Yahoo Business Hosting – Is It Any Good?
Yahoo small business hosting aims to provide the small business owner a host of features for the growth and development of his business, but how good a hosting option is it really? How well does it stack up to other hosting alternatives such as Fatcow? What follows will help to show the differences.
State of the art hosting companies offer a standard features set for web hosting that have become the norm for hosting clients to expect. What follows is a list of those features.
Typical and Standard Hosting Features
- Uptime Guarantee – A minimum 99.90% uptime server guarantee is offer in the industry. This ensures that a webmaster could be reasonably certain that his business website will be accessible to customers, and without that he could possibly lose revenue.
- Control Panel – cPanel –Not only is a control panel expected, but the award winning cPanel is much sought after for the management of complex website tasks. Also included in cPanel are installer scripts with an updated file manager, and Fantastico script.
- Set-Up Fee – A set- up fee is no longer a given in the world of webhosting, and is not charged by the most competitive hosts on the market today.
- .htaccess file – The presence of an .htaccess file is a vitally important property for many webmasters who use WordPress and it is regularly available as a standard with most hosting companies.
- Pricing – The standard pricing for hosting run about $4.00 to $10.00 per month with most hosting companies that also offer a wide range of services and features.
- Unlimited Disk Space – This is pretty much a standard with most hosting companies and is important for future growth of a small business.
- Unlimited Bandwidth – As a business grows it is good to know that the host provides adequate bandwidth to accommodate the growth in traffic to the site as well as any unexpected surges in traffic flow.
Where Yahoo Small Business Hosting Goes Wrong
- Control Panel and Old Software – The award winning cPanel is not available for use here, and the control panel software that is in use dates back to 1998. This host does not provide updated database software such as MySQL 5.5, they are only running the outdated MySQL 4.1, first released in 2004, which is no longer supported by the manufacturer. Also, only the very basic WordPress plugins are available.
- Set-Up Fee – A set-up fee is charged if the subscription is not entered on a special campaign.
- Pricing – The service is quite pricey at about $10 based on a subscription paid annually, and about $13 a month paid monthly.
- No .htaccess file – This host blocks access to this file, and this prevent a webmaster from running WordPress with a SEO friendly correct permalink structure for its page links, and instead, a longer structure, a search engine unfriendly structure, for links are the only options.
- This also prevents a webmaster from using 301 redirects as easily, and the creation of sub-domains becomes a little more complicated.
These are critical shortcomings in the hosting features of Yahoo small business, and they are severe enough for anyone considering this host to look elsewhere for the essential hosting needs of their business.
When all is said and done, Yahoo small business hosting does not provide many critical hosting features that are much sought after by webmasters today, and you would be much better off looking at the other alternatives. The missing critical features include access to .htaccess file, updated control panel, databases and other software, and no hosting set up fees.
If you are looking for hosting alternatives that would give you features that are competitive in the industry, browse our webpages here for excellent reviews on fatcow web hosting.
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