Yahoo! Small Business is a part of Yahoo! Inc. that was launched in 1995. It is a digital media company with global presence and has always been on fortune 500 list. But our experience with Yahoo! Small Business has not been a pleasant one. Have a look at the detailed review herein.
Editor’s Review
Website: smallbusiness.yahoo.com
Established: 1995
Services: Web hosting, domain registration, ecommerce, marketing and advertising, business mail
Price, hosting packages and plans: Yahoo small business has three hosting plans; namely, Basic, Advanced & Premier.
Basic plan costs $2.50/month for the first 3 months then $4.99/month; Advanced costs $5.99/month for the first 3 months then $7.99/month; Premier Plan costs $8.99/month for the first 3 months then $11.99/month.
Although the Basic plan is quite cheap, their unlimited plan (premier plan) is a bit expensive compared to competition.
Control Panel: Yahoo has its own control panel. The control panel is much faster and reliable than other hosting companies. Log-in process is much easier. You can access all the services through one account.
Features: There is no option for a dedicated ip, but other than that their hosting packages are feature rich.
| Plans | Basic | Advanced | Premier |
| Disk Space | 100 GB | 500 GB | Unlimited |
| Data Transfer | 1000 GB/mo | 5000 GB/mo | Unlimited |
| Site Pages | 10 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Domains | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Email addresses | 250 | 500 | 1000 |
| Unlimited Databases | No | Yes | Yes |
Other features include:
- Monitoring site traffic, search engine rankings and keywords and other factors leading to visitors on your website
- A step-by-step Web site design
- Unlimited data transfer
- Uptime of at least 99.99 percent
- Support for 3rd party site development tools
- Support for Adobe Flash, Macromedia Shockwave
- Easy-to-add support for maps, driving directions, photo and video galleries
- Easy inter-operation with Yahoo! Web Analytics and Google Analytics
- Automatic site submission to Ask.com, Bing, Google and Yahoo!
- Integrated WordPress blogging tools
- Toll-free telephone support 24/7
- $75 MicrosoftTM Advertising adCenter credit
Customer Support: We grade yahoo customer support as a big fat ‘F’. We did not find the customer support of yahoo to be easily accessible. Our first customer support phone call was answered within 25 minutes, which is quite a long wait on any scale. After 15 days of actively using our hosting account, our website spontaneously went offline. Upon calling the customer support who answered our call in 20 minutes we were told that our account was deleted. So we asked for the reason and then we were put on 45 minutes wait and was never told the reason & by the way our website was a 10 page web hosting benchmark website uploaded only to measure the speed of yahoo’s servers.
Speed: We did try to get a proper benchmark of Yahoo Small Business but our website was taken down and hosting account cancelled prematurely. So we put their official website to the test, and by the way Yahoo Small Business website is hosted on their fastest dedicated lightening fast server. But unfortunately according to pingdom tools their website is faster than 61% of all websites. And btw around 98% of all websites are hosted on shared web hosts. This speed is quite slow even for the low end shared hosts. Below are pingdom tool’s speed result for their own website:
Yahoo small business’s historic speed statistics shows that their speed is consistently same most of the time.
Reliability: Yahoo! Small Business is owned by Yahoo! Inc, probably one of the world’s most well known Information Technology company. Although the name Yahoo! should mean great reliability but according to montools their uptime is 95% which is 4.9% less than what they guarantee:
| Today | Yesterday | This Week | Last Week | This Month | Last Month | This Year | Last Year | |
| Uptime % | 100% | 100% | 100% | 98% | 98% | 99% | 95% | 95% |
| Downtime % | 0% | 0% | 0% | 2% | 2% | 1% | 5% | 5% |
| Downtime | - | - | - | 3 | 8 | 6 | 11 | 9 |
| #Checks | 3 | 5 | 3 | 38 | 129 | 180 | 1218 | 2656 |
Pros:
- Easy-to-use tools and options for basic Web site construction and appearance,
- Norton SecureSeal offered
- Norton Antivirus available
Cons:
- No dedicated ip option
- Below average speed
- Bad customer support
- Even worse reliability statistics
- No free Domain registration included in hosting plans
Conclusion – Should you but it?
Which Hosting would never recommend Yahoo! Small Business to companies or even individuals due to their poor customer support, reliability and speed. It should only be tried for experimental purposes only. If you are looking for fast shared hosting take a look at our iPage review or for dedicated server read our Hostgator review.
Head Office:
Sunnyvale, CA 94089,
United States of America
Tel : 1 (408) 349-1572 (Customer Care)
Yahoo Tech help line : +1 (866) 492-4664
Absolutely third class. Stay away from yahoo. Don’t go for their brand, there are many hosts better then them. Amazon offers better service and more features. Or go for companies like Arvixe.
I would NEVER host with Yahoo, it is simply horrible and they are stuck in the past!
I would much rather go with something like NodeWest or CloudBeast Webhosting for small business sites.