I have heard bad reviews about Yahoo Web Hosting before, but I never really looked into the matter as I have a great web host already.  This week I was creating a Wordpress site for a client who was using Yahoo for their web host and got to try it first hand.  Now I have first hand experience and can agree that you should NOT use Yahoo Web Hosting.  Here’s my story and I am sticking to it:

First the file manager and admin panel is a little different and not very user friendly.  Granted, anytime you use something new, there is a slight learning curve, but this one is just ‘different’.

Then, the installing of Wordpress.  I used their automated install feature, as the other way with this host would have taken extreme measures.  The install, even though it was for the root domain, installed the files in a sub folder called ‘blog’.  So, even though the home page was still mydomain.com, the files were at mydomain.com/blog.  And all pages reflected that.  Not what I wanted.  Luckily with some tweaking, I was able to move everything to the root and all was well. (Again, not an easy task as with most hosts).

Then when everything was looking good, I went to change the Permalinks to seo friendly links.  Wordpress said that the changes were made and all the posts I created seemed to reflect this. BUT…when I went to the live site and clicked on the posts and pages, I kept getting a ‘404 page not found’ error.  I checked everything I could think of and couldn’t find the cause.  And I am pretty darn good at trouble shooting if I may say so.  I went into the file manager and looked for the .htaccess file to see if there was an error or if the file was writable.  I couldn’t find it though.  I even checked to see if the ‘view hidden files’ button was checked, but there isn’t one of those links with Yahoo and I couldn’t find it with my FTP client.  SO, I went to add the file.  Yahoo pops up the warning “you can not add a file that ends with a ‘.’ (that is a period/dot)”. Apparently Yahoo doesn’t allow .htaccess files on your domain names on their servers. WHAT??? Are you serious??  SO that means NO seo permalinks.  NO redirects.

I did find a few plugins that were thought to work, but nothing I could find worked with the latest version of Wordpress (2.8.x).  Even with older versions of WP, if the plugins did work, I would be afraid they would stop working with a future update and the whole site would fall apart.

So, the lesson of this story is to NOT USE YAHOO for web hosting.  They have a BIG name, but if you are serious about putting your business/site online, you really need to find a host that works for ALL your needs.  There are plenty of good hosts for the same , or less, money that work WAY better.  I use Hostgator and can HIGHLY recommend them without hesitation.  You can check out their hosting plans here!. If you need to know more about why I like them, just shoot me an email.