Yahoo business hosting services is an excellent choice in starter hosting for those now installing a small business website, are unfamiliar with the processes involved, and who do not have much of a technical background. What follows will show the pros and the cons of the services offered.
This hosting service started in 2002, at a time when Yahoo was very popular on the Internet largely because of its search engine division. Yahoo grew quickly to become a large hosting company and was attracting clients new to web hosting with its more simplified and weaker feature offerings, and hosting plans.
Pros of Yahoo Hosting Services
- Free domain name
- Unlimited disk space
- Unlimited monthly data transfer or bandwidth
- Web tools and templates are flexible and easy to use. Fast and easy customization of Yahoo’s free professional designs. Guided step-by-step tutorials are provided for the creation of websites.
- Simplified control panel to manage website tasks
- Unlimited (1,000) email addresses
- Marketing credits for online advertising
- Responsive 24/7/365 technical support that is reachable by phone, email and chat sessions
- 99.9% server uptime guarantee
- Site backups
- Shared SSL certificate are available as well as encryption to protect personal data of customers
- 30- day satisfaction guarantee or your hosting money back
- Website analytics for tracking visitor patterns get data on referring sites and use statistics to modify marketing efforts. You can get data on the keywords and search engines that are driving traffic to your site, and you can monitor your website ranking in the search engines.
Cons of Yahoo Business Hosting Services
- No cPanel – Yahoo has created its own propriety control panel. It is a far cry from the state of the art and award winning control panel known as cpanel, which is widely sought and used by many webmasters to perform complex administrative website tasks. Yahoo’s propriety control panel does not have the many special features that are found in cpanel, but it is easily managed by novices to web hosting – Yahoo’s intended target clients.
- Old software – The software within the control panel is not updated with current versions. For example, at this time, Yahoo is still running MySQL 4.1 that was first released in 2004 (and no longer supported by the manufacturer), instead of the latest version MySQL 5.5. Although periodic updates to the WordPress system are made, it may not be done promptly enough, and you may need to update it from the WordPress site yourself.
- Set-Up Fee – A set-up fee is charged when first signing up for hosting services unless you are able to join on a special discounted campaign – when the set up fees will be waived. Set-up fees are by and large unheard of in the standard hosting plans available these days.
- Higher Fees – The lowest priced hosting fees, discounted 50% for the first 3 months, is $9.99, which compared to the fees of other hosting companies, is rather pricey. This service attracts clients who are new to web hosting and it is quite possible that they are not aware that they are paying a far higher price than they would at the traditional hosting company.
- Shopping Cart – For individuals and small businesses, Yahoo provides an adequate shopping cart builder that is based on PayPal, but the features are limited and it does not provide the same robust functionality you would find in the Fantastico-based CubeCart. For a larger business with a large catalogue of products, an upgrade to Yahoo’s more expensive ‘Merchant Solutions’ would be necessary.
- .htaccess file Blocked – Access is blocked to this file and that prevents the creation of SEO friendly page links in WordPress. Instead of the correct permalink structure of these links being used, longer less descriptive and SEO unfriendly links will be created.
- Blocking access to the .htaccess files also makes the mapping of sub-domains much more complicated and 301 redirects more difficult.
Yahoo business hosting services provides a good solution for its targeted small business clients who are novices with no technical expertise, and who are looking for a simple but quick solution to their hosting needs. For a more robust and comprehensive set of features in a hosting plan, browse our resources on these web pages for our top picks in reliable web hosts.
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