LightCMS, from NetSuite, was a cloud-based content management system for building websites and eCommerce storefronts. It is designed to be used by individuals, non-profits, and small to medium-sized businesses. The product has been discontinued.
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Turbify
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Turbify, formerly Yahoo Small Business, and now an Infinite Computer Solutions brand, is a website hosting solution for small businesses and retailers, supporting business email, basic or managed web hosting, a well as Wordpress and "Business Maker" web services.
LightCMS is perfect for 90% of websites out there. It has all the basic modules like calendars, photo galleries, news/blog, or forms building built in. Small businesses to mid-sized businesses are perfect for LightCMS. We use other solutions when the requierments for the website include a lot of third party integrations or custom modules. As a hosted CMS it has the same limitations as others with server-side development.
I would tell a colleague to stay clear of Yahoo Web Hosting/Yahoo Small Business. Our business has been with Yahoo due to the fact that there was nothing else around at the time of our signing up with them. Since then there are much better alternatives as the fact that Yahoo has virtually no third party support really hurts it, and the fact that it is so barebones and hard to customize and work in the back end makes it so that you have to find one of the few expensive developers that specialize in Yahoo. This is another huge hurdle if you plan to build a good website.
LightCMS provides all the major functionality 90% of sites need. It keeps out of its own way by making these solutions intuitive and simple and not trying to solve every problem for everyone which would over-complicate the tool-set.
This is the easiest to use CMS we have ever seen. I tell my client's that if they can make a Facebook post, they can manage their website, and it's true. Their UI is so easy and keeps getting easier to use. Untrained users get it in minutes and are able to manage their sites without our help.
LightCMS's code is simple and light-weight. Sites are fast and the CMS doesnt get in the way of performance.
You can do almost anything you want (except server-side programming) with LightCMS. So, we can create any design we want and it works great with Light CMS's tokens and editable regions concept (which is also simple to implement.)
Constantly upgraded and fixed, the product is 1000x better after 10 years of working with it, but is still simple and not bloated.
While keeping it simple is LightCMS's thing, some of the elements/modules could use deeper options or control for advanced users.
Some content, such as calendars, cannot have data exported/imported easily.
Support was amazing 10 years ago. We openly talked about how awesome they were... it isn't as good as it once was, but is still way above almost every support of other CMS systems we have used.
Yahoo Web Hosting is at the very least customizable but everything beyond just running a simple store requires custom work that you will have to pay an expensive developer to fix for you.
Yahoo Web Hosting is a complete mess in terms of branding and policies. In the span of our last year with them, they went from Yahoo to Yahoo small business to Aabaco and then back to Yahoo and each time were assigned a different account manager.
Abysmal customer service, every time we had to open a ticket we had a customer service agent in India that could not fix our issue and we were eventually assigned an account manager after numerous complaints.
Barely any apps or app eco system on Yahoo.
Frequent down times caused by Yahoo Web Hosting cost our business lots of lost revenue.
So antiquated and backwards, they were one of the last companies that I know of to switch over to https, we reached out to them several times to switch our website to https and it took an agonizing amount of time for Yahoo to implement it for all their customers.
The customer support for Yahoo Web hosting is a complete disaster. Every call is transferred to a technical support department that is in India which usually isn't an issue as that is the norm for a lot of businesses, however, this technical support team in Yahoo does not know how to diagnose issues or offer support. Every issue we had some, some critical like why is our website down were met with clueless customer support agents that would get back to us in 48 hours minimum. Eventually, we were given an account manager that actually did his best and was able to get to the right people at times for critical issues but it still was a complete hassle and waste of time every time we had any issue with Yahoo Web hosting.
We have looked at hundrends of CMS's and LightCMS is a perfect entry-level system for most of our small to mid sized clients. LightCMS's feature set is less complex than almost every other system and the actual interface is miles ahead of most other CMS systems. It's simply thought out better. It lacks sensibility and an API as well as other advanced features many more expensive or more DIY systems have, but the simplicity makes up for it.
After we departed Yahoo Web hosting we found out that there are numerous much better web hosting platforms, the main we focused on were Shopify, GoDaddy, BigCommerce, and WordPress. Between either is a much better alternative than Yahoo Web hosting as they all have much better third party support, more familiarity in the platforms which means more developers that are familiar with the platforms. Above all else, all three of these companies have stood the test of time and haven't rebranded themselves into different company names like Yahoo did with Aabaco and back and are much better for any small business.
While I always think the price could be cheaper, LightCMS is incredibly inexpensive if you consider the costs of hosting, support, and upgrading is all included.
As part of their partner program, we are able to control client accounts from our master account, making moving between clients easier and supporting them faster which ultimately makes our labor costs better.
Yahoo Web Hosting impacted our business in a very negative way with all the time we wasted and revenue we lost.
Our biggest loss of revenue was deciding to stay longer than we had to with Yahoo Web Hosting as the cost of moving to another platform was high but we had no choice.
Yahoo Web Hosting constantly interfered with our workflow with its lack of third party support and poor customer service and constant downtimes.
For instance when we wanted to find an inventory system for our business virtually NO ONE supported Yahoo.
