It looked fat and good, but in fact…
Introduction
I’d like to share my one-month experience of using FatCow web hosting which is one of the brands owned by Endurance International Group (EIG). And I’ll give you tips how to avoid being manipulated as a customer and how you can leverage you marketing efforts as an entrepreneur by revealing you the FatCow lessons I’ve learned.
From this article you’ll know:
- Why numerous top web hosting review sites promote EIG hosting brands including FatCow as best web hosts.
- How ‘best’ it was for me, as a FatCow client, from the very beginning.
- What server performance FatCow offers their clients.
- How companies can allure you, as an innocent customer, and then squeeze money out of you (with FatCow example) and tips to avoid it (INCLUDING EASY BUT VERY MIGHTY PSYCHOLOGICAL TRICKS for both buyers and sellers!).
- Why it is a problem to leave FatCow even if you want to.
- What web hosting providers can do to avoid issuing absolutely legit refund to you during a money-back guarantee period and what you should do (my case study with FatCow).
- Bonus tips: What you can do if your current web hosting provider does a bad job (hint: it’s not not always changing your hosting immediately)
Why EIG hosting brands (including FatCow) are promoted here and there?
In short, there are several reasons:
- EIG pays a lot of money for referrals. For example, one will get $100 for bringing one new shared hosting client to FatCow.
- Many of the most promoted hosts belong to EIG. And internet marketers simply avoid promoting unknown hosts (because buyers prefer well-recognized brands). Meanwhile, EIG tends to turn into a subtle monopoly by acquiring hosting brands and operating them as if they are independent competitors. EIG cuts costs by optimizing their business infrastructure and decreasing the quality of service. Most users simply don’t realize that different well-known hosting names mean in fact the same parent company. And when users get awful hosting service they keep moving from one ‘best web host’ that belongs to EIG to another.
- Many bloggers promote EIG hosting simply because they haven’t done a good research and just repeat what others promote.
A lot of newbies fall for manipulatively inflated ratings on fake, paid and affiliate-biased hosting review websites and then, having chosen FatCow, begin to suffer. Now I really feel their pain. And I want to review it so that you don’t get into EIG’s misleading marketing traps. Ever.
Update: I’m happy that this review does make a change in the world. For example, Jerry Low from webhostingsecretrevealed.net has changed his mind regarding FatCow after reading this post. He even published a Q&A session with me (you can read it in the section “FatCow User Review: Q&A With Michael Bely” on this page).
My background story before test-riding FatCow
About a month ago I was offered to write a short research on FatCow hosting. So as a part of my research I registered an account with it to check its user interface, some features and current server performance.
Now I have collected a month-long data on its performance and I bet you’ll be thrilled when you see it.
Yes, from the very beginning you can feel that it’s not going to be a positive review. But be assured, it’s really reasonable.
More than a year ago I did a research on shared hosting providers (which is actual as I update it when necessary). And since then I’ve been obviously avoiding EIG hosting by all means. I just didn’t need to try it myself to make sure EIG hosting sucks.
In addition to massive EIG hosting outages and failures that resonated in mass media, there are problems that thousands and thousands of users experience on a regular basis being EIG clients. If you are curious, just Google something like “what’s wrong with EIG hosting” and enjoy reading.
And so came the time when I had to try EIG hosting myself. So enjoy my ride report. Here it is:
And now seriously.
FatCow’s vDeck4 instead of cPanel, and it was a bad surprise
FatCow uses vDeck4 as a control panel (you are not likely to know about it until you sign up, because FatCow doesn’t explicitly put about it in its hosting feature list). But the industry standard control panel for shared web hosting is cPanel.
For you as a user using vDeck means more troubles if you decide moving hosts one day. With cPanel you have very good chances to move a full account flawlessly from one cPanel host to another. You can do it even without your participation (hosting staff will do it for you free of charge as a rule). But moving from vDeck to cPanel requires manual backing up data , restoring and setting up the new account, which can be a time-consuming pain.
And be prepared that if you migrate from vDeck to cPanel your emails associated with your former account will be lost.
FatCow: problems installing a default WordPress site and drag-n-drop website builder did not work
It was ridiculous! I could NOT install a default WordPress site. I tried all possible ways I could find in their Control panel (one-click installing, then from Simple Scripts section, then from menu, then from a their tool called Mojormaketplace). But as soon as I clicked on them, the system either gave me a blank page or a ssl error page in my browser.
After installing and setting up many dozens of different websites on different hosting, this time I could not progress any further with FatCow. Finally I had to give up and contact its support.
FatCow’s support said I had to wait for 24-48 hours before installing WordPress.
That was unexpected, mildly speaking.
And it was absolutely new domain that had been just registered (so it did not require its DNS to be propagated or whatever).
“Okay”, – I thought, – “let’s wait if you insist”. And decided to play a little with its website builder Weebly for a while.
It allowed me to edit website content, but as soon as I pressed “Publish” button, my website showed a FatCow default “site under development” page. Yes, that was very ‘user-friendly’!
If I were a newbie, I’d probably contact support (the second time for several minutes, haha). But I just didn’t want to spend my time on it because I knew it was something with home page files on the server.
So I went to File Manager and found out that Home.html file (or a setting in .htaccess) was causing the issue.
But I could not edit .htaccess in File Manager and did not want to spend my time finding a way to do it from FatCow control panel. So I just deleted Home.html.
By the way, File Manager was full of annoying bugs like no folder content refreshing or no file renaming option.
Heck, I felt like a beta-tester for FatCow hosting!
Alright. I thought it was enough for that day and waited for 2 days as the support suggested me before installing WordPress.
After 48 hours passed I still had the same errors and could not install a poor simple default WordPress site.
And I had no choice but to contact FatCow support again.
This time the support said that there were no problems with my account (which was not true, because there WERE installation problems indeed).
I felt this way…
As a short-cut to a solution, the support offered to install WordPress for me. I needed to get it done ASAP and just agreed without arguing.
So it was too much of hassle for installing WordPress with FatCow.
A decent hosting should not allow such a bad user experience happen. You should expect to be able to install WordPress quickly and flawlessly with literally a couple of clicks from cPanel.
