Yahoo Hosting Review: How Well Does The Search Giant Do Hosting? We Investigate

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Yahoo Web Hosting is part of a suite of products called Yahoo Small Business. They offer several types of web hosting plans, WordPress hosting, free domains, online stores, and local business listings.

In this Yahoo Web Hosting review, we’ll give you the information you need to decide if it’s the right place to host your business’s website.

Quick Overview

Here’s a snapshot of the best and worst of Yahoo Web Hosting services.

Pros

  • Free website with drag-and-drop builder
  • Easy for anyone to use, regardless of experience
  • Free ongoing yearly domain registration

Cons

  • Free website comes with ads.
  • Hosting plans cost more than many other hosts and are not as robust with features
  • No room to grow beyond shared hosting

About Yahoo Web Hosting

Yahoo! was one of the original vanguards of the internet, founded as a search directory in 1995.

In 2015, after being eclipsed by Google and Bing, Yahoo acquired Aabaco, a web hosting company that catered to small business, and rebranded it as their own.

Two years later, Yahoo’s operating business was acquired by Verizon.

What is Yahoo Small Business?

Yahoo Web Hosting is part of the Yahoo Small Business suite of tools which also includes domain registration, e-commerce, and business listings.

Web Hosting Datacenters

Their hosting infrastructure includes datacenters in New York and Washington states, running on Unix servers.

Hosting Plans

Yahoo has various hosting plans so here we’ll simplify what’s on offer.

  • Website builder plans – Entry-level plans that use Yahoo’s website builder, good for personal or small business sites, including a free plan.
  • WordPress plans – Host a blog or a small business website using WordPress instead of Yahoo’s website builder.
  • Hosting plans – Called “shared hosting” by other companies, you can do whatever you like with these plans.
  • E-commerce plans – Get a small or large online store up using Yahoo’s website builder

Features Common to All Plans

One of the best things about Yahoo Web Hosting is that they’ll pay for your domain registration for as long as you host your website with them.

Most other hosting providers offer “free domain names” only for the first year, forcing you to pay yearly thereafter.

Although domain registrations can be fairly cheap, it’s nice that you don’t have to worry about the renewal cost every year.

All hosting plans come with the same customer support. You can access support 24/7 by phone, chat, or online ticketing.

Every site also gets a site management control panel, free SSL certificate and built-in SEO tools.

Yahoo Hosting's site management dashboard
Yahoo’s Site Management dashboard replaces cPanel (which many other hosts use).

What’s Missing?

Compared to other popular web hosts, Yahoo is missing some key features.

  • They won’t migrate an existing site to their hosting servers.
  • You can’t choose your server type (e.g., Linux vs. Windows) or where your datacenter is located.
  • It’s unclear whether Yahoo uses a CDN (e.g., CloudFlare) to help your website pages load faster.

Free Website Plan

Yahoo has their own proprietary website builder and they’ll let you build a website with it for free. It’s essentially a try-before-you-buy opportunity. It’s called their Starter plan.

There’s no coding required and setting up your website is as easy as dragging and dropping elements into it.

The website builder comes with over 150 professionally designed themes that are responsive to mobile devices.

You don’t have to give Yahoo your credit card number if you’d just like to try out their free website builder. You can even use your free website as along as you want.

The Starter plan comes with 3 GB storage which amounts to about 1,200 high resolution images (or equivalent files).

On the downside, your site is limited to a subdomain of “yahoosites.com.” That means your site’s name will be something like yoursite.yahoosites.com. You’ll also have ads on your site for Yahoo Small Business.

Yahoo's Website Builder plans, including the free plan
Yahoo’s free plan, called Starter, is a good way to try out their website builder.

Website Builder Plans

Yahoo offers three plans for use with their website builder: Starter, Basic, and Professional. Starter is the free plan we discussed above.

The Basic and Professional plans cost $4.99 and $9.49 respectively. The biggest difference between these two paid plans is that the Professional plan offers five email addresses.

Yahoo's website builder themes
Some of the themes you can choose from with Yahoo’s Website Builder.

All of Yahoo’s plans come with free domain name registration for as long you host your website with them.

StarterBasicProfessional
Designed forBudget conscious business or personal sitesPublic-facing business sitesBusinesses with employees
Cost per monthFree$4.99$9.49
Domain nameFree subdomain of yahoosites.comYour choiceYour choice
Storage3 GB5 GB10 GB
Email addressesNone15
Activity monitoringNoYesYes
Yahoo! adsYesNoNo

WordPress Plans

Yahoo has two plans — Starter and Standard — which make use of WordPress instead of their website builder to create your site. You must install WordPress yourself, including adding (or buying) themes and plugins to extend your site’s functionality.

Unlike some other hosting providers, Yahoo’s WordPress plans aren’t “managed” WordPress plans where tech support takes care of the back end for you. With Yahoo, you’ll have to do all the site maintenance yourself.

The main difference between these plans is size and privacy. Yahoo will mask your domain registration information (which includes your email, phone, and physical address) on the Standard plan.

StarterStandard
Designed forBloggers and beginnersBusinesses
Cost per month$6.49$7.49
Domain privacyPublic listingPrivate listing
Storage100 GB400 GB
Email addresses1040
VisitorsUnlimitedUnlimited

Shared Hosting Plans

Yahoo’s shared hosting plans are fairly comparable in features to what other hosting providers offer. You can use their website builder, WordPress, or another app to create your site.

You get lots of disk space and email addresses with these plans compared to the Website Builder and WordPress plans.

