December 06, 2019

Antiquated Web Hosting Services

Verified User

Manager in Marketing

Furniture Company, 11-50 employees

Score 1 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used to use Yahoo Webhosting to host and power our website and use it as a platform and used it for several years.

Pros and Cons

Yahoo Web Hosting/Small Business is above else, cheap in pricing at the very least in terms of monthly costs.
The backend of Yahoo Web Hosting/ Small Business is customizable, assuming you can find one of the few developers that can code for it.
We were given a dedicated account manager though I believe it was because of how long we were with yahoo and how many complaints we had.

Extremely old and outdated back end.
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.

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.

Return on Investment

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.

Alternatives Considered

BigCommerce, Shopify Plus, WordPress and GoDaddy

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.

Support Rating

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.

Other Software Used

Yahoo! eCommerce, Zoho Chat, Velaro Live Chat, Zendesk Chat (formerly Zopim), Google Drive, Microsoft Teams

Operating Systems	Unspecified
Mobile Application	No

Yahoo Small Business

Shopify

Linode

GoDaddy

Shopify

Wix

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BigCommerce

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HostGator

AccuWebHosting.Com

SiteGround

DreamHost

InMotion Hosting

A2 Hosting

Graphy