FatCow vs GoDaddy – Website Hosting Comparison

Web Hosting is a very competitive market and companies are offering a wide range of features that can make it harder to find the right home for your website.

Among these web hosts, two of the most popular are GoDaddy and FatCow. You might have heard about them since a lot of people are using them and both companies have worked hard at promoting themselves, especially GoDaddy, who teamed up with some hot sport celebrities to appear in various commercials.

GoDaddy has become the global leader in the domain registration business. Over the years, they’ve added other products and services such as selling SSL certificates, website hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated hosting. Their wide range of products will definitely suit your needs one way or the other as they’ve got web hosting covered from all angles.

On the other hand, FatCow specializes in shared hosting solutions and offers a one-size-fits-all hosting plan. Although this provider was founded in 1998, just on year after GoDaddy, it seems they’ve gained most of their popularity in the last couple of years.

GoDaddy vs Fatcow – Detailed Comparison

Since FatCow doesn’t provide VPS and Dedicated Hosting products, we’ll focus mainly on shared hosting. Here are the main differences between FatCow and GoDaddy :

Operating System - FatCow’s hosting plan relies on Linux web servers exclusively while GoDaddy offers both Linux and Windows Server platforms. But as long as you don’t make use of ASP or ASP.NET, chances are that Linux will be a better choice for you.

Scripting - Both web hosts offer support for the most popular scripting languages including PHP, Perl, CGI and Ruby on Rails. In addition to these, GoDaddy also offers support for ASP and ASP.NET with their Windows-based packages.

Control Panel - With FatCow, you will be able to manage your hosting account with the use of Plesk, a popular third-party control panel made by Parallels. Plesk is very easy to use and allows you to perform multiple management tasks such as creating email accounts, MySQL databases, managing files, etc. The only issue I see is that FatCow lacks the possibility of scheduling tasks using CRON. On the other hand, GoDaddy have their own custom control panel which offers quite the same possibilities as Plesk. The downside of GoDaddy’s control panel is that its slow and confusing. Creating a MySQL database can easily take up to 15 minutes while this done instantly with Plesk.

Performance & Reliability - Since I am using both web hosts, I can tell you that FatCow is a lot faster than GoDaddy. I had a simple WordPress blog installed on my GoDaddy account and it would timeout every now and then when I would simply submit a post. Managing my MySQL databases using phpMyAdmin on GoDaddy is quite a pain too since it’s horribly slow. I didn’t not encounter performance issues with FatCow though. We’ve been monitoring the response time from both web hosts for quite a while now and you can clearly see that FatCow is faster with an average of 15.72ms compared to GoDaddy’s average response time of 43.81ms. As far as reliability goes, I didn’t see any major downtimes with both web hosts.

Customer Support - I have been quite impressed with GoDaddy’s support compared to many user reviews I’ve read all over the web. The minute you signup with them, they called me back to ensure everything was ok and offered their help. GoDaddy’s support team is quite easy to reach 24 hours a day through either phone or email. While I haven’t encountered some very complex issues, they’ve been providing me with some very good support to this day. I just wish GoDaddy would have a toll free number but they don’t.

The same thing goes with FatCow. They can easily be reached by phone 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, through phone or email. The only advantage is that they have a toll free number.

FatCow vs GoDaddy – Conclusion

Unless you are looking for Windows Web Hosting, I recommend FatCow over GoDaddy for the following reasons :

• They have faster web servers
• Their control panel is much more intuitive
• They’re using 100% renewable energy to power their data centers and offices

But still, I’d recommend you register your domain names with GoDaddy. They’ve got the best prices by far on domain registration. You can register your domain name with GoDaddy and still host it with FatCow.

Links

• FatCow Official Website
• FatCow Review
• FatCow Coupon Codes
• GoDaddy Official Website
• GoDaddy Review
• GoDaddy Coupon Codes