Introduction

I’d like to share my one-month experience of using FatCow net hosting that is one in all the brands owned by Endurance International Cluster (EIG). And that i’ll give you tips the way to avoid being manipulated as a client and therefore the manner you can leverage you selling efforts as an entrepreneur by revealing you the FatCow lessons I’ve learned.

From this text you’ll perceive:

Why varied high internet hosting review sites promote EIG hosting brands along with FatCow as best net hosts.

How ‘best’ it was on behalf of me, as a FatCow shopper, from the terribly beginning.

What server performance FatCow offers their shoppers.

How companies will allure you, as an innocent customer, and then squeeze cash out of you (with FatCow example) and tips to avoid it (IN ADDITION TO EASY BUT REALLY MIGHTY PSYCHOLOGICAL TRICKS for each patrons and sellers!).

Why it’s a drawback to depar FatCow   even if you want to.

What internet hosting suppliers can do to avoid issuing fully legit refund to you during a money-back guarantee amount and what you should do (my case study with FatCow).

Bonus tips: What you’ll do if your current internet hosting supplier can a unhealthy job (hint: it’s not not forever changing your hosting immediately)

Why EIG hosting brands (including FatCow) are promoted here and there?

In short, there are lots of reasons:

EIG pays a heap of cash for referrals. As an example, one will get $a hundred for bringing one new shared hosting consumer to FatCow.

Many of the foremost promoted hosts belong to EIG. And web marketers simply avoid promoting unknown hosts (as a result of customers like well-recognized brands). Meanwhile, EIG tends to flip into a delicate monopoly by acquiring hosting brands and operating them as if they’re freelance competitors. EIG cuts costs by optimizing their business infrastructure and decreasing the quality of service. Most users merely don’t understand that absolutely different well-known hosting names mean in fact the identical parent company. And when users get awful hosting service they keep moving from one ‘best net host’ that belongs to EIG to a completely different.

Many bloggers promote EIG hosting simply as a results of they haven’t done a wise research and just repeat what others promote.

A ton of newbies fall for manipulatively inflated ratings on faux, paid and affiliate-biased hosting review websites and then, having chosen FatCow, begin to suffer. Now I terribly feel their pain. And i would like to review it thus that you just don’t get into EIG’s misleading selling traps. Ever.

My background story before check-riding FatCow

Concerning a month ago I was offered to jot down a short analysis on FatCow hosting. Thus as a [*fr1] of my analysis I registered an account with it to test its user interface, some options and current server performance.

Currently I truly have collected a month-long knowledge on its performance and i bet you’ll be thrilled once you see it.

Yes, from the very starting you may be in a position to feel that it’s not visiting be a positive review. However be assured, it’s extremely reasonable.

A ton of than a year ago I did a analysis on shared hosting suppliers (which is actual as I update it when necessary). And since then I’ve been clearly avoiding EIG hosting by all suggests that. I simply didn’t want to strive it myself to form certain EIG hosting sucks.

In addition to huge EIG hosting outages and failures that resonated in mass media, there are issues that thousands and thousands of users expertise on a regular basis being EIG shoppers. If you’re curious, simply Google one thing like “what’s wrong with EIG hosting” and fancy reading.

And thus came the time once I had to strive EIG hosting myself. So relish my ride report. Here it’s:

(That’s enough, hide the annoying animation below…)

And now seriously.

FatCow’s vDeck4 rather than cPanel, and it had been a dangerous surprise

FatCow uses vDeck4 as a control panel (you’re not going to know about it till you be part of up, as a result of FatCow doesn’t explicitly put concerning it in its hosting feature list). However the trade commonplace management panel for shared net hosting is cPanel.

For you as a user using vDeck suggests that a lot of troubles if you select moving hosts in due course. With cPanel you have very good potentialities to move a full account flawlessly from one cPanel host to a completely different. You’ll be able to do it even without your participation (hosting workers will do it for you freed from charge normally). But moving from vDeck to cPanel needs manual backing up information , restoring and putting within the new account, which will be a time-consuming pain.

And be prepared that if you migrate from vDeck to cPanel your emails associated together together with your former account can be lost.

FatCow: issues putting in an exceedingly default WordPress website and drag-n-drop net site builder failed to work

It had been ridiculous! I may NOT install a default WordPress site. I tried all potential ways that in that I may notice in their Management panel (one-click installing, then from Straightforward Scripts section, then from menu, then from a their tool called Mojormaketplace). However when I clicked on them, the system either gave me a blank page or a ssl error page in my browser.

When putting in and fitting many dozens of various websites on fully completely different hosting, this time I could not progress any more with FatCow. Finally I had to administer up and call its support.

FatCow’s support said I had to attend for twenty-four-forty eight hours before fitting WordPress.

That was sudden, mildly speaking.

And it absolutely was fully new domain that had been just registered (therefore it didn’t need its DNS to be propagated or no matter).

“Okay”, – I thought, – “let’s wait if you insist”. And set to play a very very little with its website builder Weebly for a whereas.

