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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WP Engine
Score 9.2 out of 10
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WP Engine is a website hosting service built to host WordPress for companies of any size, with features such as daily backups, firewall,SSL, and proprietary caching technology.
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 …
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.
I am an enterprise user of WordPress and host over 7000 sites with WPEngine. Areas that I think they are well suited for include customers that need enterprise-level support and uptime and have more complex needs than a simple blog. They also manage scale well with a variety of isolated install options that you can scale up or down depending on your contract needs. They also provide premier support for enterprises and have highly knowledgable Technical Account Managers that provide a significant value add. If I were to look at where it isn't as appropriate for usage I would focus on the low-end needs and say while they do support small sites, there are options out there for cheaper hosting that lack the support a WPEngine gives you.
I love the database backups and how quickly & easy it is to restore from an old backup point. This gives me & my clients confidence that any change can be rolled back.
The built in caching & CDN mean that I have to spend less time worrying about the speed of the server & site. The caching has some side-effects that take getting used to (on-page dynamic PHP code sometimes needs to be moved to API endpoints), but this is true for most caching systems.
They have really good support for multiple environments. It's very easy to have separate production & staging environments. It's also very simple to deploy from staging to production, making product launches and large scale website copy changes much easier to coordinate.
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'd like to see WP Engine offer their own monitoring solution. When I say monitoring, I mean specific use cases that may end up being something you could script. This would keep customers from having to pay for additional services like Pingdom, New Relic, etc.
I would like to see some proactive analysis done by WP Engine on their customer sites - at least on their home pages, and offer up suggestions. This kind of goes along with the other example.
Finally, it would be nice to see a "lighter" offering, perhaps a plan that costs $49 for those who want to host only a few sites, or even 1 site.
I was in a situation where I had to bolt Wordpress on to an existing infrastructure that could not support it. If I ever end up in that situation again, please kill me. Other than that reasonably common use case, I don't think it offers a lot of value over robust shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated servers.
It took very little time to learn their dashboard for managing WordPress sites. Their built-in tools are really well done, and the addition of security and CDN tools is great.
Support is generally great. Enterprise support is fantastic, with little to no wait times. I find that chat support can almost always take care of the problem without escalating to a ticket for a higher level of troubleshooting. The chat support for many other hosting providers can only handle basic issues. This is a big bonus for us to get quick and helpful answers.
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.
While we still use GoDaddy for some services, WP Engine definitely has been a major upgrade for our WordPress hosting. In addition to faster load speeds, WP Engine has been more adept at allowing us to manage a high number of websites without straining the system. We have never used Network Solutions for our own hosting needs, but when we do interact with them on behalf of our clients, their systems always seem to be clunky and hard to use, and they often overcharge customers by selling them products they do not need.
