I’m a big Mac fan and my wife knows it. She knows it so well that she purchased me a years subscription to MacLife magazine and MacWorld for my birthday last year and then renewed again this year for our anniversary. What a gal! She’s pretty much my favorite.

FatCow

In every issue I see Fatcow.com web hosting at an incredible price and offering virtually unlimited file storage and bandwidth. So when it came time for me to create tech4eleven, I knew where I wanted to go for hosting. I think I paid something like $60 for the year. Pretty nice. So I made the decision based on MacLife and Macworld’s reputation for promoting good services, thinking “why would they have something in their mags if they didn’t endorse it?” fore-going the fact that, well, its an ad & this money in their pocket, so who cares about the company right? I also made the decision KNOWING about bluehost (and others) which perhaps have more endorsers. Nonetheless, I was blazing my own trail, seeking something new and “exciting.” (sounds harsh, poor fatcow, but listen in)

Right off the bat, I have some very frustrating issues with Fatcow. The wordpress installation was easy, but I kept getting server error codes, keeping me out of my website and out of the wordpress admin area. At times, I would make a simple change a theme file and it would give me those errors during the save. They were very random and very upsetting. What’s good is that their have an available 24 hr chat (maybe cause they need it), but if you say you have a technical issue and select to chat with someone in support, you don’t. You always get some joe shmoe who ends up submitting the issue to a techy. I think I submitted like 5 tickets with them in the first few weeks, all of which always got a “solution” saying “issue was fixed on our end. please check your end to confirm” then the ticket was closed. But it was never fixed on my end. So the back and forth went. Somewhere down the line, the issues resolved themselves (so it seemed) and it’s been fine since.

Bluehost

Bluehost is also on the top of many “Best Of” web hosting collections and it’s one of the top WordPress.org recommended hosting sites. So I knew that going in. Plus one of my good friends uses it for all of his sites, and he recommended it. But again, I was saving the world by going my own way. So with the immediate issues I had with fatcow, I went a head and used Bluehost for a photography website I am building for my sister in law. Fatcow was the cheaper of the two hosts as Bluehost costed just over $80 for the year. The wordpress setup was a breeze. It’s gotta be one of the slickest, one click WP setups out there. I was amazed. Of course both hosts have built in domain registering, so they score equally there. With bluehost.com, my site was up and running in just a few clicks. It seemed like we signed up, installed WP, created an email account, and got familiar with the layout in just a couple blinks. It was pretty amazing. And no errors, mind you.

Round 1:

Bluehost wins.

(Round 2: Speed and Features – coming soon)