These guys should NOT be in the hosting industry ... trying to set-up some Wordpress sites for a client hosted with FatCow has been the WORST hosting experience I've had.

Support's responses have ranged from condescending to completely irrelevant & 5 days later MySQL is still failing on a regular basis

Avoid at all costs!

I really liked that I was able to call and ask tons of questions about starting a webpage. There is a learning curve to figure things out but each time I called they would work me thru the questions.

I have been with FatCow since 2003, and initially, they were great for my small business. When I signed on, they were based in New Mexico, and the customer service was excellent. Within a few years, the company was sold, and moved to New England. There were some changes with the new ownership, but nothing that seemed to complicate my ability to work with my simple website (by this time, I had added two more accounts for personal websites). But, within the past two years ... I have grown increasingly dissatisfied with FatCow, and am currently looking at other shared webhosts.

My main website is for my small business (educational K-12 consulting) ... I use very little disk space or bandwidth for text and graphics. The other two sites are for personal interests (my photography, PS images, etc. and family photos). I really do not use any of their services ... primarily because I haven't needed to. But, when I recently decided to add a blog, FatCow's tutorials for WordPress were rather lacking.

I suppose I could ask FatCow's customer service ... if it existed. Yes, they do claim to have customer service, but it is crap ... excuse me, beyond crap. I don't use it often, but when I do, it would be nice if my tickets were even read. Their responses are boilerplate, and generally do not even address the problem.

I'm not high-maintenance ... in fact, I think I probably go out of my way to avoid having to contact support. The problems I encounter are generally account-related. The latest one was when my renewal for one account (the biz) was due, they auto-renewed their services on my credit card, but they allowed my domain to lapse - even though I had domain credit (this was remaining from last year when they insisted I purchase two years of domain credits when I transferred my domain to them - it had remained with a host from years ago). When I complained to customer service, they sent their usual "We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you ..." and essentially told me that I should have been monitoring this myself. Ok, fair enough, but then, what am I paying them for when I use so little of their services?

Another issue has been with pricing. FatCow offers two prices ... their regular plan for $99.00/year and something they call "Mini-Moo" which is domain parking. I pay for the regular plan for each of my three websites. A bit pricey for using so little. FatCow frequently offers discounted plans, but I can't take advantage of any of those since I am not a new customer. And, in searching for a new host, I've learned that a number of them offer add-on domains under one account.

In all fairness, I have not experienced a lot of downtime or slow network speeds with FatCow, but then again as I've previously stated, my websites are small and simple. I don't know how they would fare with more robust sites.