Stay away from Yahoo! web hosting, especially if you are looking to host a blog or will be using Permalinks.

I was turned onto Yahoo’s business hosting offerings through a “featured provider” link on the WordPress site (this has since been removed) and was very impressed with the amount of bandwidth and storage capabilities they offered for a very reasonable price. The “one-click-install” feature also seemed of interest (it usually takes 5-7 minutes to do a new WordPress install manually).

However, while working on a few sites for clients using Yahoo website hosting, these issues came up:

  1. The one-click WordPress install adds a huge banner to the admin area (which is removable, but it’s a complicated procedure which took me about 30minutes to figure out and if done incorrectly will quickly cripple the site)
  2. The one-click install is also incompatible with many WordPress plugins (such as certain contact forms) and makes other features (like JS Lightbox) much more complicated than they would be with any other host.
  3. Permalinks are supported via a plug-in for the one-click install (this works reasonably well, though doesn’t play nice with plugins).
  4. Permalinks are not supported for a manual install (the .htaccess file is blocked, keeping web site owners from implementing many useful features such as 301 redirects (very useful for SEO, especially when migrating a site into WordPress).
  5. Technical supports responds quickly (within 3hrs) but I’ve yet to receive anything besides a form letter going over the “great” features of Yahoo hosting. So far 3 support emails have yet to even mention the question asked (I’m guessing they have an automated support feature which finds keywords in an inquiry and sends back a automated response).

Hopefully this helps website owners who may be searching for hosting. It usually feels safe to go with a large company like Yahoo for hosting, however it’s good to know the shortcomings of this choice.

I’m very disappointed that WordPress once recommended Yahoo for hosting. It’s good to see they finally revoked that recommendation for the benefit of website owners everywhere.

UPDATE 6/13/06: WordPress seems to have added Yahoo back to their list of preferred hosts. I’ve written to them about this and cannot figure out why they would recommend such a crippled service. I guess the Yahoo name looks good on the WP site?

I still have not gotten a response from Yahoo answering any of the questions I had, though, at this point I don’t think they’ll tell me anything I haven’t already figured out.

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