also not the cheapest web host around and that’s gauging them against other EIG-owned companies. These hosts often have similarly structured plans and offerings for similar prices – and FatCow breaks quite a bit above this margin for no extra benefits.