FatCow server response time monitoring
After I got WordPress installed, I added 300-word article on the front page. That was enough for my simple test site.
Then I added my site to a monitoring system to watch server response time. (If you don’t know what response time is for, it’s a very important factor showing how fast your website downloads for users. By the way, real-experience full page download time is even moer than server response time.)
So guess what? FatCow hit number one worst hosting in my list. I got huge, no, HUGE, number of warning emails from my monitoring system notifying me that my website was down or did not response.
Before you see one of the worst server performance I’ve ever experienced (and I monitor dozens and dozens of hosting servers, here’s an example), look how a pretty good server response time (in milliseconds) for shared web-hosting looks like:
And now have a look at what kind of grass FatCow gave me to eat (its server response time is tens of times slower!):
Day 1. Kind of typical FatCow server response time. Look: the website starts responding only in seconds, and there are frequent and long downtimes!
The monitoring system shows the site is down if its response time is more than 10 seconds.
if you’re brave enough, look at other 20 days of FatCow’s server recorded performance by clicking the link below.
Impressed? So was I. But do I want to say that absolutely all FatCow users get the same performance for their websites? No, I don’t think so. Otherwise FatCow would not last long I guess. So consider I was unlucky to be hosted on a problematic server. The very first hours of Day 0 (not on the screenshots) my test website was actually quite fast, but it did not last long…
Anyway, such an awful FatCow server performance is not an exception. If you do your research, you will find that a lot of people complain about slowdowns. It means that FatCow (and EIG in general) do not manage the servers well, or simply overcrowd their servers with websites.
How companies can persuade you into buying a (sh!tty) product (FatCow example). And what you can do with it
One of the most successful tactics to persuade people into buying anything is to appeal to emotions and do psychological tricks. The most effective manipulations are based on people’s emotions. Let’s see how FatCow persuades people into buying its products.
You, as a consumer or a customer, may learn from the stuff below how to resist such manipulations when looking for a good product. At the same time you, as a entrepreneur, may learn how to use such tactics to talk people into buying your great products.
One of the most famous manipulation experts, Robert Cialdini, points out 6 key principles of influence (and my comments regarding buying products):
- Reciprocity (Someone did anything for you, and you will feel kind of obliged to do something, for example buy a product from them, in return),
- Commitment and Consistency (someone will have more chances to persuade you to do the whole thing or buy a more expensive product by making you do little steps or make micropayments),
- Social Proof (we love to be with the masses, it let us feel safe and lighten our burden of responsibility of making a right choice when we buy anything),
- Authority (we tend to obey authorities or even simply famous people like celebrities and subconsciously we are much less critical to what they recommend us buying),
- Liking (if you like someone, you are more likely to agree to buy what he or she offers you),
- Scarcity (you are more likely to buy anything if there is a shortage of it, kind of “Hurry up! This offer ends in 0 days 3 hours 14 minutes and only 8 copies are left” etc)
In general, I’m not against of using these principles in business (of course, considering good ethics and good products are in place).
But FatCow was an awful hosting service for me (as well as for many and many other clients). That’s why I am going now to take FatCow as an example of bad manipulation and reveal it here for educational purposes.
1. Reciprocity (doing something in return)
Look at this FatCow banner below:
Observation:
The company plays a good and caring role by giving to the society a share of its revenue for taking care of the nature and human health. How nice! Many people will want to buy the hosting as a reciprocity act of the input they can do from their end.
Cold-minded notes:
As a whole, donating is a good move. But the point is that it doesn’t have anything with hosting. So, donating can make a good company look better, but it can not turn a bad company into a good one only because of donations.
The take-aways:
For you, as a customer:
- Don’t let your emotions fall for misleading reciprocity tricks. Focus on what matters most in the first place (hosting quality in this case).
For you, as an entrepreneur:
- Use reciprocity (by giving out something free of charge) to help people out and make a world a better place, and you will earn a good reputation.
2. Commitment and Consistency (several little steps instead of one big leap)
Observation:
You see different discounts and promo prices. One offer is better than another:
Looks like a good deal for you compared to an original price.
Cold-minded notes:
After you buy hosting that is advertised as if it has all the bells and whistles, you realize that some features are limited and you need to pay additionally for a full access (for example, a free website builder is only for first 6 pages, then you have to upgrade your account, etc).
Besides, you are offered different up-sells, which are not included in the original price like automatic backups (surprise!) and other features. By the way, you can get some of those features cheaper, better or even free of charge somewhere else.
If you look at the attractive price discounts more carefully, you’ll see that they are all temporary (e.g. first billing period is cheaper, but then prices increase dramatically).
Thus, the point of FatCow’s strategy is to persuade you do the first step and sign up. And then they will increase prices and up-sell you different additional stuff, some of which you even don’t need (but telling you as if you do need it) or which doesn’t work. Finally it will be not cheap at all as you might be thinking in the beginning.
The take-aways:
For you, as a customer:
- Look for renewal prices (it’s the easiest what you can do, but it’s still very effective).
- Read carefully the fine print and Terms (yes, easier said than done).
- Keep in mind that if you have difficulties finding company’s pricing and features in one place, then there are chances that the company wants to make this mess on purpose to keep you unaware and make you sign up and then increase prices and up-sell.
For you, as an entrepreneur:
- Commitment and consistency is the strategy with a great potential. Use it wisely to keep you customers happy. You may start with a little price to establish relationship and trust first.
3. Social Proof (the more people use or buy something, the more likely you’ll do the same)
Observation:
It’s one of the most effective tactics to persuade people to do anything.
Here’s how FatCow uses it. FatCow gives numerous highly positive reviews and feedbacks on its website. FatCow is smart to select and display those feedbacks that emphasize its branding (by the way, branding is how a company want to look like, not how it really is):
- newbie-friendly
- polite and fast support
- it’s easy and fun
- reliable
Many people repeat the same again and again in their reviews using different wording. And it seems to persuade and convert.
Cold-minded notes:
After using FatCow for nearly a month, I can say that positive reviews that touch the technical side of FatCow do not correspond at all with my experience with FatCow.
