A review of Yahoo! Small Business Web Hosting
yahoo! It is the undisputed number one destination on the Internet with more than 379 million monthly users worldwide. If you’re looking for web hosting services for your business, we recommend you consider the fact that Yahoo! It is home to more than 30 million websites and they manage more than 50 terabytes of data. It’s easier than you think to get all the reliability, performance, and search engine popularity advantages that come from being on top of the Internet.
yahoo! Small Business offers three virtual web hosting plans for small businesses. They are: (1) beginner (2) standard and (3) professional. Each plan provides a free domain name with no renewal fees for as long as you host with Yahoo! The starter plan starts at $8.96 per month and includes 5 gigabytes of disk space, 200 gigabytes of monthly transfer, and 200 email addresses. The standard plan starts at $14.96 per month and provides 10 gigabytes of disk space, 400 gigabytes of monthly data transfer, and 500 email accounts. The professional plan starts at $26.96 per month and provides 20 gigabytes of disk space, 500 gigabytes of monthly data transfer, and 1,000 email addresses. yahoo! Small businesses are especially competitive if you’re developing a new business website because they don’t require a long-term contract, but allow you to rent their service on a month-to-month basis.
If you’re new to website building, Yahoo! Small Business provides a free software package called Yahoo! SiteBuilder which was designed to make it easy to create websites. This is software that you download to your Windows operating system. For this review, we downloaded version 2.3.1 along with over 380 templates and over 3,400 images that can be used to develop a multi-page website without the need to know the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) web programming language. The software comes with handy tutorials to help guide you through each development activity. yahoo! Small Business showcases several business quality websites that have been developed using these templates. However, if you prefer to use a professional web development system like Adobe Dreamweaver, you’ll find Yahoo! Small business web hosting fully compatible with cool technologies like Flash and Fireworks.
Virtually unlimited MySQL database support is another reason why Yahoo! Small business services above the rest. With virtually unlimited databases, you can add many advanced features to your website, including: customer databases for use with e-commerce, blogs, interactive message boards, and other database-driven content management applications like phpNuke . yahoo! Small Business provides scripting tools like PHP and Perl that make advanced database programming easy.
yahoo! Small business web hosting accounts come with a $100 bonus from Yahoo! Search Marketing Credit and $50 Google AdWords Credit. Your business website will need these advertising services and this provides a great opportunity to learn valuable skills that you will use again and again.
yahoo! Netcraft monitors performance and free reports are updated every 15 minutes so you can always check back and make sure you’re receiving exceptional service. The reports provide data on four performance parameters: (1) first byte (2) connection (3) DNS, and (4) total. Our review uncovered a small number of user complaints that the speed of web pages transferred from Yahoo! was slow Further investigation revealed performance figures somewhat lower than expected. However, properly designed and optimized pages should perform well within the range of performance expected by most users.
Managing your website on Yahoo! it is very easy thanks to your web hosting control panel. Everything from setting up email accounts, getting monthly website statistics, to website development and maintenance can be easily controlled through a standardized interface. yahoo! allows you to have control over your own DNS so you can modify MX, A and CNAME records. yahoo! It has the best email service on the Internet, providing each mailbox with 2 GB of storage space. yahoo! Spam controls can’t stop all spam, but they do a great job of significantly reducing the volume users have to deal with. yahoo! allows transfer of email messages with huge 20MB attachments.
yahoo! Small Business is an exceptional value and is highly recommended. This review is only an overview of the capabilities provided with Yahoo! Web hosting accounts for small businesses.