It allowed me to edit website content, but once I pressed “Publish” button, my website showed a FatCow default “website under development” page. Yes, that was terribly ‘user-friendly’!

If I were a newbie, I’d possibly contact support (the second time for several minutes, haha). However I just didn’t want to pay my time on it because I knew it had been something with home page files on the server.

Therefore I visited File Manager and revealed that Home.html file (or a setting in .htaccess) was causing the problem.

But I might not edit .htaccess in File Manager and did not need to pay my time finding a manner to attempt and do it from FatCow management panel. Therefore I simply deleted Home.html.

By the way, File Manager was crammed with annoying bugs like no folder content refreshing or no file renaming possibility.

Heck, I felt sort of a beta-tester for FatCow hosting!

Alright. I thought it fully was enough for that day and waited for two days as the support steered me before putting in WordPress.

Once forty eight hours passed I still had the identical errors and could not install a poor easy default WordPress net web site.

Which i had no choice however to contact FatCow support once additional.

This time the support said that there are no issues with my account (that wasn’t true, as a results of there have been installation issues indeed).

fatcow troubles installilng wordpress

I felt this method…

As a short-cut to a resolution, the support offered to put in WordPress on behalf of me. I needed to get it done ASAP and merely agreed whereas not arguing.

So it completely was an excessive amount of of downside for putting in place WordPress with FatCow.

A sensible hosting ought to not permit such a unhealthy user expertise happen. You need to expect to be ready to place in WordPress quickly and flawlessly with literally some clicks from cPanel.

FatCow server response time monitoring

Once I got WordPress put in, I added 3 hundred-word article on the front page. That was enough for my easy check internet site.

Then I added my web site to a monitoring system to appear at server response time. (If you don’t recognize what response time is for, it’s a terribly vital issue showing how briskly your web site downloads for users. By the means, real-experience full page download time is even moer than server response time.)

So guess what? FatCow hit range one worst hosting in my list. I got huge, no, HUGE, selection of warning emails from my monitoring system notifying me that my web site was down or did not response.

Before you see one among the worst server performance I’ve ever experienced (which i monitor dozens and dozens of hosting servers), look how a moderately smart server response time (in milliseconds) for shared web-hosting appearance like:

EuroVPS server response time

And currently have a have a study how much grass FatCow gave me to eat (its server response time is tens of times slower!):

fatcow server response time for shared hosting

Day 1. Fairly typical FatCow server response time. Look: the website starts responding solely in seconds, and there are frequent and long downtimes!

The monitoring system shows the location is down if its response time is more than 10 seconds.

if you’re brave enough, study different 20 days of FatCow’s server recorded performance by clicking the link below.

Yes, I’m brave. Show me currently!

Impressed? Thus was I. But do I would like to say that totally all FatCow users get the identical performance for their websites? No, I don’t suppose therefore. Otherwise FatCow wouldn’t last long I guess. So assume about I was unlucky to be hosted on a problematic server. The very first hours of Day 0 (not on the screenshots) my check website was really quite fast, however it didn’t last long…

Anyway, such an awful FatCow server performance isn’t an exception. If you are doing your analysis, you will notice that a ton of people complain about slowdowns. It means that that that FatCow (and EIG normally) don’t manage the servers well, or just overcrowd their servers with websites.

How companies will persuade you into looking for a (sh!tty) product (FatCow example). And what you’ll be able to do with it

One in all the foremost successful tactics to steer individuals into shopping for anything is to charm to emotions and do psychological tricks. The foremost effective manipulations are based on people’s emotions. Let’s see how FatCow persuades folks into looking for its product.

You, as a shopper or a consumer, might learn from the things below a approach to resist such manipulations when looking for a good product. At the identical time you, as a entrepreneur, may learn the approach to use such tactics to speak people into searching for your nice merchandise.

One in every of the most famous manipulation consultants, Robert Cialdini, points out half-dozen key principles of influence (and my comments regarding looking for product):

Reciprocity (Somebody did something for you, and you may feel quite obliged to strive and do one thing, for example purchase a product from them, in return),

Commitment and Consistency (somebody can have additional chances to steer you to try to to the entire issue or get a a lot of pricy product by making you are doing very little steps or build micropayments),

Social Proof (we love to be with the tons, it enable us to feel safe and lighten our burden of responsibility of creating a right alternative when we have a tendency to get one thing),

Authority (we tend to have a tendency to tend to obey authorities or perhaps simply famous folks like celebrities and subconsciously we tend to tend to are a ton of less essential to what they recommend us looking for),

Liking (if you want someone, you’re a ton of attainable to agree to buy what she or he offers you),

Scarcity (you are a lot of in all probability to buy one thing if there is a shortage of it, quite “Hurry up! This supply ends in zero days three hours fourteen minutes and solely 8 copies are left” etc)

Typically, I’m not against of using these principles in business (in fact, considering good ethics and smart merchandise are in place).

However FatCow was an awful hosting service on behalf of me (furthermore for many and several different shoppers). That’s why I am going currently to take FatCow as an example of dangerous manipulation and reveal it here for tutorial functions.