Nevertheless, I bet numerous positive reviews are effective to persuade many other people who don’t know much about hosting or who didn’t do a proper research before signing up.
I know that FatCow used to give its customers $25 credit for a single review. So no surprise how FatCow could get a lot of positive feedbacks.
By the way, here’s a psychological trick – if you are paid, then your review will tend to be much more positive than if you wrote it without compensation. And in addition to that, many people will write whatever just in order to get the money.
Let’s look at just one good example of FatCow testimonial (which is listed as number one reason why FatCow clients are mooing with delight):
So what do we see? It’s not about hosting, it is not about features, it’s not even about satisfaction in general, and it’s not about benefits. It’s just fun and pure emotionally driven piece of creative writing. That’s what persuades FatCow’s target audience.
The take-aways:
For you, as a customer:
- Don’t rely too much on a social proof factor. It can be easily faked. Even if all the numbers, people, reviews etc are real, it may not mean a lot in many cases because of many things including people’s conformity or their incompetence.
- Try to ignore purely emotional or unspecific feedbacks (even if there are tons of them)
- Stand against the crowd – do your own research.
- Don’t follow FatCow’s advice to join the herd.
For you, as an entrepreneur:
Social proof is a very powerful way to persuade people. You can even change people’s beliefs and behavior radically. Here is one of my favorite videos about the subject:
- So, use and leverage social proof (but be ethic)
4. Authority (famous people or members on a higher level of hierarchy can talk other people into buying anything easily)
Observation:
Although FatCow didn’t hire Chuck Norris to promote the hosting, there is a kind of authority’s moo in the testimonials:
A person claims to entrust a hundred clients sites to FatCow. Newbies may think that the guy is a kind of expert with such a big client base and his hosting choice must be good.
Cold-minded notes:
Authorities may have their benefits or reasons when promoting or recommending something. It can be a direct compensation, a part of business collaboration, partnership, friendship or some other kind of relationship.
The take-aways:
For you, as a customer:
- Resist trusting authorities that you don’t know well, especially if they are not experts in the field in question. Nicole Kidman agreed to advertise Channel in the most expensive short TV ad ever not because it’s her favorite perfume, but because she got paid $3 mln:
For you, as an entrepreneur:
- Find $3 mln and hire Nicole to promote your product! 🙂
- If seriously, have a great product and cooperate with experts (or other authorities) to get it promoted
- Reveal yourself to the public as an authority in your field of expertise
- Learn something and become an authority in your field
- If you are just starting your business and don’t have business connections yet, here’s a piece of my experience: help people out and you’ll get truthful and sincere feedbacks that you can use to build your authority. For example, check out one of the emails that I got after chatting with a person whom I could help:
You can be helpful for someone not when you know everything, but when you know more than that person.
5. Liking (you are more likely to buy stuff if you like the seller)
Observation:
FatCow uses a definitely consistent and appealing design that turns into a story. It’s a story about nature- and health-friendliness, community-like herd, love, humor and politeness of technical support.
The story creates a pleasant atmosphere and people like it, especially if they are newbies and all technical stuff is so difficult and even frightening to them. And here is a kind and friendly fat cow mommy that will help you, a little newborn calf cattle, set up your website, surrounding you with care and support.
I don’t deny it, it’s a good story that FatCow has (even if it’s not 100% truthful story) and it converts into new sign-ups on and on.
Cold-minded notes:
People like all the love that FatCow displays on its website, even if it is not what hosting should be about in the fist place.
FatCow doesn’t even guarantee its servers uptime (at least I could not find it on their website).
And what’s more funny, look what FatCow tells its clients about email notifications from an uptime monitoring system regarding FatCow outages:
By this FatCow confirms that multiple downtimes is kind of normal and simply suggests to turn the annoying notifications off 🙂
Well, if to put the irony aside, a hosting that charges as much as about $11/mo should make sure that outages are as seldom as possible. Suggesting to ignore the downtime notifications is a sheer mocking!
The take-aways:
For you, as a customer:
- Try to separate emotional liking and sympathy from the stuff that really matters when making decisions
For you, as an entrepreneur:
- Develop your business image so that your clients like your brand, or like what you do, or like how you do, or like you as a person, or even like how you look like.
6. Scarcity (makes your pointer finger tip itch and click ‘buy now’ button)
One of my previous posts was devoted to time scarcity, abused by marketers.
Observation:
FatCow uses this mighty psychological trick to make people buy their hosting ASAP.
Cold-minded notes:
And FatCow uses this tactics very straight: it just puts “this offer ends soon” every time when a current offer expires. The simplest way to make little cows take their place in FatCow’s hosting stall as soon as possible.
Just check out the history of FatCow offers snapshots in Waybackmachine. The offers are in place everyday, although the banner on their websites says it expires soon or time-limited offer etc (or even gives a specific deadline so that you act ASAP):
The offer kind of ends soon
The offer kind of still ends soon
The offer kind of never ends. So don’t hurry, take your time.
Check out the dates on the screen shots above: the similar offers and sales are continuous and not really a time-limited discount. So this time-scarcity “Act now” trigger is just a marketing trick.
The take-aways:
For you, as a customer:
- Very often time scarcity is just a marketing trick and doesn’t have anything with a real time-limited offer. So keep it in mind before impulsively clicking ‘buy now’ button. It can save you sometimes from a bad decision.
- Read the second half of this post if there’s a time-limited offer that ends soon, but you don’t want to act now and would like to think for some more time.
For you, as an entrepreneur:
- Time scarcity is a very effective approach to make people, who tend to buy impulsively, act ASAP. But if you don’t want to look like a cheap cheater, use it wisely.
Want to quit FatCow? You’ll get problems.
So let’s assume you got it enough and want to quit. Some companies (including FatCow) may do quite an effort to make you stay with them or continue charging you against your will.
Taking your domain as a hostage
One of the shortsighted moves you can do when registering your domain is to register it with your hosting provider. Why is it bad? Because when you decide to change your hosting, you may have issues taking your domain under your control.
