FatCow is a website hosting service with features such as a free domain name, a blog, site templates, and unlimited mailboxes, offered by Endurance International Group.
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SiteGround
Score 9.2 out of 10
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SiteGround offers website hosting, as well as managed WordPress, managed Woo Commerce, fully managed cloud services available to support a variety of services, as well as reselling.
I honestly can't speak to whether FatCow would be well suited for large companies. But for independent contractors, bloggers, and entrepreneurs, FatCow is a perfect fit. If you're a novice user, their tools and interface allow you to build a site quickly. For advanced users, the clean interface makes it simple to find what you need. One-click installation of web applications is awesome. I haven't updated my site in a while, but they provide a great platform for those looking to showcase their portfolios and blogs.
If you've got a WordPress site and are unhappy with the performance, support or price of your current hosting service, SiteGround is well worth checking out as it excels in all those areas. From a single one-off blog, to more robust hosting packages, they offer a range of options that are well-suited to any budget or service need. Everybody, from noobs to experienced developers needs support from time to time, and SiteGround's team is the best I've seen. Not only are they easy to communicate with and highly proficient to solve any issue I've thrown their way, they're also easy to reach with multiple access options with minimal wait times.
You get a number of page views as a guide to your bandwidth, and a fixed amount of disk space on the server. So you know what you have to work with. No hazy promises of “unlimited” resources.
If you pay more, you’re allocated a server with fewer accounts, so there’s less chance you’ll be slowed down by your neighbors.
Its self-help material is pretty good — close to InMotion Hosting for knowledgebase quality.
SiteGround tackles slow speeds from all angles, using SSD storage, Nginx, SuperCacher, CloudFlare CDN, and HHVM.
I was very disappointed with my initial renewal. I understood that the price I had paid was an introductory price, but the renewal rate was much higher than I anticipated. They could be more transparent with their renewals.
I don't feel stress about the website and emails hosted with SiteGround. I like the customer/tech support, the agents are always polite and ready to find a solution. My websites are secure and has a free SSL certificate - I can get on with my business. The boost in speed to the webpage loads is a big bonus especially when designing and developing websites online. They also provide tips and how to videos on various topics which is valuable learning tool.
Before choosing FatCow, I looked into a few services. As this was 9 years ago, the options weren't as diverse as they are now. GoDaddy was the most popular at the time, but the rates were significantly higher for a smaller package, and they had a pretty sexist ad campaign at the time that really turned me off of their services. Since choosing FatCow, I have looked into using WP Engine as I do my website in WordPress, but it wasn't worth it to move it over at the time and I elected to stick with what I had.
I used Namescheap in the past. I believe Namescheap is a big company compared to SiteGround, as big as godaddy. I think because of that, you get what you expect. Good services, but maybe more costly and you have to pay for everything as extra. Email $5, SSL $10, CDN $10 etc In my opinion, SiteGround actually has packages that make sense for wordpress hosting. If my website gets a lot of traction in the future, I will need to upgrade from the current plan and maybe move away from SiteGround.
All the sites I've set up at SiteGround are performing faster than they did at their previous hosting provider. This yields a superior customer experience and higher Google/SEO rankings.
Their service has been rock solid, necessitating little support (which is admittedly less than ideal for my support business, but a boon for my clients bottom line) and zero downtime.
Easy to get new sites up and running, which speeds creation of new businesses and rapid deployment of conceptual campaigns.
