Yahoo Hosting Review

Host Website: http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting

Yahoo doesn’t need any introduction. Besides providing free email accounts and various other services, Yahoo also provides web hosting services. One of it’s key selling points is the fact that Yahoo hosts more than 30 million websites and blogs and manages more than 50 tera bytes of data. Yahoo hosting has been known for reliability and good customer support. Moreover, it has frequently been commended for it’s ease of use too.

Yahoo Hosting plans

Yahoo’s hosting plans are quite straightforward and without any twists. The first thing to note is that there is no requirement for entering into an yearly contract or any contract of that nature.

Yahoo offers 3 hosting plans and the cheapest one comes for $11.95. There is a setup fee that you need to pay (on all the plans). The disk space on Yahoo’s hosting plans is between 5-20 GB and the bandwidth varies from 100GB to 500GB. Emails, website building tools etc are not a problem and are included with the packages. You have all the standard stuff available on all the plans e.g. support for PHP, Perl, MYSQL etc. Besides that, Yahoo provides data security through shared SSL certificates.

One big benefit with Yahoo’s hosting services is in terms of it’s online marketing expertise. Yahoo provides sevices and advise that can help you in building traffic to your website. Some of these marketing services are offered for free whereas others (premium marketing services) are offered on discounted rates to hosting service customers. Some website enhancements e.g. Paypal buttons, guestbooks, bulletin boards, blogging tools etc are also made available on Yahoo hosting plans and the domain name is free as long as you host your website with Yahoo.

Reliability

Yahoo’s reliability statements are hard to belittle - considering their reputation in the online world. 99.9% uptime guarantee is what you get from Yahoo (and this is indeed the best in the industry). Moreover, Yahoo does a frequent backup of your web pages in order to ensure that no changes are lost. Automatic website snapshots are taken on 4 hour basis in order to ensure that the latest changes are recorded. It also uses mechanisms to ensure that your data is safe and that your website loads fast. Yahoo has mulitple data centers that ensure that your site is never ‘down’.

Customer support

Yahoo web hosting services come with 24 hour customer support. You can either use the toll-free customer support number to ring them up or you can use the email route for contacting them. The getting-started guides are accompanied by videos which aim to make things even more clear and pre-empt the need for contacting customer support in many cases.