There are some evidences that FatCow uses this domain-hostage practice:
When I for a testing purpose registered a free domain with FatCow, the domain was registered under my WHOIS data. So formally, the domain belonged to me. (However, some really bad hosting companies register domains under their credentials, so the domain even don’t belong to you at all.)
As regards FatCow, I assume (although I don’t know for sure), that the problems that people have when they try to quit FatCow hosting are connected with that FatCow somehow resists changing DNS. And as a result you can’t use another hosting with your domain while it’s still registered with FatCow.
Anyway, according to messages in the web, people do have difficulties with domains registered with FatCow when they try to quit the hosting. And that’s a bad argument against FatCow.
So, It’s a good practice not to take a free domain from your hosting company. It’s recommended to have your hosting and domain registered in different places.
Say goodby to your emails
One of the caveats of FatCow hosting is that when you decide to change hosting, your emails are likely to stay with FatCow forever and you aren’t able to move them to your new hosting. Probably it’s due to the reason that FatCow uses vDeck and most other web hosting companies use cPanel as a control panel.
Big hassle of manual migration
You will have to face another problem when you decide to move from FatCow to another host. Since most other webhosts use cPanel as control panel, you will have to move your files, databases and all the setting manually. I’ve already wrote about it above so will not repeat here.
FatCow does NOT guarantee unconditional 30-day moneyback
FatCow recommends to pay with credit card, saying in its Terms that only so you are guaranteed to get a refund during 30-day money-back guarantee. It sounds BS to me. I suspect that FatCow wants you to use a credit card because they know that you have less control over automatic payments scheduled on your credit card by FatCow.
Moved from FatCow but still charged
Using Paypal you can go into your account and cancel recurring payments at any time. Whereas using credit card, if you forget to cancel your account with FatCow, you need to go to your bank when you are charged and request a charge back, which is a lot of hassle. And there are chances that you simply forget it.
As regards me, when I bought FatCow hosting, the first thing I did was that I went to my PayPal account and canceled the scheduled recurring payment. And thus I just didn’t need to contact FatCow support asking them to cancel my account and then check after a year if they really did not charge me again. With PayPal I have more control over my payments and feel safer for my credit card credentials.
You want refund during a money-back guarantee? You’ll not get it!
In addition to FatCow’s terms about guaranteeing refund during 30-day money-back period only if you paid with credit card, it will not refund you the money that you paid for additional services and add-ons such as spam protection, backups etc.
Moreover, when I requested a cancellation of my FatCow account and a full refund during 30-day money-back guarantee, the support simply did not want to give me refund. Only insisting and digging into FatCow’s Terms helped me to get my money back. Anyway, it was not about money, it was about FatCow’s attitude towards clients.
Here’s our chat:
The chatting manner of the support made me think that the support is simply instructed to avoid refunds as much as they can. No surprise if they get some bonuses for that.
A good hosting would not simply assert that the website is fine when a client says it’s not. And a good hosting would suggest ways how they can rectify the situation or finally explain the options how a client can get a refund. But it’s not the case with FatCow.
How to get a refund if you are right and even if your are not right according to Terms of Services
First of all, the best way to avoid such situation is simply to avoid such hosting.
But if you appear in the situation like mine, and you know that you are right, then keep insisting and demand explanations. Then go to their Terms of Services and try to find a way how to get what you want.
Even if their Terms are against you but you feel that you are right and the money that you are loosing is significant to you, then you may record your chat and publish it on some public place in the Internet, for example a forum where the company in question is being promoted.
I know many cases when people got refunds regardless any terms of services only because hosting company wanted to save its face. And if you are polite during public discussions, you will have more chances to get a refund, because it will be about sympathy and ethics and not about terms of services (which hardly any customer reads at all, by the way).
What you can do if your host does a bad job
Of course, you may just leave it for good if you’ve got it enough. In many cases it’s the best decision.
But if you used to like it and then something went wrong with the hosting, then you may give it a second chance. Just contact its support and try to talk with them like with partners and explain them your worries. A good hosting company will do as much as they can to make you pleased, because they don’t want to loose you as a client, especially if you are a polite client.
Conclusion
The most expensive thing in our life and business is our mistakes. And you can avoid a lot of mistakes if you do a proper research. But it may take tons of time and efforts for you. So I hope that this 5,000-word article about hosting and marketing manipulation will help you to save your time by getting a piece of my experience and thus become smarter.
Thank you for reading!
Share in the comments your thoughts, ask any questions, or just let me know what do you appreciate or expect most of all in a good web hosting?
FatCow has now become FatFraud. They now hide and refuse to list any customer service number…indicative of wrongdoings. I was illegaly charged $300 dollars from my bank account without permission or authorization. They dont answer their emails or chats! Stay away from here. FCC needs to close them down..!!!
personal information has been removedWell… You can try chargeback
Hi Michael! Maybe would you like to test new hosting service from the USA? I think about Dynamic Edge created by dhosting.com. We combined three hosting services in one – shared hosting, VPS and cloud, and we can transfer your sites for free.
Give me a sign, please! 🙂
r.karbowski@dhosting.com
Hi Radek,
Your service looks interesting.
I’ll keep it in mind.
I’m here for you – just let me know, and I will prepare the test for you. 🙂
I wanted to add my experience with Fatcow… I used them several years ago to purchase a domain name and start a website selling leather backpacks and shoulder bags I was making. (it was an attempt to move away from Etsy.com)… After the first year, of course, my base cost went from $5 or so (without add-ons) to
$75 (for domain name only; website costs added up to about $140). I wasn’t doing that well so I tried to cancel. I got weekly website stats for the next two years in my email, for a blank page. They tried to do an “automatic payment” after I had selected “manual.” Bounced everything in my bank account. They did this again a year later. My bank was calling me… I closed the bank account and opened a new one.
Tonight I checked their site for domain names and
it’s “available” for $980. Other domain sites list it as “unavailable.”
I know they hold on to your domain name for a year or two, and then raise the price, but $980??? Other hosts list my old name as “taken” but fatcow is ready to sell it… I’m thinking about whether I should buy my old name with a “.net” or a “.org” or even “.co” in order to hold on to my old business. All of those are quite available, everywhere,
for a few dollars.
thanks,
steve
Hi Steve,
Thanks a lot for sharing your story. Another example of FatCow’s unethical behavior.
