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Yahoo! Small Business Review: Web Hosting |
| Sign up for Yahoo! Small Business | ||||||||||||||||
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| Best choice for beginners serious about web hosting; great interface and support; includes 25% discount | ||||||||||||||||
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[Editors Note: Yahoo! Small Business is offering NextAdvisor visitors a 25% discount the first 3 months of web hosting, bringing the price down from $4.99 to $3.74 per month for a 12-month plan.]
Yahoo! Small Business web hosting is one of the few stand-outs in web hosting, and will be perfect for the beginning site owner who doesn't really know what to expect from web hosting. It's the one to be recommended for the less tech-savvy among us. Pricing The basic web hosting plan is $4.99 per month, though Yahoo! takes 25% off for the first 3 months with our NextAdvisor deal. This makes it a great choice for the beginning web master. Even though domain registration and set-up are free, domain privacy will cost an additional $.99 a month. We recommend domain privacy, particularly for individual users. As with many web hosts, your domain registration is free for as long as you host with them. Features While most web hosts use the ubiquitous cPanel to let users administer their site, Yahoo! has made its own control panel. It's clean and friendly and showcases site statistics in an engaging way. Advanced users will find it lacking in special features, but first-timers will find it easy to deal with. Likewise, using the built-in site construction software is a breeze. Yahoo!'s templates are some of the nicest available and the WYSIWYG editor is very intuitive. What's more, you can easily add widgets that display weather, maps, stock prices, and more. The popular Wordpress blogging platform is easy to install. There's also an alternative downloadable site creation application available for Windows that looks to offer even more flexibility. E-commerce It's somewhat confusing that Yahoo! calls its only web hosting plan Yahoo! Small Business, when, in fact, it's also a fine choice for individuals. However, a shopping site with a fairly substantial catalogue of goods will want to move up to Yahoo!'s more expensive Merchant Solutions. On the other hand, those that want to build a simple PayPal-based store can't go wrong here. It easily has the most intuitive PayPal-based shopping cart builder out there, though the features aren't as robust as those included with the Fantastico-based CubeCart available from many web hosts. By virtue of Yahoo!'s place as one of the big three search engines, there are also advantages for small businesses, particularly those that want placement in Yahoo!'s local search. Yahoo! also offers an upgrade path to its Merchant Solutions. These normally start at $39.95 per month (plus a $50 startup fee and a 1.5% transaction fee), but a current promotion brings the first three months to $25.97 and waives the $50 fee. Users can build a robust ecommerce system designed to sell up to 50,000 products. The plan includes advanced inventory, analytics, and transaction processing tools. Plans starting at $129.95 per month include gift certificate and UPS shipping options (at the time of this writing, the first three months are $84.47, and the $50 fee is waived). Yahoo!'s Merchant Solutions are powerful enough to host websites for Simplehuman, the Oakland Raiders, Ben and Jerry's, and the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Performance Yahoo! demonstrated the advantages of its large worldwide network with better-than-average scores for uptime, response time, and download speeds. See the chart below for details. For uptime, higher percentages are better. For all others, lower numbers indicate better performance. Yahoo! test data:
Sign up for Yahoo! Small Business | Compare to Other Web Hosts |
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| Cheapest Price: | $3.74/mo for 3 mos then $4.99/mo for a 12-month plan |
| Storage/Data Transfer: | 100 GB/1000 GB per month |
| Money-Back Guarantee: | 30 days |
| Domain: | Free for life |
| Support: | Email, Phone |
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