FatCow Reviews 87

Horrible, horrible, horrible! 3 years I have been trying to get them to stop billing me. I have no services with them anymore but I get multiple bills per year. No refunds, no help, out of country call center, always promised the account is closed and then more bills months later. I hate FATCOW!

Fatcow deleted my sight and told the registration had expired. I was told to I had purchase another site with two years hosting. I agree because I was desperate to get my site back up. Turns out it was all a ruse. I was defrauded and forced to purchase an additional site. When I discovered the verified the fraud and asked for a refund I was told it was too late. DO NOT DEAL WITH FATCOW. Worse web site host ever.

Our organization has been with Fatcow for about 14 years. Customer service used to suck in that I would be on hold for long periods (20-30 mins) to talk to a low level tech person when a problem arose that I needed help with.... The low level tech person would often not know the answer but would get advise from a level 2 tech person... That is a time consuming process for the customer especially if the low level tech has to bounce back and forth between the two parties to get the issue solved.

In recent years they solved the time you wait to speak with a low level tech (bravo!) BUT... the low level tech now seems to know even less about hosting websites and databases and does all the communication with an offshore accent that is hard to understand.

Not happy? Move your site to another company, right? Well, that is a major pain in the ass when you have to transfer a database and get the site running again.

Shop around if you aren't a website developer with extensive knowledge in mysql and php and won't need much help from support. I pay extra for a VPS server for our organization's website. I used to be able to talk to a VPS team that really helped when I needed it. Now I get the same crap tech support the $4.95 a month folks get

It's a Scam FatCow IS Quite Literally What They Say This Business IS a FatCow 100% A good choice of names Everything they say IS a Lie They Try Hacking You!

I've had FatCow for ten years. Like others things went smoothly for about six years then I was hit with an outrageously raised renewal fee. Getting the rep to understand my questions was near impossible. It sounds like the rep's "office" is in his living room or at a bar in the Philippines. Once I received a message that I had 24 hours to eliminate all the bad code in my domain! The WHAT? At one point the non-English speaker called me and sounded drunk demanding I pay the usurious fees. When I couldn't get my tech problems solved I moved to another server temporarily but came back at a greater discount.
I appreciate the monthly activity report but it needs deeper explanation of what the statistics are.
Smooth lately but when I have the time I'm switching to something less expensive and, hopefully, American based with native English speakers.

Fatcow is a completely unethical. They will try scamming you. To clarify, they will try hacking you website. Then, they will call you attempting to upsell you to a sitelock(site security) package. And to let you know, they are owned by EIG. For this reason, we need to boycott any hosting company that is owned by EIG. I will never use any hosting company owned by EIG ever again. We need to fight back.

I deleted my Fatcow account 2 years ago but they still charge me every year and will not refund the charge. Even after I received emails from corporate.

I had a look at this hosting provider and was not ready to proceed.since then I've been bombarded by emails telling me to 'get on with it" basically. You can't unsubscribe without setting up an account, it's ridiculous

MY DAD KEEPS CALLING ME THIS 😭 MAKE IT STOP HE’S MEAN

This company should not offer its services without fulfilling its promises. My credit card was charged when I notified fatcow's technical support and was promised that the problem would be taken care of within 2 days. It's five days later now and the problem is still the same. Calling the 1-888 number leads to endless waiting. I gave up after 30 minutes.

Scammers. I purchased a domain name for a year from Fat Cow with my credit card details. As I only wanted it for a year, I set it to manual renewal instead of auto-renewal and I also removed my credit card details. For some odd reason, despite placing it on manual renewal, it reverted automatically back to auto-renewal on two occasions, which I had to re-set it back to manual. Now Fat Cow went ahead by simply auto-renewing and charging my credit card whose information I had removed. I Spoke to their staff who refused to reverse the charge for the auto-renewal. Moreover, the charge by Fat Cow took place even before the expiration of the domain. It speaks volume of their operations and desperation when they are so hard up that it and its staff needs to behave some unethically. Just stay away from this company.

Still the worst company to ever do business with : tried being an affiliate and and even supporting them.
Refused to do a refund : give me my passwords : in order to stop automatic payments : fraud and scam

The most horrible company on the planet

1. They brought our sites down continuously through their errors
2. They illegally used our credit cards and claimed they knew nothing of it
3. The Slammed the phone on us repeatedly.
4. They purposely accumulate reports of malware, and dont tell you until the last moment, after 6 months, and bring your sites down, and then you are forced to immediately buy protection from them to save your business.
5.We bought protection (sitelock) and they stil didnt protect us, brought our sites down, and charged us more
6. They charge for SSL where other great companies dont.
7. None of the assistants you speak to actually work forthe company. They are all call centre people who know nothing, and issue tickets. So, by calling, nothing gets fixed.

Horrible, horrible, horrible hosting company. We were damaged tremendously, and in the end we and all our associates left.

