From my point of view Yahoo is trying to make the users understand that any shared web hosting is for small businesses only.
Try and access webhosting.yahoo.com and you will get redirected to smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/
But this contradicts the upgrade options available after you buy a account.

The Ordering Process:
If you hate long registration processes before buying a product, then Yahoo is for you (only if you have a yahoo account/email/ID). You only need to authenticate using the Yahoo ID and that’s it, you are ready to buy a web hosting account. From here you only need to register a new domain or use a existing one and enter the billing details.

Account activation:
The account is activated in real time, after you finish the payment process your account is activated and ready for usage. Nothing spectacular here tho.

Ease of Use:
After you sign in for the first time into the web hosting account, you will be prompted with a 3 steps “Getting Started” wizard.
- Set Up Email
- Design Your Site
- Promote Your Site
All this 3 steps help beginners to get started with a simple or more complex web site.
If you are a advanced user then you can skip this 3 steps wizard and go directly to the tools offered by Yahoo.
In the “Web Hosting Control Panel” you have all the necessary tools needed + a few more, like:
- Site Traffic
- Search Engine Ranking / Submit
- Promotion Tools
And the list may go on, their control panel is organized and easy to use.

Used Software:
First let’s see what software is Yahoo using:
- FreeBSD 4.11-YAHOO-20080312 #0: i386
- Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.28 OpenSSL/0.9.6b FrontPage/5.0.2.2510 mod_fastcgi/2.4.2
- PHP Version 4.3.11
- MySQL Client API Version 3.23.49
- PCRE Library Version 4.5    Release Date: December 2003 !
- Zlib:
+ Compiled Version 1.1.4
+ Linked Version 1.1.3
To be honest I don’t know where to start from.
OS:
Let’s start with the operating system, FreeBSD 4.11, was released in Jan 2005, it’s the latest stable 4.x version of FreeBSD. Maybe they keep this old OS up to date, but still, why would they use this ancient OS at all?
Apache:
One of the most important software for a web hosting server is the Web Server itself, in this case Apache. Yahoo is using Apache 1.3.37 which is outdated, the latest 1.3 version is 1.3.41 which fixes a lot of critical security holes, check the Apache Change Log.
FrontPage:
Microsoft has discontinued FrontPage extension support for the Unix platform, this leads to severe intrusion attempts using FrontPage vulnerabilities on all servers using this outdated extension. With all this Yahoo is still using FrontPage.
PHP:
PHP Version 4.3.11 was released in March 2005 and it is not the latest stable 4.x version.
The support for php 4.x was officially discontinued in December 2007, and the last release 4.4.9 was on 07.08.2008, from that date php.net didn’t released any new version or any security patch for version 4.x
The php team is working on the transaction from 5.x to 6.x, imagine that Yahoo will still have version 4.x when 6.x will be released.
MySQL:
I don’t even know who uses mysql api 3.23 this days, it’s not outdated at all, it’s ancient!
Zlib:
Why would Yahoo compile a newer version of zlib and link an older version for usage? This makes me think that they are experimenting with old software.

Internet Connection:
At this chapter Yahoo scores big, only at the number of internet service providers used, meaning that the up time should be over 99.9% (excluding eventual server problems).
Yahoo uses Akamai for content delivery, Akamai is one of the largest networks offering this services.
With all this, the internet connection is slow. The tests made were from different internet providers and different locations. The speed never went above 200KB/s, that’s under 2Mbps.

Support:
The average email response time is 8 hours, not very bad, but still there’s room for improvement.

Conclusion:
Yahoo had a promising start, let’s their pros:
+ Easy to order a plan
+ 3 steps wizard and your web site is on the web
+ Easy and advanced control panel
+ Webmail interface almost identical to Yahoo’s webmail
+ Over 99.9% uptime
+ 100$ Yahoo Credits
+ 50$ Google Credits

What Yahoo failed to offer:
- Slow internet speed, under 2Mbps
- Outdated software
- Vulnerable to attacks due to outdated versions of php, apache, mysql, etc
- Newer php scripts are not compatible with the server due to outdated php and mysql version
- Support response time over email is slow

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Claudiu Popescu

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