StarterBasicProfessional
Designed forBlogs & personal sitesSmall businessHigh traffic sites
Cost per month$4.49$5.89$6.79
Storage100 GB500 GBUnlimited
Email addresses2505001000
Bandwidth100 GB/month500 GB / monthUnlimited

E-Commerce Plans

Yahoo’s E-Commerce three plans are called Starter, Standard, and Professional. The primary way they’re different is their monthly cost and transaction fees.

All online store plans come with:

  • Unlimited product listings, bandwidth, and storage.
  • Free domain registration and 1,000 email accounts.
  • Analytics and built-in SEO
  • Accept credit card and PayPal payments
  • Live chat with customers
  • UPS shipping integration

Additionally, with the two top-tier plans, you have the option to use API programming to link your store website to your inventory and accounting systems.

StarterStandardProfessional
Designed forStartup online storesLower feesLarge online businesses
Cost per month$10.95$25.95$254.95
Transaction fee1.5%1.0%0.75%
Yahoo Web Hosting's e-commerce apps
You can add apps to your e-commerce website from your control panel.

Add-Ons & Other Plans

We’ve mentioned that domain registration comes free with your web hosting plan, but the converse is also true. You can use Yahoo’s website builder to create a free website if you buy your domain from them.

If you already have a website hosted elsewhere, but aren’t able to get email from your hosting provider, you can opt for Yahoo’s Email plan. Bulk pricing starts at $3.19 for 1 mailbox and goes down to $1.19 for 10 mailboxes.

Localworks

Localworks is central to Yahoo Small Business. Its essentially a dashboard that offers a high level view of your business across multiple fronts like:

  • Search engines
  • Social networking sites
  • Google and Bing maps

If you need to update your business’s information, you can do it in just one place. You can also read reviews of your business across various sites and respond to customers.

Localworks is a listing service that costs $23.25 to $33.25. The main difference across plans is how many directories you want access to and if you want analytics.

What’s the Difference?

The main differences between Yahoo Web Hosting’s plans are:

  1. Website plans only allow you to use the website builder to create your site. They also have a lot less disk space.
  2. WordPress plans let you install WordPress to create your website. You won’t get access to the website builder, but you get more resources for your money.
  3. Shared hosting plans let you create your site however you like. Their resources and prices are similar to the WordPress plans.
  4. E-commerce plans enable you to sell online and are the most expensive plans.

Uptime and Response Time

Yahoo claims that their hosted sites are up 99.9% of the time and 100% during the year-end holidays. Yahoo’s uptime over the past year has been measured at 99.99%, which is outstanding.

However, their server response times seem slower than what we’re used to seeing from hosts like Bluehost and SiteGround, but they are roughly similar to GoDaddy’s response times.

Yahoo offers no actionable uptime guarantee.

Security

Yahoo offers security on two fronts: One for your site’s visitors and customers and the other for website owners.

SSL Certificates and PCI Compliance

For your customers to feel secure, all of Yahoo’s plans come with SSL certificates and are PCI compliant. However, they currently only offer domain-validated SSL certificates.

Server Security

For your security on the back-end of your site, Yahoo is more ambiguous. They say they maintain “reasonable physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards that comply with federal regulations,” but do not explain further.

They do not provide publicly available information on their server protections like firewalls, anti-malware protocols, or DDOS protection.

Customer Support

All of Yahoo’s plans come with the same level of customer service: 24/7 phone, chat and online ticketing support.

They have a searchable knowledgebase and an active customer community who can help with common issues.

Yahoo Web Hosting's help center
Yahoo offers multiple ways to get help.

Payment Options

To pay for your Yahoo hosting plan, you can use any major credit card or PayPal.

Money-Back Guarantee

Yahoo offers a 30-day satisfaction guarantee for paid plans. However, you can get refunded for your plan price only.

Taxes, fees, domain registration, or other add-ons you’ve purchased aren’t refundable.

User Ratings

We took a look through the user reviews of Yahoo Web Hosting services.

  • Comments about negative experiences with customer service.
  • Comments about issues with websites displaying correctly on iPhones.
  • Most positive reviews are from prior to 2016.

Yahoo vs Bluehost

Bluehost has outstanding customer service and value for your money. You get at least 50 GB of storage plus unlimited bandwidth on even their cheapest plans.

Even better, as your business or site grows, you can scale up your plan to take advantage of more advanced hosting features, like VPS and dedicated servers.

Yahoo vs GoDaddy

GoDaddy also positions itself as friendly to small businesses and it offers a comprehensive suite of tools for owners. You can get apps for email marketing, accounting, and Office 365 as add-ons to your hosting plan.

You also get a lot of bang for your buck. Along with their own website builder, you have unmetered bandwidth and at least 100 GB of storage with any hosting plan.

One drawback of GoDaddy’s cheapest hosting plans is that you don’t get a free SSL certificate like you do with Yahoo.

Get Our Discount

Want to try out Yahoo Web Hosting? Make sure you get the best price by using our discount code.

Just click any of the links to Yahoo on our site and your browser will automatically embed our pricing discount and send you to Yahoo’s website.

Even better, when you click through on our links, we make a small referral commission that helps us provide all of our HTML resources and reviews to you for free.

Visit Yahoo Web Hosting now.

Summary

Yahoo Web Hosting is worth considering if you are a small business owner just getting started and are strapped for cash.

You can try out their website builder for free. If you like it, it’s easy to convert to a paid plan or switch to WordPress hosting.

However, you can find other hosts that, while not free, offer much more for your money and include easy-to-use website builders too.

But if they sound right for you, visit Yahoo.com now.

Your Review of Yahoo Hosting

Are you a current or past customer of Yahoo hosting? Would you recommend them? Please leave your comments below and let our visitors know what you think of Yahoo hosting’s speed, features and customer service.

Visit Yahoo Small Business Now


Contributing editor: Natalie Mootz.

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