When you see Fatcow ... run

Customer Service is terrible. The individual people are courteous and responsive, but the process is ridiculous and starts at the corporate level. No matter what you need, it takes 24 to 48 hours. I paid to have them migrate a site for me. They put it at some ridiculous domain. If you call back to ask them to fix it, tack on another 24-48 hours for someone to respond. Support personnel are not based in the U.S. and it's hard to communicate at times. FatCow doesn't cooperate with awesome plugins like Backup Buddy which helps when you want to move your website to a different location/host. I will not ever recommend them to any of my clients.

I had some bad experiences with Fatcow. I have to use it as a webmaster.
1. Fatcow charges costs for three years in advance which I think is unreasonable.
2. Fatcow lets you pay invoices but it is unclear to me what their services are all about.
3. Their customer service does not do what it promises. I tried to change credit card information. They said they would send a confirmation e-mail but they just don't do it and the credit card information remains unchanged. I need to call again and again.
4. Their webmail is annoying to me. I can only access it with Windows Internet Explorer 6 or higher. I usually work with Chrome but it won't work at Fatcow webmail. To access webmail I need to enter my login name and password more than once. The time it takes to view my webmail is very long and I need a lot of patience.
I had to work with Fatcow as a webmaster on behalf of somebody else so I am not in charge to work with this. For myself I would choose to avoid Fatcow at any time.

My early experience with FatCow was very good. The price was low, everything worked well, customer service was available 24/7, and any problems I had were always quickly resolved.

After the initial special offer period ended, I had to go up to paying full price. This was still reasonable enough, and I paid up front for three years. Three years later, they sent me an email saying that my hosting was about to be renewed for another three years. I checked the price. It seemed awfully high. I checked what I paid three years ago. The price had more than doubled. No warning, no explanation, no apology. I then spend a load of time with their support and retentions people, negotiating a lower price. This I finally got, but not after they had taken up a significant amount of my afternoon and put me in a bad mood for the rest of day.

They clearly hoped that I would not pay much attention to the original email, and just let them go ahead and take this money from my account so I don't have to think about it for another three years. They hope that you will not remember what you paid three years ago, and I'm sure that getting you to pay three years at a time is part of this whole rouse.

Probably in a lot of companies, this email is seen by someone who has no idea what the cost was three years ago and is supposed to just assume that everything is proceeding as normal. I feel this is a bit of scam, and it's particularly unpleasant to have this happen with a company that I previously appreciated and trusted.

I have renewed with FatCow, reluctantly, as I am too busy at the moment to do anything else. But now I have the next three years in which to find a hosting company that will treat me with a bit of respect, as I can't stay indefinitely with a company that has tried to con me in this way.

As others have said previously, the initial service was ok, the appeal of the 24 hour chat was good, however as time has gone by things have been getting worse and worse.
Firstly if you are not in the US, the prices can be stupid, as instead of performing a currency conversion at the checkout it just changes the currency symbol, so you have to pay more in £??? and no option to pay in $ and have the bank convert it.
Secondly the support, while it was good at first, it has become obvious that the support centre buried in the heart of India is becoming over used, wait times have become 30 minutes + for live chat and 24-48 hours for a support ticket, when your website is down for no reason this is not acceptable !!!
Thirdly the number of random background changes has become unbearable, permission changes on random wordpress files???? yeah thats really going to be me messing up my own site!!! or the pitiful uptime we have had this year.
Enough is enough with this bunch of jokers, we have now moved our sites away to a much more reliable host who respond to support tickets within 5-10 minutes at busy times!!!!

Suspend sites for no reason - Weak uptime. My sites have been down time and time again.
Insanely expensive and no refunds
Push so many redicilous tools you dont need and then charge the joint for them.
Slow customersupport
Messy controlpanel

I can't begin to tell you how clunky and how unreliable Fat Cow is...
just horrible horrible customer service

The "free domain" option must be chosen at the start of the sign up...or you lose it...although the site does not tell you that.

Everything is convoluted and hard to deal with. I have spent hours on the phone with customer service, never the same person, nothing gets done. Speak to a supervisor? 20 minutes on hold with horrible music

At one point all sites were down and they lied saying would be back up in "an hour"....a day later it came back up

Expect to be "on hold" forever on the phone...get jerked around....no one knows what they are doing. On line chat....wait and wait to chat with whichever person in India is up next, expect to get more wrong information

The interface of the cpanel is full of useless Mojo junk all trying to get you to spend more money constantly. Fat Cow is a huge joke

Half of the time, people visited my site, they were redirected to some 3rd party advertising site, i suspect is run by fatcow, so they firstly stole half of my traffic, and when i complained, they shut down my site with no reason.

They dont answer your questions, mostly because they dont understand english very good in the poor part of India where the support is located.

Im actually happy they shut down my site, so i could find me a real provider