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Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting Review

April 29, 2008 by marketingeffects_upx1cx 3 Comments

If you’re looking for a good web host for your website and you’re considering Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting, I’ve got some advice for you – don’t do it!

I’ve had my own website since 2002 and I have to say that this has been my most disappointing hosting experience in that time.

Here are my top 5 reasons to avoid Yahoo Web Hosting.

1) Overpriced

Let’s start at the beginning for why I didn’t enjoy their service. First, I felt it was overpriced. There are a lot better deals out there for faster web hosts at better prices. Yahoo can get away with charging more because of their name, but really you’re not getting anything but that name when you pay extra for it.

2) Poor Customer Support

A few weeks ago I had a question that I needed an answer to quickly. With other web hosts I’ve done business with, I typically get a response in about an hour – for the web hosts that weren’t great, I’d get a response within 24hrs. How long do you think it took Yahoo to reply to my email? Well, I’m sitting at 6 weeks and counting – they never bothered to reply despite saying they replied within 1 business day.

Then today I called them up because I was having an issue and didn’t want to wait indefinitely for a support response and was told they didn’t allow me to do what I needed to do on my website (see reason #3) so I told the guy I needed a refund on my hosting – he transferred me to billing because he couldn’t do it. After an hour of waiting, I decided I wasn’t going to waste anymore of my valuable time waiting around for Yahoo. Web hosting customers are pretty valuable to a company yet Yahoo didn’t feel the need to answer my phone call to talk to them within 60 minutes – that’s just unacceptable.

So I hung up, and canceled online and told them about the ill will they’ve earned from me.

3) No Htaccess

If you’ve never worked on websites yourself, them you may have no idea what this is or why it’s important, but to me it’s a huge deal that I be able to add a custom .htaccess file to my sites. Yahoo in its infinite wisdom simply doesn’t allow this. I’ve never had this happen with any other host I’ve ever worked with… ever! This was the reason why I called up Yahoo Customer Service this morning and why I decided to cancel – I’m not going to pay for overpriced hosting when I can get a better deal with someone who will actually allow me to customize my site like a “real” web hosting provider would.

4) Not Easy To Usefurniture Elhovo

You would think that since it’s more expensive than most hosting, it must be easy to use to make up for it. Nope. They do have a built in online site builder but no serious website owner would be proud of what that thing can build. Then there’s their Yahoo Site Builder – that thing is just a pain to work with and guess what – I wasn’t able to get it to work properly.

I hired a professional to design a content management system to put on the site and he found working with their Yahoo system a complete nightmare… and he’s a professional – I can only imagine how frustrated novices must get.

I prepaid for 3 months of service in advance. I only used one – you’d think that’d I’d get a refund for the two months I didn’t use because that just makes sense, right? You shouldn’t have to pay for what you didn’t use. Nope – Yahoo won’t refund any money you’ve paid them – it’s buried deep within their convoluted terms of service agreement. To be honest, this just astounded me. I can’t think of any other web host that would be in business with practices like these but since Yahoo gets so much traffic and has their name to rely on, they can get by with offering really crappy service and people put up with it because they don’t know what else to do.

Alternatives To Yahoo Web Hosting

So if you’re looking for alternatives, here are two that I’ve personally used and can recommend to you.

Hostgator.com – I’ve been a customer with Hostgator for years. Their customer support is superb. I don’t think I’ve ever waited more than an hour for an email response from them and they offer toll free phone support too (and trust me, you won’t be waiting an hour to talk to them on the phone). Their hosting prices start out at $4.95/month.

Liquidweb.com – My personal favorite web host. Honestly, I’ve only ever purchased dedicated servers from this company, but I have to tell you their service is great, their servers are reliable, and their prices for managed dedicated hosting are great. And although it is rare for me to have to contact customer support, I get directed to a live person almost immediately after I call them (I’ve never waited more than a minute to talk to a person), and their email response is always extremely fast. If you’re new to web hosting, you won’t need Liquidweb right away, but when your website is big enough to justify going with them, I’d recommend looking them up.

So if you’re looking for web hosting, I hope you found this post helpful. I didn’t mean to go on such a long tirade but I really hate getting treated like crap by companies and wanted to let you know about my bad experience with Yahoo so you can avoid it.

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Comments

  1. Gratis Weblog says

    February 18, 2009 at 3:44 am

    Thanks for this info as i was always thinking to get a website builded once from so called small business of Yahoo but you struck with the article at the right time. Yes they shows their small business with templates of recent made websites by them.

    I have heard about hostgator most of the times and as per saying they would might have the service that you all say.

    Anyways you saved me on time

    Reply
  2. BWK says

    April 19, 2009 at 3:03 am

    I am a professional developer/designer who inherited an account already signed up with Yahoo. It has been a nightmare. My client hired me because she doesn’t understand web development, yet would like to keep her private account information to herself and I have FTP privileges. There is some kind of cache in the file manager that doesn’t show on FTP. I cannot get rid of or overwrite some of the old files which show up in Google searches and display. If you type in the URL everything works great and is directed to the proper page, but, for the life of me, I cannot find other files that still display under url/home. I have deleted and reuploaded to no avail.

    She doesn’t know what to ask and I can’t find any technical support. My FTP username and password do not get me in to anything. There is no technical support that I can find. They should take lessons on customer support from GoDaddy!

    This is absolutely ridiculous! I have over 20 sites and this is the only one that I cannot find or have full access to files that display. I am recommending that she change servers.

    Thanks for letting me rant on a Saturday night with a Monday deadline that I see no way to meet.

    Thank

    Reply
  3. vikash says

    July 18, 2010 at 2:16 pm

    i hate yahoo small business hosting so much that if i would get a chance i would break their servers. These are the major problem you might get from yahoo:
    low php vesion:
    Yahoo hosting is the only hosting that i have found that still uses php 4.11 which stops you from installing latest script.
    You will be unable to run wordpress blog [ due to memory limit], wallpaper site or anything related to images[ due to low version of image magic and GD library] and many more problem.

    If you still want to use it get ready to slap yourself with your decision.

    Reply

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