FatCow Review: Plans, Prices & Specs

What FatCow was

FatCow sold shared hosting to small businesses and individuals, and it sold it with a joke and a single price. Its own about page described the idea plainly: the industry was full of techno babble and confusing pricing schemes, so FatCow pioneered what it called one plan, one price, originally a $99 a year hosting plan with everything included, plus a cut-down MiniMoo plan for people who only needed a domain and an email address. The cow branding was memorable enough that the brand outlived the idea behind it.

FatCow was founded in 1998 and stayed a small-business host for its whole life; it never moved into VPS, dedicated servers or developer tooling in any serious way. Trade coverage places its sale to Endurance International Group in 2005, and from then on it shared infrastructure and, increasingly, a roadmap with Endurance’s other shared hosting brands. Endurance became part of Newfold Digital in 2021.

What happened

The site went dark in late 2024

The last working capture of the FatCow homepage in the Internet Archive is from early October 2024. The very next day’s capture is a redirect, and there has not been a live FatCow marketing page since. There was no shutdown announcement; the storefront simply stopped existing.

The redirect target kept moving

This is the part that confuses people who check the domain twice. In October 2024 fatcow.com forwarded to a FatCow landing page on Bluehost. By mid-2025 it forwarded to the FatCow customer login instead. Checked in September 2026, it forwards to Network Solutions’ landing page for inherited iPage customers. All three destinations belong to Newfold Digital, so the customer base never left the group, but which brand answers the phone has changed more than once.

Where the accounts are now

The current redirect points at Network Solutions, and iPage, FatCow’s closest sibling, was folded into Network Solutions after Newfold announced that move in December 2025. That makes Network Solutions the most likely home for a surviving FatCow account, but because Newfold has pointed the domain at Bluehost in the past, we would not tell anyone to assume it. Check your invoice before you open a support ticket.

If you are still a FatCow customer

• Look at the billing descriptor on your card statement or your most recent invoice. That name, not the old FatCow branding, tells you which support team can actually see your account.
• Sign in through the successor brand’s account manager using your existing credentials, and use its password reset if they are refused.
• Download a full backup now: site files, databases and mailboxes over IMAP. A brand that has been redirected three times in two years is not where you want your only copy to live.
• Check what renews and when. Confirm the renewal price rather than the price you remember paying, and turn auto-renewal on or off deliberately.
• If you are leaving, unlock the domain, get the authorization code and confirm the administrative contact email is one you can read, then move the website and email before the domain.

What to use instead

FatCow’s appeal was a flat, simple price for a small business site, so the replacements worth looking at are the ones that are still honest about the second-year price rather than the ones with the lowest headline number. Note that Bluehost and HostGator, which often appear in FatCow comparison lists, belong to Newfold Digital, the same group FatCow ended up in, so they are a move within the family rather than away from it.

Why this page exists

We keep reviews of retired hosting brands online because people still search for them, still link to them and still have accounts, invoices or domains tied to them. A dead page or a silent redirect to a sales funnel does not answer the question those readers actually have, which is what happened and what to do next. This page is a status record, not a recommendation: we have not tested FatCow and we cannot, because there is nothing left to buy. Everything above is based on what the brand’s own domain does today, what the Internet Archive captured while the site was still live, and what the successor company publishes for the customers it inherited. If the situation changes we will update the page rather than delete it.