Loosing a sweet .com domain hurts. Although, other domain extensions may also be a nice option.
There are well-established companies which do not use .com domain.
For example, one of the best website security services Sucuri use .net domain.
As an advice for the future, it’s a good idea to register domain in one company and host your website at another one. This gives you more safety, flexibility and independence from what may happen on a hosting side.
Additionally, if you have a domain registered with a proper domain registrar and have a backup of your website (both files and database), it’s so much less pain to switch the host in case it screws up like FatCow.
I’ve used several domain registrars and here are my favorite ones that I use each time whenever I need to register a new domain.
Also, in case you are choosing a new host, my recommended list is here where I picked out the best options I know for almost any budget.
Hope you get over this issue with FatCow and move on with your business.
FatCow (or Fat Bastards, as we’ve begun calling them) are holding my professional site, and my blog, hostage, after my credit card company initiated a charge back on $300.00 worth of fees for ONE MONTH! These guys are criminals.
I’m trying to migrate my site from FatCow to another hosting company, but FatCow is making this an impossible task – just as you’ve stated in your piece. I’m so frustrated, and so angry, I could spit nails.
Thank you for all of your in-depth reporting on this egregious excuse for a hosting company. How can we get the word out even further for those who, like me, are novices? Any and all recommendations are welcome because the business practices FatCow (and EIG by extension) engage in, are not ok. I’m losing contracts because of these jerks, and all because they, and their security company, Site Lock, have access to my credit card and decided to grab every dollar they could get.
(I would provide my website URL below, but, like I said, FatCow is withholding it until my credit card company (which was appalled at what FatCow was trying to do) reverses the $300.00 charge back for my October, 2017 fees.)
Hi Karin,
Sorry to hear about your problem with FatCow. EIG hosts (and FatCow is one of them) cause a lot of painful issues like this to many people.
On a personal level you can just spread a word about it. There is a number of user reviews websites about hosting.
As regards acting on a legal level, several people contacted me letting me know that they were going to sort of initiate a class action suite against EIG or a particular EIG host. But I have not heard about any success, at least yet. I’m not a lawyer anyway to sink into this topic.
On a practical level, in the area of my expertise, I’d suggest the following the two very simple things for future:
1. Hold your domain and hosting at different companies. My favorite domain registrars are here and the hosts I recommend are here.
2. Always have a backup of your site independently from your hosting. I examine website backup topic here and here. As a short additional advice, make periodically a full backup of your site (using a cPanel utility). The full backup allows to migrate your site to another host within hours.
Unfortunately, without this approach it’s probably impossible to do anything to bring your website back to life again for free and quickly in a similar case.
Feel free to let me know if I can help you with anything else.
Hi Michael, thank you very much for your reply, and for your advice and resource links, I really appreciate that.
On the legal side of things, if you hear any more about that class action suit against EIG (or FatCow in particular) I would love to add my name. These guys are beyond unethical, and have caused me so much stress and anguish, and they’ve cost me so much money this entire experience has been practically unbearable. I ended up having to pay an egregious amount of money just to gain access to my site again so I can move it, and leave FatCow in a dusty field for good.
I’m glad to know that backing up my site independent of FatCow’s backup services is the right way to go because I’ve hired a guy to help me with this mess, and that’s the first thing he did (before we lost access to my files.)
If I’ve learned anything at all it’s to do the research before diving headlong into a hosting company (or any business, I guess), and partnering up. I was such a novice back when someone suggested FatCow I just put my faith in their counsel and handed my savings to FatCow on a sliver platter.
Thank you once again for your advice, and for the resources you’ve posted. I really appreciate that, and am heartened to know there are good guys like you out there doing all this work to protect people like me who don’t have extensive knowledge in this area, and are, therefore, fair game for the shysters. Thanks so much.
Karin, thanks very much for your kind feedback.
I will let you know if I know about any class suit against FatCow (or EIG) going to a practical level.
Besides, feel free to ask me any questions if you ever need. I will be happy to help you with advice if this is my area of expertise.
I’m going through my worst professional experience ever with FatCow right now. My website has been down for 4 days. Due to their (apparently common) SSL problems. Support is SUPER SUPER shit/slow/incompetent. I even tried to move away via changing the name servers but that too was broken – and they wanted me to raise another ticket to sort that!!! NEVER EVER AGAIN.
Thanks for sharing your experience, Justin.
FatCow is indeed one of the “best” examples of EIG hosting.
Hi Michael –
Well, as the domain administrator for my church I have just had the pleasure of successfully moving our domain hosting to a far greener pasture. Yes, this is an old article of yours, but having been hosted by FatCow for the past six years I can affirm not only that what you relate here is true – it’s actually gotten worse over time as EIG continues to search for the bottom of the bottle to find out just how much money they can milk from their customers.
A funny story to add: After successfully moving all of our files and services to a new provider and re-pointing our namservers I set about to move the domain itself to a new registrar. It turns out that even though domain privacy had been disabled for over a month during the move process, FatCow never updated the WhoIs record – and it took going through several tiers of support before this got resolved on the LAST POSSIBLE DAY before the 14-day transfer lockout started.
I sent a polite but pointed “Dear John” letter via their web interface (Oh by the way, there is no way to directly contact anybody at FatCow via email.) detailing the reasons we were leaving which included our experience with their on-line support services which typically are handled by third-party offshore agents with limited English comprehension. The response I received is priceless:
Hello,
Thank you for contacting support.
I’m really sorry for the inconvenience caused. However, it was never our intention to inconvenience you by anyways. You are one of our valued customer and we do not want to loose you at any cost. We would like to offer you the discounted hosting price of $250.20 / 3 years.
Disappointing a valued customer is the last thing we would like to do and we hope for a positive reply from you.
In order to apply the discounted hosting renewal price and refund the the difference amount, please provide the answer to the security question set on the account : What city were you born in?
If you have any further questions, please chat with us at
Sincerely,
Jnanesh U
Billing Specialist
Needless to say, I won’t be taking them up on their offer.
