Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting Review

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.