Top Reasons to not use Yahoo! Hosting
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I try not to write such posts, but the frustrations expressed by my clients who hosts on Yahoo! Small Business compels me to point out the obvious shortcomings of a popular host. This non-exhaustive list is in no particular order, it’s just the top 4 reasons why I would not recommend or host any on my sites on Yahoo!
One-Click-Install of Outdated Software
A client recently used the one click install feature to add WordPress to her site, within days it was hacked and she lost everything she had moved from another CMS (luckily she still had her backups). The problem was the defunct version of WordPress that Yahoo! installed; WP version 2.0.2, which beats Al Gore’s hacked sites WordPress version. Yahoo! claims to be partners with WordPress.org and provide search capabilities for the official WordPress sites, yet the version they install on thousands of user sites is full of holes prone to malicious attacks and hijacks.
Forces to use Yahoo! Mail, no PHPMail
This is somewhat funny and restrictive setup that Yahoo! Hosting has in place to screw users from using phpMail functions. The most common addon on any new WordPress site is the contact form, yet Yahoo! wont allow you to use one. The only situation when it would work is if the from email ID entered in the Contact Form is from the same domain as the site you are on. For example, if you are hosting the domain example.com on Yahoo! Hosting, the only people who can use the contact form are those with emails like someone@example.com, essentially email ID’s set with the same domain! Does that even make sense? Their reason is, if you had access to send emails to and from your site, you might use the privilege to spam someone else. Privilege to Spam? Yahoo! assume that its subscribers are spammers and treat them like one irrespective of if you really are one or not. While there are ways around this issue, it is not worth the time and effort.
Restrictive Controls and no .htaccess Access
Although this feature is mostly used by advanced users, they don’t let users have access to their own .htaccess files. What this could mean is, you are not allowed to set up redirects, and if you do manage to set one up from within the WP install, Yahoo! will delete the file and if you are the ‘unlucky types’, it might even kick you out of the system completely without the opportunity to restore or reverse the .htaccess edits. Lame.
Customer Support
I ended up calling Yahoo! on behalf of my client and was on hold for a good 50+ minutes just to hear the guy on the other end tell me he will “get the engineers to look at the issue the next morning” and that “the issue will be resolved in 3 to 5 days“. I replied (in astonishment) “3 to 5 days?” and he replied very calmly, “that’s less than a week” (almost as if service in “less than a week” should make me feel special!). Obviously Yahoo! Hosting thinks your site is not important and can be down 5 days, after all, why bother rushing their engineer to look into petty matters when they could be spending it on keeping up the number 1 site in the world.
Need more?
I’ll let the readers add the rest using the comment form below.
December 4th, 2007 at 4:19 am
That is soo rite! I ended my hosting with Yahoo last year because it wasn’t flexible. Even the domain registration is quite complicated, and charging another $$ for the security hidden whois.
December 10th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
I have had similar problems with GoDaddy or similar type hosting options.
It is hard to explain to newbies why they need cpanel type access. Most of them just go for the price and find out later what their decision cost them.
Remember: you want Fantastico, SQL database, .htaccess, PERL, awstats, etc. You may not know what this means, but you will be glad you have them later.
December 10th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
@ Linda the Website Design Tutor
I don’t even think it is the price, Yahoo! hosting is no way less expensive, it familiarity- people buy hosting from Yahoo or GoDaddy because they are familiar with their names and think just because they can search the internet well or register your domain they should be able to do a good job of hosting too!
December 11th, 2007 at 9:25 am
“the issue will be resolved in 3 to 5 days” - now this is ridiculous. You know, it’s funny how all the big names offer hosting services that are simply not that good. I wander what would be if at least one of them was offering a rock solid hosting. Probably they would kill all the competition. However, something else applies, I guess. When you are such a big name, it’s so easy to grow too fast. This means that you have to rapidly hire personnel that is not prepared well to handle such a load.
It’s far better to use a smaller company which has web hosting as their primary business and get response to all your tickets in 10-15 minutes, not days.
December 11th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
@ Elias the Linux Hosting Guy
Not sure if small is the way to go either, what if the company folds and leaves with your unsaved data(base)?