Hi Jeff,
Thanks a lot for sharing your story. What you have come across is quite typical for FatCow.
I’ve dealt as a client with several EIG hosts. And FatCow is one fo the worst experiences I’ve had regarding both hosting performance and support satisfaction. Although the support is polite, they are trained to sell above all. This drives me crazy 🙂
Thanks again for your comment. Although this article is quite old as you mentioned, this is indeed still actual. By the way, I keep all my articles up-to-date. And if something gets outdated, I mention this at the beginning and provide a link to a new article.
Good luck with your new home for your website and domain!
Hi Michael,
I know this is an old article, but I still wanted to thank you for it. I own a few websites with different hosting providers ( sitesell, go daddy, mygoto brands, fatcow) , and I was about to decide what to do with my website hosted by FatCow as the costs keep growing. Guess what? I checked my domain registrar, and, just as you said, it is not me, it is fatcow! Every other domain is owned by me except this one. I have to think how to proceed from here ( any advise?)
Glad I found your blog. Thanks again,
Olga
Hi Olga,
Thanks for your comment. I appreciate your feedback.
I suggest contacting FatCow’s support and let them know that you want to move your domain to a different domain registrar (I use these ones).
I guess FatCow might try to persuade you not doing it. But regardless of it, you have the right to move your domain to any other registrar of your choice.
I also suggest making screenshots of your chats with FatCow’s support (just in case it’s not going to be resolved effortlessly).
Feel free to let me know if your issue is not resolved (but I believe it should be resolved 🙂 ).
I used Fatcow years ago, before The Darkness. They seemed good at that time, presumably before they were abducted by EIG. Now, more recently, the last time I attempted to establish a web hosting account with Fatcow, the feeling they gave me was damn near starkly different. And an unbelievably outrageous part of it was the fact that THEY WERE NOT ENCRYPTING MY CONNECTION TO MY CUSTOMER ACCOUNT AND/OR MY CPANEL ACCOUNT. NO HTTPS. Usernames and passwords traveling right there across the net in the utter clear. I complained. “What the hell?” No joy. From customer “service,” there was no interest in understanding or helping or even acknowledging that this was a major problem. Cancelled account. Moved on. … To another EIG company. Until they stopped even pretending to reply to support tickets. Then moved on again … to another EIG company. None of their tech support knew anything about anything I ever called about. And they couldn’t even provide a basic self-signed SSL certificate. Wanted me to buy dedicated IP and an expensive third-party certificate that I didn’t need. … … I’ve since moved on to a NON-EIG hosting company. So far, by comparison, it’s paradise. I never knew what awesome was in web hosting until I accidentally stumbled out of the net of EIG front companies. This has all been quite a revelation. Let’s all keep spreading the word.
Thanks Joseph for sharing your story.
EIG “optimizes” the hosts it acquires. “Optimization” means decreasing costs including getting rid of more expensive and professional support.
So no wonder you have clearly noticed the change of hosting quality of the acquired host.
Of course, not all non-EIG companies are superb, but there are non-EIG companies that are really great.
Thanks again for your detailed comment.
I’m glad you’ve found one.
Michael, your site does a stupendous service. Glad I found you. Thanks for doing the work you do. I’m going to check out your recommended hosting companies in weeks and months to come.
Thank you Joseph for your kind words. I’m very happy that you appreciate what I do.
Feel free to contact me anytime once you have any questions!
OH wished i had of seen this a few years back. I am leaving Fatcow ASAP. they have been so bad./..i want to puke. They have lied to me….telling me weebly cant handle more than 20 pages normally (i have 200) and come to find out..it isnt weebly..it is Fatcow cutting me off at 2 Gb of space. never offering me anything more… my website wouldnt publish so i had to delete a bunch of pages. TWO, the tech support is awful. i got blamed every single time for any issues then later they discovered it wasnt me… Also i was signed up with their affiliate program and while I DID get paid…they also give you credits when you make them a sale. well they just took those credits away from me…saying they dont apply. WHART? i am not sure what the credits were to be used for. i think a price reduction in what i pay them…but they removed them. i am furious. they have lied to me so many times and screwed me over. I am getting completely away from any EIG webhosts. i am sooo done. also i had alot of problems using weebly with them. HONESTLY i feel pretty certain it was the Fatcow servers that was my biggest issue overall. i use weebly, inc for other sites and have NEVER had those same issues at all. so that tells me it was Fatcows servers. now i am going to try to leave them. I hope they dont give me crap over leaving….i also will be losing 9 months of paid plans. but i have GOT to leave those idiots now for my own sanity. also when you call, your on hold for 30+ minutes. thats BS. These people are bad bad news. i am also taking a friend of mine away from them that i talked into going over there. i have already removed 2 other websites from them i had. its been a crazy and horrible ride. i wouldnt wish them on anyone. oh and I WAS going to try Bluehost until i learned they were EIG. so i am going to try out Siteground now..
Debbie, thank you for your emotional and truthful story.
Yes, BlueHost is also from the EIG gang.
SiteGround is a really good choice. It’s in my recommended hosts by the way.
Feel free to let me know if I can be of any help to you.
Oh Michael….i was sooo excited about going to Siteground. but i must say, its been pure hell the last 24 hours. to explain, i have a BIG website with fatcow. i wanted to be able to sign up with Siteground to start rebuilding my website…before transferring anything over. so that i wouldnt have any down time. it may take me a month or longer to rebuild it. its really big. and important. soooo after trying to edit my hosts file and then trying to get them to give me a different URL until i was finished..they basically told me they couldnt. that i needed to DELETE my website with fatcow. well thats not gonna happen. so i am FORCED to resort back to Bluehost. i need USA based tech support cause i cannot understand accents. Also Siteground didnt want to talk to me on the phone. they wanted me to talk to them thru tickets only. it was a total nightmare. i am so upset and disappointed…i have SEARCHED all over for another webhost that offers weebly and has USA based tech support. Bluehost is all I found. and they CAN issue a URL for me to work off of until i finish my rebuilding. i surely dont understand why siteground couldnt do that. i know i am not the first to request this. it wouldnt have been an issue if it was a small site to rebuild as i could do that within hours. this one is so big, i cant…sooo bluehost it is …SIGH..what a BAD DAY!!! I do not recommend siteground unless you want to chat via ticket support. and trying to get someone to answer me, it took them over an hour to answer my ticket. fatcow is also overseas tech support and blame everything on you.. sooo i guess i will roll the dice with bluehost. God Help us all if we cant find better support than this…. I will let you know how it goes with Bluehost. thanks for lsitening.
oh siteground also told me i need to find an IT person to help me on my end. WHAT? thats what they are for. it was a simple fix they could help with..unbelievable to be told that.
