HOSTGATOR VS FATCOW HOSTING

Hostgator was founded by a dropped out college student in 2002 with only a few customers but now they are one of the top web hosting companies that host more than 9 million sites. FatCow was established much earlier than Hostgator but they only host more than 30,000 sites up to date. FatCow is also listed as one of the top web hosting companies because they get a lot of positive feedback from customers. The following is a comparison between Hostgator and FatCow.

Uptime

Both Hostgator and FatCow have fast servers and offer a 99.9% uptime for customers. Despite that, a survey conducted over a period of 30 days showed that Hostgator has an uptime of 99.97% but FatCow only maintain an uptime of 99.91%.

Hostgator is in partnership with the top colocation provider, SoftLayer. Hostgator has a number of data centers. Their data centers are equipped with powerful Dell servers and power supplies. FatCow operates 2 data centers that house more than 800 servers. FatCow data centers feature Petabytes storage, N+1 power, and 24/7 security. Their data center is protected with 24/7 security.

Plans and Pricing

Hostgator lets webmasters choose from 3 types of web hosting plans. Hostgator’s cheapest plan, Hatchling plan, starts at $5.56 per month. Their most popular plan is the Baby Plan that features unlimited domain, bandwidth, FTP accounts and email accounts. Hostgator hosting plan supports various types of programming languages including CGI, PHP 5, Ruby on Rails, Perl, SSH, Cron Job, Python and SSL.

Unlike Hostgator, FatCow only offer one web hosting plan. FatCow unlimited hosting plan is not available in monthly installment plan. Their hosting plan costs $49 per year, which is significantly cheaper compared to Hostgator. In FatCow shared hosting plan, there is an application installation wizard that allows you to add a variety of scripts onto your site such as photo gallery, blogs and etc.

The hosting plan also allow you to integrate shopping tools onto your site such as shopping carts, catalogs, and Paypal. FatCow shared hosting plan supports CGI, PHP, Python, Perl, and Ruby. One thing that FatCow do not support is SSH.

Control Panel

Every Hostgator’s shared hosting plan includes the cPanel control panel, which allows you to easily manage all aspects of your site. Cpanel has an app called Fantastico that lets you install 75 open source scripts in just a single click.

FatCow offers a customizable control panel that includes all the basic features for you to manage the site. The control panel is equipped with an application installation wizard that let you easily add different types of applications.

Bonuses

Hostgator offers a free Weebly SiteBuilder and a variety of website building tools for webmasters. The sitebuilder comes with about 4,500 ready website templates that you can use for free. Hostgator offers $100 Google Adwords and $100 Yahoo/Bing credits for every web hosting plan.

Hostgator can help you to transfer your site, and MySQL database for free of charge. Both Hostgator and FatCow offers free server backups with Hostgator offering weekly server backups and FatCow providing daily server backups.

FatCow also includes a free point and click site builder that let you create a professional website without any skill in programming. Just like the Weebly sitebuilder, there are many free dynamic templates you can use. When you sign up with Fat Cow, you get free marketing credits including $100 Google Adwords bonus, and $100 Yahoo/Bing search marketing credits, Yellow Pages listing and HubSpot’s website grader.

Customer Support

Both Hostgator and FatCow offer 24/7 customer support services through telephone, email and live chat. Hostgator also let customers contact them through support tickets from the billing portal but you could also submit a ticket about your query through the create ticket form on the contact us page.

Both Hostgator and FatCow provide toll free telephone customer support services for US based customers as well as international customers.

Hostgator’s customer support team is faster and more responsive compared to FatCow’s customer support team. Hostgator customer support takes an average of 60 seconds to respond while FatCow takes about 90 seconds to respond. Hostgator’s hosting plans are backed by a 45 days money back guarantee whereas FatCow’s hosting plans are covered for up to 30 days. Both Hostgator and FatCow have a knowledgeable center that covers all kinds of topics on how to use the web hosting services. Apart from offering article tutorials, Hostgator also provide a wide range of web hosting video tutorials.

Is Hostgator better than Fatcow?

In conclusion, Hostgator is better than FatCow in that it is more reliable and offers better uptime. FatCow is cheaper but it lacks many free features in its shared hosting plans.

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