For a few months now, I’ve been using Fatcow for my different sites. Why did I choose them? I had read some reviews and didn’t come across anything bad, at that time, plus their shared hosting rates were pretty cheap, amazingly cheap as a matter of fact. Now, after several months of use, I’ve decided to write a review of Fatcow, just in case you’re looking for a new host for your own sites.

Shared hosting means that your site’s actual serving computer serves other sites as well. Dedicated serving costs much more than shared but if you don’t have a huge site and you don’t really care too much if your site is a bit slow to load, shared hosting is fine.

One caveat that you should be aware of is the problem with WordPress. While WordPress is a superb front end for your website, it also uses a fair bit of serving oomph as far as putting a load on your server. WordPress uses a database to keep track of everything and this database, MYSQL, puts a drain on the computer that runs it. The bigger the site, the bigger the database and, of course, the bigger the drain. Pure HTML doesn’t use a database and all of my HTML sites load like greased lightning. My WordPress sites, however, can be agonizingly slow by times.

There are different settings in WordPress that can affect the loading speed and, according to Fatcow’s help department, you can also optimize your databases. Having done most of these things, suffice it to say that the sites sometimes take a long time to load.

As far as Fatcow’s tech support, they are efficient and seem to be capable, at least for the few times that I have used them. I should warn you now that Fatcow does NOT use CPanel. If you’re used to the CPanel interface, you will be sorely disappointed with Fatcow. I grew up with CPanel, at least as far as working on websites is concerned, and was dismayed that this was something I didn’t check before I signed up. That is an LAL (Live and Learn) moment, certainly not an LOL one.

For now, Fatcow is filling the bill for me. Either I switch all my sites, eleven of them,  to HTML and put up with coding in Dreamweaver or I shut up about slow load times. I’ll see what happens. I would give Fatcow a B. At times when my sites have been slow, I would rate then a C- but things aren’t too bad right now.

Finally, there was talk a while ago about some kind of spiff from Fatcow if any of my readers signed up with them. Well, the link to that program is completely dead (did it ever work?) and it seems that this was another brilliant idea that lost its steam.

Thanks for reading. If you have questions or comments, tweet me. Link is up on the top right.