Yahoo! Web Hosting is offering unlimited disk space, unlimited data transfer, unlimited email storage, and 1,000 email accounts all for $11.95 a month. Is this truly unlimited hosting as it appears to be?
Yahoo! has targeted this hosting solution for its Small Business customers, who can now host a professional-looking site in hours, with assurance that their hosting package will grow with their business. In addition they offer simple web site design tools to create great-looking sites, packaged with a free domain name, 24×7 phone support, and a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, and automatic optimization for top search engines. It seems existing customer got an email invitation with the option to migrate to this new plan!
I checked out the new Yahoo! Small Business Web Hosting plan and delved into the details for some fineprint clauses. Read these before you sign up.
1. Its is a shared web hosting service, with multiple web sites hosted on the same server and “a customer’s web site usage cannot adversely affect the performance of other customers’ sites.” Most affordable webhosting services offer a shared server, and obviously if your site is huge, you need a dedicated server solution.
2. They want you to host web sites and not store data so “Using an account primarily as an online storage space for archiving electronic files is prohibited.” Most shared or free web hosting services will not let you act as an online storage network
3. Grow slow as there are some constraints on how fast you can grow so “you can add as much content as you want, but maybe not all at once.” Obviously most sites grow slowly, but if you plan to move a huge site to their server, think again.
4. They mention “in certain circumstances, our server processing power, server memory, or anti-abuse controls could limit downloads from your site.” So take care what you intent to host on your site.
5. Upload as much as content as you like, but it is “subject only to the rules that control how fast your site can grow” policy. I wonder what that ‘growing’ limit is.
6. Unlimited email storage means never worry about having to delete older messages. But again remember that “purpose of unlimited storage isn’t to provide an online storage warehouse” which will otherwise get flagged by Yahoo! Business Email’s anti-abuse controls.