TeqEdge Blog

Yesterday I discussed the features of Yahoo! web-hosting with unlimited disk space, unlimited data transfer and unlimited email storage. Today let’s discuss the good and bad qualities that will distinguish Y! web-hosting from the rest.

Competition

Yahoo! has waited a long time to fully enter the cheap and highly competitive hosting industry. Hundreds of businesses have been in the hosting game a long time and even small hosting providers have hundreds of thousands of customers. Hostmonster is one example. I use Hostmonster to host TeqEdge.com and several other websites. Just a side by side comparison between Yahoo and Hostmonster reveals how hard Y! has to work to get the precious webmaster dollars.

Comparison To HostMonster

Advantages Of Yahoo!

Yahoo does have a lot of advantages over the plethora of other web-hosting companies. Most important ones are traffic and brand-recognition. Y! can leverage these assets to put itself as a market leader or at least in a respectable position. With millions of eye-balls hitting the Yahoo! website every day hundreds of web-masters will sign up with their service in a short time. In the same time Hostmonster gets a 100,000 customers Yahoo! might get a million. Simply because of the exposure Yahoo has over the internet community.

With instant brand recognition going for them, Yahoo can afford to charge a few more dollars than the competition. For example, almost every internet user has heard of Yahoo in some form or the other. When a newbie wants to create a new website he will certainly go to Yahoo as the first web-host. Yahoo might not have all the features but, I expect, their brand will carry them to very high levels. Even though Hostmonster charges half the monthly amount, some customers will still feel more comfortable with a well-known and respected Yahoo! brand.

Yahoo! jumps into the web-hosting business with unlimited disk space, unlimited data transfer and unlimited email storage. Webhosting is not something new to Yahoo! The Small Business section always had a full featured hosting package with a handful of plans and features. Anyone could register a domain with Y! and create a starter page without much effort. But till now the Yahoo! Web-hosting looked like a bastard child that everyone knew existed but always avoided. With today’s announcement Yahoo! has jumped head first in to the highly competitive hosting business.

Features

So what is included in the unlimited web-hosting package? Well it includes several features. For just under $12 a month anyone can take advantage of the package. The plan does require a minimum 3 month commitment but does not have any of the annoying fees – no setup fees, no transfer fees etc.

Features That Stand Out

• Unlimited disk space
• Unlimited data transfer
• Unlimited email storage
• Free domain name
• Forms to collect visitor information
• Maps and driving directions so customers can easily find your business
• 99.9% uptime
• Backups of your web site in different geographic locations in case of emergency
• 200 password-protected accounts
• Shared SSL certificates and encryption
• Easy-to-use design tools
• 24-hour customer service
• Reliable and secure hosting
• 1000 email addresses
• Easy web access to email
• Compatible with email applications such as Outlook
• SpamGuard Plus, for powerful spam protection
• Norton AntiVirus, for virus protection
• $100 credit toward Yahoo! Search Marketing
• $50 credit toward Google AdWords
• Free, automatic submission of your site to Yahoo! Search and Google
• 30% off Yahoo! Local Enhanced Listings
• Basic website analytics

Server side components include:

• Support for third-party tools like FrontPage 2000/2002 and Dreamweaver
• PHP version 4.3.11
• Perl version 5.8.7 and support for the standard library plus 12 additional modules
• MySQL 4.1, with unlimited databases
• Support for most FTP accounts
• Support for Flash, Shockwave, videos, and more
• Blogging options for beginners and professionals, including Yahoo! 360°, WordPress, and Movable Type
• Web site enhancements, like guestbooks, PayPal payment, Yahoo! Maps, site search, phpBB bulletin boards, and PHP-Nuke content management

Tomorrow I will discuss the good and bad of Yahoo! web-hosting and compare it to the “other hosting providers”. Since I use Hostmonster for several of my websites and I am quite pleased with their service I will draw a competitive picture between the two. Stay tuned.

Starting your own website you will spend a lot of time getting the best CMS software, best possible hosting solution which won’t make you broke and installing as many plugins as you can think of. But a week or two into the project you will realize you can’t visit your own website 24hours every day. So how do you make sure your site is up? You use FreeSiteStatus.

FreeSiteStatus is a free service which monitors your site and emails you reports every week about downtime experienced by your site in the previous week. For example every Monday morning I receive a short email from FreeSiteStatus telling me the stats for my site.

From: Dec 03 2007 12:00 AM (US/Eastern)
To: Dec 10 2007 12:00 AM (US/Eastern)

1. TeqEdge
- uptime: 100.000%
- downtime: 00min
- outage: 0

This service also provides a monthly report which looks very similar.

From: Nov 01 2007 12:00 AM (US/Eastern)
To: Dec 01 2007 12:00 AM (US/Eastern)

1. TeqEdge
- uptime: 99.861%
- downtime: 01hr 00min
- outage: 1

That’s not all. You might want to have more control than the free service provides. For as little as $2 per month FreeSiteStatus will monitor your website every 15 minutes. I have not upgraded yet but I am very impressed with their service so far. Their reporting has been correct and on time. Check out their full list of features and their free vs paid monitoring benefits.

This is not a paid review. I use this service and find it beneficial. This service is bound to give you some peace of mind that someone else is monitoring your site and will notify you if it goes down.