http://www.bluehost.com and http://www.fatcow.com
Plans & Features
As you narrow down your choices of which web hosting provider to go with, it usually just boils down to which one will give you the best value for your money. Here, we will take a look at how BlueHost measures up against FatCow in terms of the plans, features, reliability and customer support that they offer.
First, here’s a look at some background information about the two companies. BlueHost has been in the business since 1996 and they are considered to be one of the top-ranking web hosting providers today. FatCow, on the other hand, was ‘born’ a couple of years after BlueHost – the company was founded in 1998 and they currently host more than 30,000 customers.
So how does one measure up against the other when it comes to the plans and features included in the web hosting packages that they have? Here’s a quick comparison:
- BlueHost basic plan, $6.95/month
Includes: Hosting of unlimited domains, hosting space & file transfer
: 2,500 POP/Imap e-mail accounts
: Free domain forever, free site builder
- The Original FatCow plan, $5.50/month ($66/year)
Includes: Unlimited domains, disk space, bandwidth and POP mailboxes
: Shopping carts, secure SSL server & a host of other features
Although FatCow offers a lower monthly fee, price should not really be your primary consideration when choosing which web hosting provider to go with. When it comes to the detailed list of feature set, BlueHost has the edge because they have CGI and databases included, free website plug-in scripts, e-commerce, multimedia and world-class technology features.
Reliability
The best way to measure the reliability of a web hosting company is by determining their uptime guarantee and the type of datacenter that they have.
Both FatCow and BlueHost offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee. This is a perfectly reasonable percentage which is pretty much the standard in the industry – and the reason why it’s short of a hundred percent is to make way for a variety of issues like traffic to other sites, hardware or hard drive failure, and file corruption.
Next, let’s rate the quality of data center used by each individual company. For FatCow, their hosting platform is made up of dual routers for redundancy, NetApp storage clusters to ensure reliability, a new gigabit network connection for better performance and a Cisco PIX firewall for tighter security.
On the other hand, BlueHost employs Opteron servers, a quad-processor server which is extremely reliable and fast. With the OC-48 connection that they have, a newly introduced bandwidth pipe and frequently updated hosting infrastructure, there’s no doubt that BlueHost is one of the most reliable web hosting providers that you will ever come across.
So how does one measure up against the other in terms of reliability? Since both BlueHost and FatCow employs high-quality datacenters and both have 99.9% reliability, it’s a tossup between the two in this regard.
Support
Lastly, let us look at the quality of customer support offered by FatCow and BlueHost.
With BlueHost, 24/7 customer support over the phone is available, as well as live chat and e-mail. In case you have basic questions about the service, a Knowledge Base and a ticketing system is accessible through the website.
The version that FatCow has for the Knowledge Base of BlueHost is their FatCow Help Desk. E-mail, live chat and telephone support are also available.
When it comes to the user feedback of the quality of FatCow’s customer support, a significant percentage is on the negative side – from the response time of their customer support department to the availability of the live chat support.
This is where the advantage of BlueHost as a web hosting company can be seen. Part of the reliability factor when looking for a web hosting provider is whether they can provide you with the technical assistance that you need through all available channels. Without proper, good-quality support, you might as well not have a web hosting provider.
As far as the quality of support goes, BlueHost is the clear winner.
Visit the BlueHost Website (http://www.bluehost.com)
