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Yahoo! Small Business Review: Web Hosting Review |
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| Best choice for beginners serious about web hosting; great interface and support; 25%-off discount | |
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[Editor's Note: Yahoo! is offering NextAdvisor visitors 25% off their web hosting for the first twelve months. There's no coupon code necessary, just follow any of the links to Yahoo! Small Business from NextAdvisor.com. They are also offering 35% off the first three months of their Merchant Solutions program and waiving the $50 sign-up fee; just follow the links in our review.]
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. At $7.46 per month for the first twelve months, Yahoo! Small Business is a little pricier than some, but a good 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. 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. 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. Yahoo! demonstrated the advantages of its large worldwide network with better-than-average scores for uptime, response time, and download speeds. Its uptime wasn't perfect, but at 99.97% (or just 39 minutes over three months) it was better than the 99.88% average. Its response time was a speedy .394 seconds (faster than the average of .500 seconds). The average download time of our 77MB test movie was just over a minute, and nearly 50 seconds faster than the average. Support is provided by email and via a telephone call-back system. We received the call almost as soon as we requested it, and received some of the best customer service we encountered during our tests. Yahoo! has one more important caveat: the refund policy. In common with most web hosts they offer a 30-day money back guarantee. After 30 days, however, there's no refund. If you cancel within thirty days they charge you a low fee of $7.00 for the domain. 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. In short, Yahoo!'s Small Business web hosting is excellent for those who want easy, online site, blog, and shopping cart creation, but don't mind shelling out the extra bucks. It sets the standard for usability, particularly for beginners and their solid performance stats really complete this web hosting package. |
| Cheapest Plan: | $7.46/mo for the 1st year (after 25% discount) |
| 1 Year Plan: | $89.55/yr; $7.46/mo |
| $ Back Guarantee: | 30-day full refund, no prorated refund after; $7 domain charge |
| Domain: | Free for life |
| Support: | Email, Phone |
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