Why can you “safely” say this? Being twice as likely to talk about a bad experience does not mean that one person being upset means that two people are happy. It just means that if your service is bad you’re going to get more complaints than praises if your service were good. That is really the only relationship you can draw.

I have had a bad experience with FatCow myself: terrible wait times in the live chat (30 minutes for them to decide they weren’t sure what they were doing and escalate a ticket), misleading advertising (the site sales page mentions Ruby, but their hosting does not process Ruby scripts), and terrible archival services (you can’t manually zip and download your entire website all at once; you have to either download everything uncompressed or compress each directory as you go [as far as I have so far been able to figure out]).

On the other hand, the site is INCREDIBLY cheap—and if you’re just running a simple script or page here or there, I DO recommend them. But if you’re anything of a techie, or need anything more advanced whatsoever or expect much for the support staff, I would go with someone like Bluehost.com.

Soooo… I no longer have a domain name with you, but you’re going to charge me a privacy fee on something that doesn’t exist??? AND you’re going to do it TWICE??? AND you’re NOT GOING TO TELL ME ABOUT IT?

Thank goodness they were nice just now on the phone and took the charge(s) off… Though it irritated me at how deceptive their business practices were in the first place

1 – AUTO charging for something I did NOT authorize
2 – DOUBLE charging
3 – NOT TELLING ME about the charges

My advice – if you go with them, MAKE SURE TO CHECK YOUR BILL EVERY YEAR, EVEN AFTER YOU’VE STOPPED SERVICE.

However, I think you will face the same problem regardless of the web host you use. If you forgot to CANCEL, they will RENEW. Fatcow, Hostgator, Godaddy, ICDsoft… they are all the same – they cannot read your mind

The campaign was successful, and I took the site down afterward. Unfortunately, I did not cancel the account, and it autorenewed at _$107_ for a year. When I went to cancel it, they told me there would be a $35 cancellation fee. When I said I didn’t remember seeing that when I signed up, they said it’s in “Terms and Conditions” – buried with a ton of legalese.

Anyway, fool me once and all that. I told them I thought their policy was misleading and abusive, and I won’t be back.

(PS- They also take _forever_ to answer their phone – it took three tries to get this cancelled since one time I had to leave after ~20 minutes on hold and the other time I was cut off after a similar wait time.)

Avoid.

The service, I don’t really care about as long as I can get things resolved. The problems with Fatcow come with how often my site goes down. I run a forum, which needs to connect to the DB, which oftentimes goes down for no particular reason. It’s random, and sometimes it’s for just a second, sometimes it’s for minutes at a time.

(funny enough, fatcow is down right now, HTTP 500 Internal Server Error, my site being down as well)

I may be an isolated case, but I’ve just noticed way too many problems / downtime for my liking.

In terms of updating my site, I haven’t had too many problems (except a file disappearing once) with Fatcow. I don’t care for FTP, and I don’t use a builder, so I update all of my code through the File Manager. SOmetimes just uploading a new version of the page, sometimes editing the code directly in the document.

Before I learned CSS and HTML I tried the drag and drop site builder. While it may be easy to use, when I used it, it was so ridiculously slow, and hardly customizable at all – making a simple contact table took forever to do because the builder was so slow. I have, however, heard great things about some of the other site builders they offer, so don’t discount it altogether, as it’s just a nice showpiece because it looks pretty and is user interactive.

I do like the ease of integrating certain things into the website, although the updates aren’t always current. I use SMF for my forum, and while I installed it fine through the control panel, I had to do a big update manually, as it wasn’t available to do through SMF. Not too difficult, but I can’t speak for how that could affect other applications. They offer other big name things like WordPress blogs, Joomla, etc. And a vast array of different ecommerce and other things that most everyone would be able to find what you’re looking for.

All in all, I’m paying 10.00 a year for a domain name, since my friend already has a hosting plan with them. To people who already are registered, they’ll offer a separate hosting plan for 2.95 per month, which is really good. By the time I have to re-register my domain name, if I still have a lot of issues with the Site / DB going down I’ll try another service, but if things shape up and I don’t have continuous issues, I’ll stick with them (and probably go on my own hosting plan).

Hope this helps give people a good idea of one person’s experience, and good luck!