I have always been skeptical about huge companies launching hosting services. But seeing so many requests for information on Yahoo! Web Hosting (review)in my website’s statistics, I thought I’d give it a try.
I mean Yahoo! is a huge company (I know, I know, their search engine’s popularity is nowhere near as Google’s…) and they might have what it takes to put up a great hosting service. I mean they’ve got the servers, they’ve got the network so why not?
So that said I decided to sign up for a Yahoo! Web Hosting and give it a try…
Yahoo! just can’t compete with hosting businesses who have developped a strong expertise in this field.
Sorry to say this but it’s the thruth.
Singing Up With Yahoo! Web Hosting
The signup process went smoothly and was rather quick. I used Paypal and paid for 3 months in advance. I used a domain name registered somewhere else. Within about 20 minutes my website was setup and active.
I’ve received a bunch of emails from Yahoo! with mostly useless information. Since I used a domain registered with another provider, I thought they’d send me the nameservers I’d have to use but no. I had to find this in their online knowledge base. Of course I could’ve called them and asked for support but with over 13 years of experience in web hosting I thought I’d be able to do this all by myself…
So a couple of minutes later I was able to find their nameservers (yns1.yahoo.com and yns2.yahoo.com) and make the appropriate changes to my domain name.
Yahoo! Hosting Control Panel
I decided to install Wordpress manually to try out their hosting service a little so I headed for their control panel. So where the heck is their control panel? Oh yes it’s over at http://webhosting.yahoo.com… And you gotta click on the “Small Business” button at the top… Phew I finally found.
So trying to get into Yahoo! Web Hosting’s control panel, I am taken to a wizard that tries to setup everything for me. After looking around I finally got passed this damn wizard and found the main control panel.
Yahoo! Web Hosting’s control panel got me all nostalgic: it reminded me of the web management interfaces made in the late 90’s. No icons, just plain text menus with blue links divided into a bunch of navigation tabs. Talk about intuitivity… (click on screen to enlarge)
So I finally made it through the MySQL management area where I got even more confused. I swear I don’t make this up: it took me over an hour to setup a new MySQL database!
So once I finally created the database and understood that you can’t create more than one MySQL user account, I finally got to installing Wordpress. Now while Yahoo! web servers are fast when it comes to downloading, uploading is another thing: it took me over 6 minutes to upload Wordpress to my account!
From there I followed the usual Wordpress installation and all went well.
I then took a look at what the control panel has to offer. If it were easy to use, I would have gone through all the functionnalities quickly because they don’t have a lot to offer believe me. Besides 5 or 6 scripts that can be installed automatically, you’re all by yourself if you’re a fan of great script installers like Fantastico Deluxe.
I tried Yahoo’s site builder too. It is fairly easy to use and it might be enough for the average user. They’ve got some nice templates but I thought they all looked “Web 1.0″ a lot.
Yahoo! Hosting: The Verdict
Now I could go on and on as to why I’d never host a professional website with Yahoo! Web Hosting (or even a personnal website for that matter) but I think you get the point: Yahoo’s hosting service is just not up to par. If it weren’t for a strong architecture of clustered web servers, I would’ve gave them a 1 out 5.
I wonder how they’ve got PC Magazine to name them the web host of the year…
Yahoo! Web Hosting Rating: 
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