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- My rating: 0 stars
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3 out of 3 people found this review helpful
1.0 stars
"Could only be worse if the power went out"
Pros: Quick to take your money
Cons: Could care less about the customer
Summary: Yahoo is probably great if you are clueless on web design and want to use their in-house page maker. But if you do your own design, customer service is of any value, or if you might need to talk to anyone who knows or will do anything for you, then don't bother wasting your time with Yahoo web hosting.
With over 100K visitors per month, I was looking for stability in moving my site of over 5000 pages and being down is not an option. I reasoned that a company the size of and with the technical infrastructure of Yahoo should be able to provide this. And they weren?t a cheap host either. While there are plenty around that are in the $8-10 per month range, Yahoo?s 20 gig hosting is over $30 per month. Normally, you expect more if you pay more and in 10 years of being in the business, I?ve pretty much found this to be true.
To start with and despite being told otherwise, there is no temporary place to upload your site until the DNS changes over. That means that the domain name has to propagate to your ISP and if your is one of the later ones, then you are down until it does. Even hosts that run out of someone's basement have this feature or they manage to get around it by going in and copying your site for you.
I have also come to the conclusion that their CSRs have no understanding or knowledge of what they are doing. The simplest questions were often met with pauses, stammers, and then completely impossible answers. When they were told that the answer they just gave is impossible, they have to put you on hold to research this. (?Research this? - Code for look it up in a manual or ask someone else.) Every 30 seconds, they come back to ask you if you will continue to hold. A nice service feature at first, but highly annoying after an hour. Additionally, Yahoo CSR?s have no access to do anything in the system. When I asked them to clear the error logs, they told me they would have to send this to engineering.
After their servers started timing out, one of the CSRs told me that he thought that there was some sort of hangup because of one of my directories, but he couldn?t tell me what that reason might be. However according to him, I was to open another FTP client and remove it manually and then upload it again. I didn?t find out till later that Yahoo?s own documentation says NOT to do this or stuff will start breaking... something about their setup. And guess what? it did break. When I approached them later about this fact, they said yes, this was still the appropriate thing to do, and yes, it would cause the system to break. In other words, a guaranteed failure.
Next, their servers started sending back operating system error messages and gave an OS Error 13 code saying that a particular OS file had permissions that were set wrong and it could not access the file. The next CSR?s first instinct was to insist that one of my html files must have changed the operating system. If you know anything about web hosting, you know this isn?t even possible. She would agree with this and then tell me it all over again.
I thought I was getting somewhere when she finally let me talk to a supervisor. However, his ability was no more than hers. He had no access to the system, and his solution was that I needed to remove every file I had there, and then they would send this to engineering and the problem would probably be resolved in 3-5 days. They refused to let me talk to anyone higher saying that engineering was not allowed to talk to customers, and he refused to pass this along to them until I removed my entire website from their server. So ultimately, their solution to their own technical problem and errant information was that the customer must go out of business for a week while they figure it out. Asking if this happens regularly, he indicated that it did. In other words, hosting your website with Yahoo is only a good idea if you don?t mind your website being down on a regular basis and risk having to monkey with the works every time you update.
To my way of thinking, these people think awfully highly of a broken down piece of junk system to think that anyone who cares about their site would stay with them under these circumstances. If not for their kindergarten online web package, evidently designed for your average Homer Simpson web developer, I fail to see how these people stay in business.
