Experience with Fat Cow hosting?

[Westside guy]

Hi all,

Anyone here have experience with Fat Cow's Web hosting, one way or the other?

I'm considering switching my hosting when my year is up (early summer). I am looking for a hosting company that's reasonably priced and has been around a few years, runs Apache, etc. etc.

I know there are other companies people have raved about on this forum, but generally when I've looked them up they've only been around about a year or so. I'd like a bit more of a track record than that, since I've seen how a lot of these "young" companies seem to start really good and then go down the toilet fast.

Thanks for any feedback!

 

[Makosuke]

I don't have experience with Fat Cow, but it sounds like you're looking for alternatives that have been around longer. If so, lots of people will no doubt chime in, and I won't be the only one to mention Dreamhost (.com). If you haven't already checked them out, they run Linux with Apache and the standard extras (MySQL, etc), they've been around siince 1997, and I've personally had sites hosted with them since late 1998.

If you didn't want to hear yet another hail of "I like XXXXhost" posts, I apologize for misinterpreting.

 

[jeremy.king]

I host two sites with fatcow webhosting and have been very pleased with them. I have called for live support with no hold times and haven't noticed an outage of the site yet (since Oct 2002). Download speeds have always been greate and now that they have upped the storage/bandwith on the $99 plan, you really can't go wrong.

FYI, I was able to get them to waive my MySQL setup fee simply by telling them I would sign on with them if they did waive it. The customer service woman replied "No reason to pay the $10 if were going to get your business."

All in All I highly recommend them.

Feel free to PM me if you have more questions, or just post here.

And...NO I do not work for them.

 

[Westside guy]

Thank you, Makosuke - I am glad to hear about alternatives that have also been around for a while. My caveat was there simply because I've already decided against going with another recent startup, given my current situation; but I for sure want to hear about companies that have a track record and whose users are pleased with their service.

kingjr3 - thanks for the feedback! If I do end up going with them, I'll try to do the same thing regarding mysql fees (heck, I know from experience that setting up a person's mysql access is pretty simple and quick).

 

[Westside guy]

I just heard back from the two hosting services mentioned above. Fat Cow doesn't do secure e-mail, so I'm leaning towards Dreamhost at present (since only the two were mentioned). The annual costs are similar - 100 for Fat Cow versus 120 for Dreampost.

This is a tangent; but in this day and age of shared cable and all: How can anyone NOT support secure mail (IMAP or POP over SSL, or using TLS)? That just seems silly. It's as bad as using FTP for file transfers. At a minimum all ISPs and hosting services should support secure logins even if they don't encrypt the mail itself.

 

[Makosuke]

Yeah, that is weird that somebody would be offering non-secure connection services in this day and age. I ran into a low-rent server recently that didn't support sftp, which you'd think would be embarassing enough to get it fixed even if you didn't want to.

Being that FatCow is one of the few hosts from the late 90s that's still around and kingjr3 seems to like them, I took a look around on their site. Looks like a pretty good host--features and price are comperable to Dreamhost, and they've been around long enough that they must be at least half decent. Heck, both offer a money-back-guarantee (30 days for FatCow, 90 for Dreamhost), so you could just try out both and see who you prefer.

I did notice a few significant differences:

FatCow charges $100, DreamHost charges $120, but if you don't already have a domain name or want another, Dreamhost kicks in a free domain registration if you pay for a year, so they end up costing about the same amount.

FatCow offers a shopping cart on their plan, which you have to spend more at DreamHost to get--that's very nice if you need one.

Dreamhost seems to have a much better backup system, that they don't advertise well; you get online (via a remote terminal session) access to two each of automated hourly, daily, and weekly snapshots of your files--great if you accidentally delete something you didn't want to and faster and easier than asking tech support to retrieve something from backups (though you can do that, too, and when I did before they had the snapshot system in place, it was free). FatCow does daily backups, of course, but they at least say they charge you $75 to restore stuff.

DreamHost also has the advantage of several levels of "upgrade" plans, if you ever outgrow the base one; this seems to be a good fallback for a site that might go somewhere in the future if you don't want to bother switching hosts (and upgrading your plan is a much cheaper way to more bandwidth if you need it than paying $10/month for overage). (By the way, the $240/year special they're running is an awesome deal.)


I also suggest poking around in their respective control panel demos; DreamHost's control panel has a massive number of features, but FatCow's is easier to figure out, and it has a neat feature for archiving files and directories from a web interface--really handy for backups, obviously.

 

[Westside guy]

I also suggest poking around in their respective control panel demos; DreamHost's control panel has a massive number of features, but FatCow's is easier to figure out, and it has a neat feature for archiving files and directories from a web interface--really handy for backups, obviously.

Thanks, I'll do that. The secure e-mail issue, though, has pretty much eliminated Fat Cow from my list. Mainly on principle; it's not like I get much important e-mail. But since I'm using a wireless LAN that's connected to the Internet via a cable modem... well right there are two weak links in the security chain, and I don't want to add a third. Everyone should be using secure protocols.

I'm a bit surprised that other hosting services weren't mentioned - maybe everyone is using startup hosting companies.