FatCow Reviewed – Taking a Tour Inside FatCow’s Control Panel

Yesterday I’ve just signed up with FatCow, a Cheap Web Hosting provider. At first, I thought the company’s name was kind of… ridiculous. It didn’t sound like a serious web host, at least not serious enough for a small business website.

The sign up process went smoothly and I used Paypal to make the payment. I always prefer using Paypal rather than giving away my credit card number all over the Net. I paid $66 for a full year which comes down to $5.50 per month. I didn’t register my domain name with them though, I think that $20 is too expensive for domain registration. I always recommend using a separate registrar for your domains anyway.

Within five (5) minutes, I got a confirmation email from FatCow with all the necessary information to log into my control panel. The only information missing was the nameservers to use so I contacted FatCow’s support. Noel Keller from their support team answered me promptly and gave me true professional support.

Being now ready to setup my website, I went over their Plesk control panel. I gotta say the interface looks great and is very intuitive. Have a look for yourself :

Some of the great features of their control panel include :

• SiteDelux : The perfect site builder for your personnal website. Although it would work for a small business website, I wouldn’t recommend it though. It’s very easy to use and it has some nice templates. Your website will be online within a few minutes.
• WebSite Creator : This free website builder is even better than SiteDelux. It allows you to create more complex websites and it has more better looking templates. It is as easy to use as SiteDelux. A great tool for starters.
• ShopSite : This is a great shopping cart. With ShopSite, you’ll create your own online store without any technical knowledge of web hosting or development. What’s even better is that FatCow offers PowerPay. It’s a secure payment gateway that will allow your visitors to make payment from the items they’ve bought on your ShopSite store.
• InstallCentral : Everyone knows installing web applications like blogs and forums isn’t always easy. But with FatCow’s InstallCentral, you can achieve this without little to no technical knowledge. There tens of free applications ready to be installed like Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, b2evolution, Coppermine Photo Galler, phpBB forum, osCommerce and MediaWiki. A total must to put your website online easily.

Other than all the nice features FatCow gives you, you will also get some great advertising vouchers for Google AdWords ($50) and Yahoo! Search Marketing ($25). Because to be honest, PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Marketing has its learning curve, so you won’t waste your own money on testing and learning this stuff.

As far as customer support goes, FatCow can be reached 24×7 by phone (toll free number), email and live chat. This is great, cause I hate it when I have to wait until the next day to get support.

All in all, my first impression of FatCow is very good and I’ll see how it goes with time.

Links

• FatCow Review
• FatCow Coupons
• FatCow Website
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