Debbie, sorry to hear your hard case with rebuilding your site.
On the other hand, it’s understandable why SiteGround sort of refuse working with you (as it looks like this). The point is that good technical support costs about $20-50 per hour. And it’s assumed by hosts that you don’t abuse their support. Some occasional issues can be resolved, that’s not the problem. But something more serious which is not hosting’s issue, but client’s issue can be treated as out of scope.
And SiteGround estimated, as I can see it, that the work is too much to cover your hosting costs. That’s why they honestly told you to find an IT person. It’s a good hosting and they don’t cheat you. BlueHost or some other hosts which are not expensive may do the work for you, but remember that the costs are distributed onto the quality of hosting.
So, I’m sorry again that SG did not work for you, but probably putting all the work you have on the hosting is really out of scope of shared hosting.
I can see the following solutions in your case:
1. You stay with BH as you want which agree to do all the work for free, but I would not expect miracles and perfect quality of hosting. You choose.
2. You contact other high-quality hosting and tell them about your issue and your requirements (including moving your site with as little downtime as possible). They may offer you charging extra fee for this extra work. This is absolutely normal n special cases (like in your case as it looks like).
3. You may want to start using fully managed hosting which assumes maximum technical support (e.g. LiquidWeb WordPress managed plan and they have a good phone support as you need it). They may agree to do the work for you without additional fee – you need to check it with them. But this kind of hosting is many times more expensive than a shared hosting. And this your extra work is covered with a higher price for the hosting.
4. You find an IT person who helps you move the website.
All extra costs for your not standard work should be covered anyway – be it higher hosting price, per-hour charges or worse quality of hosting. You need to understand this and make your decision.
Anyway, I’m sorry that you have this kind of problem. But how you solve it depends on how many issues you will have in the future. I just wanted to let you know honestly how I see the situation and show you the perspective. Would be happy to help you with further advice if you need it. Good luck!
Look I am not stupid here. I build computers after all. I was not asking for them to call me and redo my entire computer system. it wasnt even close to that. They didnt even want to talk to me on the phone from the start. BUT Siteground wouldnt even attempt to let me build my site with them unless i completely deleted my website with Fatcow. Thats just crazy and ignorant. People will NOT agree to that that want to stay up and running. As for the IT guy thing, it was a simple thing but they didnt bother to explain it further or explain why. Initially getting moved over, they should expect people to be calling them to learn how they do things. These people didnt even want to talk on the phone at all. ONLY through support tickets but yet they BRAG about how good their tech support is and always available by phone email and chat. Siteground didnt even have Weebly available in their cpanel. it was actually a cluster f***. it may work well for a new website and maybe using wordpress or such but under these circumstances, they could not even get me set up. Atleast with Fatcow when i initially signed up, they were extremely helpful. I just finished signing up with Bluehost and piece of cake. Weebly in cpanel, they assigned me a different url until i finish my build. VERY simple thing that Siteground could have done. I also spoke with Bluehost on the phone and they were very nice. So even though Bluehost may not be excellent in certain things, its alot better than what I got at Siteground. I can say Siteground had some really good specials and offers. i did like that alot…but it doesnt help we when i cant even build a site there. I BELIEVE that Siteground isnt really set up to deal with weebly..thats what I think. so anyone using weebly shouldnt go there UNLESS they are creating a brand new site. It seems you think they are great and maybe they are..but not for transferring an existing site or weebly for that fact. it would have been simple and cheap to go straight to weebly inc but their tech support isnt 24/7. so i was afraid to go there. i do have a couple small websites there and that works perfectly but not this site. it is my baby and needs to be up and running at all times. its critical to have good tech support. and no one has ever tried to charge me an extra fee. its rolled into there hosting plans I am sure. and one should never brag about how helpful they are when they are not. if they want to charge for detailed tech support..then they should and also should advertise it as well.
so i wont bother you here anymore..but felt I should let others know..it isnt always wine and roses for everyone..no matter how perfect another person may think they are. Every case is different and clearly this is a classic example.
Sorry for butting in.
Sorry again, but building computers doesn’t automatically makes you an hosting expert….otherwise you would not need s**t like Weebly to build and manage your site; Weebly is for those people who would make their websites in Microsoft FrontPage if it was still available. It’s not a good platform…that’s why only equally s**tty providers like EIG brands have it.
Ana, thanks for joining the discussion.
Just wanted to add, that people have different experience with hosts and different expectations and requirements.
So if something works well for a person (e.g. BlueHost solved Debbie’s problem and Debbie is happy) then it’s totally fine.
On the other hand, I’d choose to avoid EIG at all costs and I’d rather choose a really good host, even if I had to hire IT to do the work one time to move my website (if I could not do it myself).
Debbie, thanks for your detailed comment.
However, as I say, everything a host does is included in prices of its services. If a host is ready to do extra work that other hosts refuse to do for free, it means that somewhere else there should be something wrong or broken with a host. There can be exceptions of course and even great hosts can fail at times to do the work properly in some particular cases, but the general patterns is like that.
I also agree with you, saying it in my own words that every host takes its niche.
And if you like BH for their careful attitude on the phone, its great.
Cross your fingers and hope that everything works great as well with them for as long as possible.
After all, the hosts that I recommend are focused on performance, reliability and professionalism with effective support first of all, because this is what I’d expect from hosting above all.
And EIG hosts are known for being more successful in marketing and acquiring clients, but their hosting services suffer. It’s the fact that is very obvious.
Anyway, people and clients are just different and have different requirement for a hosting.
