Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting – Worst WordPress Host Ever

In my day to day life, I’m pretty direct. However, when it comes to writing my company blog, I try to be diplomatic. After all, this post is going to live forever.

Still, I have no problem saying the following for all to hear: Yahoo small business web hosting is the worst WordPress hosting option I’ve ever worked with, not to mention the worst web hosting option I’ve worked on.

Why, do you ask, is Yahoo’s small business web hosting so terrible? Here’s a list:

1. Price. Yahoo web hosting is $10 per month if you buy one year in advance, $13 per month if you buy monthly. They offer unlimited storage (at least to new accounts), unlimited bandwidth, unlimited databases, etc., just like many other web hosts. HOWEVER:

• Yahoo charges a setup fee, something that I don’t see anyone else doing
• Hostgator, GoDaddy, BlueHost, etc. all over similar levels of service for $4-$7 per month

While Yahoo does include domain registration in their price (worth about $0.80 per month), it’s 2-3 times as much as any competitor. The only reason I could see paying Yahoo two-three times as much as anyone else is that they do give you a steep discount on a Verisign “Trusted Business” seal – just $4 a month instead of the $20 per month list price…but that’s the only reason, and even that’s a stretch.

2. Old software. The client I’m working with (Kern-Photo.com, a Colorado Wedding Photographer) had to leave Yahoo hosting because Yahoo is running MySQL 4.1 and we needed 5+ to use some fairly basic WordPress plugins (MySQL 4.1 is so old that it isn’t supported).

MySQL 4.1 was first released way back in June 2004. I realize that might not seem like a long time, but in the Internet world 5 years is a long time and 7 years is an eternity. It’s 2011, which means web hosts should be running 5.1 or even 5.5.

It’s like buying a new car in 2011 and finding out that you have to turn a crank on the front end to start it. It’s just unnacceptable.

What’s worse is that Yahoo didn’t offer PHP 5 until just a few months ago (mid 2010 as far as I can tell). This blog post from March 2010 does a nice job of listing off more of Yahoo’s old software – check it out if you’d like a second opinion.

3. No .htaccess files allowed. If you want to run WordPress with the correct permalinks, you’re SOL on Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting because you’re not allowed to have an .htaccess file. Instead of using the best WordPress permalink structure possible – [ /%pageid%/%post-name%/ ], as described here – we’re forced to use a ridiculous /index.php/permalink…/

It’s not very pretty, not very easy to type, and longer than it needs to be…which isn’t good for SEO.

Also, because we can’t use .htaccess, we can’t use 301 redirects nearly as easily. It’s a real bummer if you have lots of old content that needs redirected.

4. No uptime guarantees, no fantastico or similar install scripts, no modern file manager. For $4-7 per month, you can buy an “unlimited” plan from GoDaddy or Hostgator that may or may not be fast and that doesn’t offer an uptime guarantee. Still, that’s one-half to one-third the cost of Yahoo.

For $10 a month, you can buy a decent-sized shared hosting account from A Small Orange that offers a 99.5% uptime guarantee, fast servers that use green power, etc. It’s not unlimited in terms of storage or bandwidth, but it offers excellent business features.

All the other hosts I mentioned offer some sort of script install software like fantastico, and all of the other hosts offer a modern file manager that allows you to zip and unzip files before uploading/downloading.

5. Wacky sub-domain handling. I recall another client who used Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting, and we had a very difficult time mapping a sub-domain to a specific directory. It’s about as complicated as it could possibly be. There were some other problems that mystified me at the time, but I can’t bring them to mind right now. Trust me when I say it was ridiculous.

Bottom Line: Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting offends me. Not only because it lacks some critical features (running an old version of MySQL and blocking .htaccess are unnaceptable problems in my eyes), but because it uses the Yahoo brand name to hoodwink customers into buying what would be considered sub-standard and overpriced hosting.

Perhaps if Yahoo offered an uptime guarantee, upgraded all the control panel software, opened up server access, and got rid of their stupid setup fee, they would be a fair deal. Until then, you couldn’t do much worse than buying WordPress web hosting from Yahoo. Avoid them like the plague.