While working on a project, I had occasion to work with Yahoo! Small Business Web-hosting.  Compared to working with hosts like Hostmonster and Site5, it was rather painful.

First, the control panel software was flown in from 1998.  I don’t know if it’s home grown or just wildly outdated, but compared to modern control panel software like cPanel, it was severely lacking.  The file editor, for example, was a basic text box that occupied a small percentage of the page.  cPanel, by comparison, provides multiple editors with various capabilities, such as syntax highlighting.  I don’t normally do a lot of editing of the files on the host (it’s not conducive to version control, for one thing), but it can be handy for quickly testing changes.  Having a decent file editor makes this easier, and Yahoo doesn’t.

Another item missing from the panel is the ability to extract compressed files.  With cPanel, I can upload a compressed file and extract its contents to any location I want.  This is quite useful for installing new software or transferring lots of files.  With Yahoo, you have to extract the files locally and then upload them to the hosting account.  This is slow and annoying.  It also precludes zipping up a bunch of files and uploading them compressed in order to cut the upload time.

Yahoo also prohibits you from creating filenames that start with “.”, so “.htaccess” isn’t allowed.  This is a file used by web servers to do all sorts of things, such as redirect URLs (e.g. if you’ve moved a page to a new location and want to reroute the user).  It is especially handy for creating URLs that are “search engine friendly” when using tools like Joomla.  Taking this tool away handicaps the user.

Then there’s the software.  They supply PHP 4.3.11, which was released on March 31, 2005.  PHP4 support was discontinued by the PHP project at the end of 2007.  Even security fixes were discontinued after August of 2008.  This makes sense when you realize that PHP5 was released three years earlier, in July of 2004.

Yahoo also installs phpMyAdmin 2.11.9.6, which is over 2 years old, but is required because they only support PHP 4.  This is a program that allows one to interact with MySQL to administer databases.  The current version is 3.3.  How many security problems have been fixed between those two versions?  In addition, I’d cite the new features in MySQL that aren’t supported by this old version of phpMyAdmin, except that they supply a rather old version of MySQL, so the new features aren’t available anyway.

Yahoo supplies MySQL 4.1.14 (released on August 17, 2005).  This is a database that is used by many common programs, such as WordPress and Joomla, and can be used by custom web-sites as well.  Versions 5 and 5.1 have been released since (in October 2005 and November 2008, respectively), adding many new features and thereby improving its feature set to match that of many competing products.

All of these programs are still usable (though quickly becoming less so as software programs move on to newer versions).  There is also some advantage in staying off the bleeding edge; stability and security are generally better.  However, this set of programs is quite long in the tooth by technology standards, and especially by Internet standards.  By comparison, Hostmonster and Site5 both supply current versions of these programs.  In addition, they supply many more programs that aren’t available from Yahoo.  They’re not charging more, either.

Yahoo does do a few things, such as provide some site statistics (e.g. page hits) that are useful.  They integrate well with their own search engine and analytics, but that’s to be expected.  Overall, though, it was a very disappointing experience.  I can’t recommend it to any of my clients.