If you like BH or FatCow, this is totally fine. And if they could get it done what you needed this is probably the most important thing that matters. So I wish you all the best.
Hola!
FatCow just lost 4 years of emails for my sister’s psychology practice (stone arch psychology). The negative impact on her practice was enormous. Reading the fine print, they now disclaim any responsibility for backing up. Yet they advertise, and up-charge, for back-up. Seems like a deceptive business practice, no?
Many thanks,
Carrie
Hola Carrie!
I’m sorry for what happened to your sister.
EIG, the owner of FatCow, is quite deceptive in general.
Anyway, to be on a safe side and not to be trapped one day, you need to treat hosts as if they are not responsible for anything. Some hosts just do their work much better than others. And it’s much less likely to get into problems with some hosts than with others.
Backups is the thing that you also need to take care of yourself. Even if you use a great backup service, you need to have many copies of your precious data in different places.
S regards emails, it can be a good practice, in addition to making backups, is to automatically forward emails to some additional email account (e.g. forward emails to free gmail account). So that in case of data loss you will have email copies in the second place.
Again, I’m sorry for your sister’s data loss. I wish she can restore emails somehow.
Fatcow was my first ever paid host – when I had yet to know better: I had issues since day 1, when my blogging script (not wordpress, an even more basic one – still requiring a mysql database, though) freshly installed kept spewing error after error all coming from mysql; Fatcow support wasn’t able to find the solution not even in almost a week. I didn’t know better, so I changed script and stayed with them….being very careful to disable automatic renewal, after seeing their outrageous full price! After I got away from them, they still kept sending me promotional email for about a year.
After that, I tried Bluehost and HostGator but left them in about 10 days; since then, I’m spreading the word about EIG crappy service and their shady unethical business model.
Thanks Ana for your comments and sharing your story.
Yes, That’s what EIG is about – make clients jump from one their ship to another ship that belongs also to them.
You may find interesting my full list of EIG hosting companies and brands.
Also, I’ve got a list of the hosts that have great value for price here if you are interested.
Thanks again for commenting and your input!
Good Article. My biggest beef with EIG (Bluehost as just one Example) is the branding of the WordPress Dashboard. I think it reinforces the rest of your article and a heaps more.
That scripted process you experienced, questioning, accusation, stonewalling, and deniability regarding your refund monies is a well plotted out sequence of scripted responses’, and role-played during training. The agent is not allowed to go public until fully trained and then monitored very closely for production results. (ie getting you to give up on your money). From what I understand, there is also a handler (one or more) brought in to the conversation, listening and guiding the person you are talking with. With a keyword script that must be followed and the pressure of conversing with multiple persons through the person you are speaking, your “conversation” seems hopeless.
These links are from Bluehost, but it would not surprise me to find this being populated to all EIG assets as it is a hired service. Look at what Bluehost is wanting to hire and that’s probably after EIG reduced services (people). Lots of key position have been on the list for months and July 1, 2015 Customer Retention Specialist is #1
Careers – http://www.bluehost.com/careers
Tracking Code: 601-060 (Retention Specialist)
(long URL, but, yes its correct) copy and paste in your address bar…)
https://endurance-openhire.silkroad.com/epostings/index.cfm?fuseaction=app.jobinfo&jobid=601&source=ONLINE&JobOwner=992514&company_id=17060&version=3&byBusinessUnit=NULL&bycountry=0&bystate=0&byRegion=NULL&bylocation=NULL&keywords=&byCat=NULL&proximityCountry=&postalCode=&radiusDistance=&isKilometers=&tosearch=yes&city=
looking forward to your newsletter.
Yeah, Retention Specialist is a kind of work with a quick turnaround – many people come in and many leave very quickly. So such staff is always in demand, not only in EIG.
And yes, resisting to give a refund was a sort of planned action from their side. I understood it clearly.
Thanks for your feedback.
P.S.: I hope you are not a recruiter from Bluhost, are you? =) LOL
And fatcow avoids paying affiliate commissions , by placing all commissions on HOLD without any explanations. support just told me my signups were questionable….and it would be reviewed, I changed my traffic source and again all my new commissions were placed on Hold. Im directing traffic from buyers of my scripts and this traffic converts well, I WASTED TWO MONTHS of traffic on these guys, took my traffic to bigscoots and how come there is now no issue.
Stepehen, I’d assume that many of your clients that you referred to FatCow canceled their accounts (and there’s no surprise why they might have done this).
And if so, then according to FatCow’s affiliate rules, FatCow can decline all pending and future commission to you.
As an affiliate we spend hundreds of dollars advertising products, and fatcow simply decided not to pay because they failed to keep the customer happy, I had a feeling their offer was too good to be true and surely it is….I learnt my lesson the hard way…I should have read this page first.
As a part of a joint stock company (EIG), their primary aim is keeping their shareholders happy. All other factors, including clients, affiliates etc is just a means, obstacles or circumstances when achieving the primary aim.
Hi Bely,
Thanks for introducing with FatCow. Currently i’m using local hosting for my blog and website. Sometimes, it make me bother for late response.
I’ll surely try the FatCow. Again thanks for the great review.
Manik, thanks for your comment, but if you read the post (or at lest its headlines) once again, I doubt you will want to try FatCow.
I am all too familiar with FatCow along with other EIG hosts. I fell for FatCow’s $1 per month for 12 months promotion. My uptime was somewhere around 84-95% every month. I disabled auto-renew from their panel but I forgot to disable auto renew from Paypal and I was charged over $100 for the renew. I checked the control panel and somehow it was on again. It took several days of arguing in order to get the refund.
From now on I am vouching to do my research on a company and avoid EIG at all costs. What a nightmare.
Sulfen,
Thanks for sharing your experience.
Any hosting company can become worse from a performance point of view if the owners don’t do their work properly. But when a company squeezes money out of clients by all means (including deception and bad ethics) I can’t stand it. That’s why I posted this negative review on FatCow, keeping in mind that it’s a common EIG’s policy.
Take care!
Nice post Michael. Thanks for an eye opener article.
Hey Sid!
Glad you liked it 🙂
And thanks for the first comment!