Yahoo Small Business Review

Ideal for

Yahoo Small Business is best for small businesses looking for a flexible web hosting solution that includes Ecommerce and online store tools.

Pricing and Plans

Yahoo Small Business has 3 tiers of plans, beginning at $4.49 per month when you pay for a year upfront. You can choose to pay for your account monthly, yearly, or every 3 or 5 years for longer contracts, but only the yearly prices are available upfront on the website. To discover prices for other billing periods, you'll have to go through the purchase process and select a domain name first. All the plans include a free domain as long as Yahoo hosts your site if you pay for a year at a time, and the Basic and Advanced plans include site design tools as well.

*Prices last updated May 2018

Ease of Use

Yahoo Small Business is aimed at new business owners who are just getting started. So, it’s not surprising that everything is designed to be intuitive and easy to use. To set up your new site on the Yahoo Small Business platform, you just need to choose your plan, pick a domain name, and select how often you want to be billed.

You can easily enter your preferred domain name and check whether it’s available. If not, Yahoo Small Business will guide you to pick an alternative name that is as similar as possible to the original.

Once you’ve entered your payment details, you can click the “Get Started” button to begin building your new site, or to import an existing site. You can import a site built with most site building tools and continue to edit them using the site builder, but you’ll be warned that your files may not be editable using the original tools. It’s easy to add more content, pages, and widgets to your existing site.

If you’re building a new site, you can do so using the site building tools from the web hosting control panel. These are easy to use to create pages and widgets, and you can quickly and easily edit colors, layouts, and images. You’ll need to use code to add more advanced content like forms, social media links, and slideshows.

Alternatively, the simplest way to build a website is to switch to the intuitive, drag-and-drop Yahoo Websites website builder platform. You don't need any code, and it's very fast to get your site up and running. You'll need to forward your domain to the Yahoo Websites platform and pay for the lowest tier Lite Website Builder plan. Since this is free for the first 30 days, you should be able to build your site and close your subscription before your free trial period expires.

Website Building Features

Yahoo Small Business offers 2 options for building your website. If you are buying the Basic or Advanced web hosting plans, you can use the site building tools that are included in the price. These include templates, support for coding and scripting such as PHP and MySQL, file management tools, blogging integration, and database management. It’s ideal for experienced web developers who know exactly what they want, and how to achieve it.

Alternatively, you can use the Yahoo Small Business Websites service, which is a very easy-to-use, drag-and-drop site builder platform. It’s by far the easiest choice because you don’t need to know a drop of code. There are 150+ themes organized into categories to make it easier to find the right one.

SEO tools, mobile optimization, analytics, and multimedia content support are all included too, so that you can get started quickly. Once you choose your theme, you can customize just about everything—adjust the color scheme, add video background, move or remove elements, change fonts, and more.

Whichever website building tool you use, you’ll get a free SSL certificate, easy-to-use Ecommerce features, and plenty of storage ranging from 100GB to unlimited storage. Yahoo Small Business also invites users to bring their own CMS, database management, and other web management tools to integrate with its hosting platform. You can build your website from within your own software by connecting it to Yahoo Small Business.

Customer Support

If you’re a Yahoo Small Business user, you can access support 24/7 via phone or live chat. For non-users, customer support is reachable from 6am to 5pm PT Monday-Friday. There's also an online community forum where you can ask for advice and share ideas. The online resources and advice are extensive, and you'll be able to find answers to most questions without even needing to pick up the phone or open a chat window. Before you can open live chat or make a support phone call, you'll need to get an incident number. To do this, you'll have to click the large “Get Incident Number” button.

Unfortunately, Yahoo Small Business has a number of negative reviews for its customer service, with customers complaining about a long response time and unsatisfactory interactions, but there are also positive reviews reporting that calls were answered within a minute and the support representative was helpful and friendly.

VPS, Shared, Dedicated, and Cloud Hosting

As the name suggests, Yahoo Small Business is aimed at small businesses. As a result, it doesn’t offer large-scale hosting services, such as VPS or dedicated server hosting. Once your business grows out of shared hosting, you’ll need to migrate to a dedicated server or VPS option. This could be a deal breaker for a medium-sized business which is hovering around the point of moving to dedicated or VPS hosting, but if you’re just starting out and want plenty of support and features for new businesses, shared hosting shouldn’t put you off.

Yahoo Small Business only offers Linux-based hosting, not cloud hosting. Although cloud hosting is often seen as ideal, the small businesses that Yahoo Small Business serves are unlikely to need the increased capacity or speed that comes with cloud-based hosting. Yahoo Small Business promises 99.99% uptime, so the risk of downtime from the Linux server crashing doesn’t seem to be a problem.

Conclusion

Yahoo Small Business offers everything that new businesses need to get started. A range of price plans, unlimited storage, databases, and data transfer, along with a free SSL certificate and domain name make it ideal for small businesses. Together with a 30-day money-back guarantee, 24/7 customer support, and 99.99% uptime, Yahoo Small Business is a comprehensive solution for new Ecommerce businesses.

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