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CNET review (1/14/03) By Matt Lake Ever the changeable beast, Yahoo recently launched Web hosting services aimed at slightly-more-than-casual individuals and small businesses. We reviewed Yahoo Web Hosting Business Starter, an $11.95-per-month service at the lowest tier of three packages (the others are Business Standard for $19.95 per month and Business Professional for $39.95 per month). If you're a fan of Yahoo's other services and you like GeoCities-style Web creation, try Business Starter; it offers easy Web building and a few perks, such as 10 different e-mail addresses and password-protected directories. But you'll get better performance and lower prices with DirectNIC or even Catalog.com. Those looking for true small-business hosting should consider Yahoo's $39.95 Business Professional package for better security, advanced Web building tools, and dedicated tech support. Installation and interface Setting up a Yahoo Web Hosting account is quick and easy and costs a nonrefundable $15. Once you set up the page, it takes a couple of days to go live--comparable with the time most Web hosts require. If you haven't already signed up for Yahoo's free services, however, you'll have to get a free Yahoo Mail account and sign up for a Yahoo Wallet account and fork over your credit card information. Nor does Yahoo Web Hosting offer a 30-day money-back guarantee or prorated billing if you cancel midmonth--something offered by many small-biz hosts, such as Aplus.net. Once you've established your site, you'll find well-organized administration pages that make it easy to perform most typical hosting tasks, including uploading pages, checking your site traffic, and adding new e-mail accounts. In general, Yahoo presents almost no learning curve, especially if you're already familiar with GeoCities; Yahoo Web Hosting shares GeoCities' site-building tools and general layout. Those tools are almost ridiculously easy to use, especially if you're a fan of WYSIWYG Web page editing. If you prefer to create your own Web site offline, Yahoo lets you upload three ways: using the Web-based file manager, FTP, and via Microsoft FrontPage 2002 extensions for uploading sites and subwebs. Such flexibility makes Yahoo a good choice for more advanced site builders who aren't interested in prepackaged Web sites. Features Yahoo Web Hosting's Business Starter package includes basic but standard options: an all-expenses-paid domain name from ICANN-accredited registrar Melbourne IT, 50MB of shared server space, 20GB of data transfer, and 10 e-mail forwarding accounts. By contrast, the $19.95-per-month Business Standard package offers 100MB of server space, 25GB of data transfer, and 25 e-mail addresses, while Business Professional offers 350MB, 35GB, and 35 e-mail addresses. Despite all those extra addresses, e-mail is Yahoo Web Hosting's biggest bugaboo. For example, Yahoo will redirect and forward all e-mail addresses at your domain only to @yahoo.com mailboxes--a bit too inflexible and Yahoo-centric for our tastes. Besides, if you're setting up e-mail addresses in your domain for multiple people, each one must have his or her own Yahoo Mail account to receive such mail. On the plus side, we like that Yahoo's e-mail scheme gives plenty of control to the account holder. Each person with an e-mail address is responsible for setting up the account with passwords and so forth; the administrator just assigns e-mail addresses. Yahoo Web Hosting offers some additional slick extras that set it apart from other small-business hosts, too. For example, you can shorten long URLs by setting up subdomains (up to 10 prefixes that go where the www does in regular URLs--for example, webservices.cnet.com instead of www.cnet.com/internet/0-3761.html). We also like Yahoo Web Hosting's e-mail forms, which let visitors send you feedback mail in a specific format; a Yahoo Search box you can add to your Web site; and password protection for select folders so that you can set up private areas on your site that are accessible only to people you know. Performance During our month-long evaluation of Yahoo Web Hosting, we ran NetMechanic tests to see how well Yahoo's hosting performed compared to three other small-business hosts. Unfortunately, the results didn't wow us. In our tests, the Yahoo Web Hosting site took longer to respond to clicking and loading, and it downloaded data slower than sites hosted at Catalog.com, DirectNIC, and ValueWeb. The numbers are close, certainly, but given that Catalog.com and DirectNIC don't charge monthly fees for their hosting, we expected better from Yahoo. Service and support Yahoo Web Hosting's Business Starter plan doesn't offer phone support, only e-mail. (The other two Yahoo Hosting plans include priority e-mail and 24/7 toll-free telephone support.) We found the cheap-seats e-mail support turnaround a little slow--more than 24 hours in one case. Such a long response time could wreak havoc for a small business with a critical Web site problem. In our trials, which took place in the weeks just following Yahoo Hosting's launch, the online FAQs and tutorials were hard to locate. Thankfully, Yahoo Hosting's FAQ content, once you find it, is lucid and well organized. | ||
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