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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; 25% off first 12 mo | ||||||||||||||||
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Yahoo! Small Business web will be perfect for the beginning site owner who doesn't really know what to expect from web hosting. It's the one we recommend for the less tech-savvy among us. For more advanced users, while the sleek, simplified tools make basic tasks very simple, Yahoo!'s web hosting lacks some more complex features.
Pricing With our current discount, you'll get 25% off your first 12 months, making it $2.62 per month for the first 12 months and $3.49 per month after that if you sign up for their five year plan. Plans for shorter terms are available, with a one year plan for $3.74 per month with the 25% discount. 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 first year's domain registration is free, but you will have to pay to renew it after that. The basic plan includes a 10 page website, which will be enough for small personal sites, but users who plan to build larger websites will need to upgrade to the Advanced Plan for $7.99 per month. Basic Features While most web hosts use commercial solutions like 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. 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. 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. However, if you plan on creating a shopping site with a fairly substantial catalogue of goods you'll want to move up to Yahoo!'s more expensive Merchant Solutions. Yahoo! offers an upgrade path to its Merchant Solutions. Upgrades start at $39.95 per month (plus a $50 startup fee and a 1.5% transaction 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. Yahoo!'s Merchant Solutions are powerful enough to host websites for Simplehuman, the Oakland Raiders, Ben and Jerry's, and the Lance Armstrong Foundation. 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. Advanced Features Unlike many of the hosting solutions we've tested, Yahoo! Small Business does not offer shared hosting customers unlimited data transfer or storage space, but their caps (100 GB of storage and 1000 GB/mo of bandwidth) will likely be more than enough for almost every site. Yahoo! only allows users to host one domain with each account, which may be a limitation for advanced users. The service also limits email addresses to 250 per account, and only offers webmail through Yahoo!'s existing system, which may be another restriction for advanced users. Though Yahoo! Small Business hosting allows unlimited MySQL databases, the company does not provide Shell Access (SSH) for advanced administrating, and only supports PHP and Perl if you upgrade to the Advanced or Premier plan: the basic plan does not support any programming languages. All Yahoo! shared hosting accounts use Linux servers. Because of its somewhat limited features, we generally only recommend Yahoo! as a hosting service for beginners and intermediate users, directing advanced webmasters to more fully featured options like HostGator and Hostmonster. Usability This is where Yahoo! really shines. With its custom-built control panel, exceptional step-by-step help and useful popup feature explanations, Yahoo! is extremely easy to use. For advanced users who are already familiar with more standard control panels, it may be a bit of an adjustment to find features in the Yahoo! interface, but beginners will find everything they need clearly explained and arranged at their fingertips. 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: | $2.62/mo for 12 mos, then $3.49/mo |
| Storage/Data Transfer: | 100 GB/1000 GB per month |
| Money-Back Guarantee: | 30 days |
| Domain: | Free for 1 year |
| Support: | Email, Phone |
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Yahoo! Small Business Forum Posts
- Is Yahoo Small Business good for beginners?
Yahoo Small Business (web hosting) is actually our favorite site for beginners. It's the one we recommend for the less tech-savvy among us because it... - Is Yahoo Small Business good for beginners?
I am interested in starting a small web site selling swimwear for women. my customer base is the mature individual. I have an established wholesale... - Can I use my own domain name?
Yahoo! includes free domain registration with this package, but you can also use your own domain, either registered elsewhere or transferred over to... - Can I use my own domain name?
can I use my own domain name or is it one Yahoo supplies - Free hosting for a church?
Any host will support a site built with HTML. Unfortunately, however, none of the hosts we have reviewed offer free hosting for a church.
