Yahoo! India Small Business web hosting review
33dots.com is my first website and i do not have much knowledge about web hosting providers. Anyway, i list here some of my observations on Yahoo! Small Business where this site is hosted
Technical specifications
Free domain name.
PHP 4.3 / PERL 5.8 / MySQL 4.1
1000 POP / SMTP emails.
1000 FTP accounts (for website management)
1000 sub-domains
Hourly/Daily/Weekly automated backups
Rs 1999/ year.
Some of the interesting features of the service are,
Unlimited space
You are given a 5GB space initially and this can be increased free of cost upon request. So you will never run out of space.
Unlimited data transfer
That’s good considering the reasonable price.
1000 email id’s
The SMTP emails given are in the same yahoo mail interface, which is one of the best webmails in the world.
Yahoo! brand name and expertise
We can expect that the site is hosted in the yahoo servers and so it should be secure, reliable and has a high uptime.
Yes! Its also a matter of pride to feel that our site is hosted in Yahoo!
However here comes the problems,
No .htaccess support.
Yahoo do not allow .htaccess files. We cannot upload/create any file beginning with a .(dot) .This is a real problem as most of the CMS and BB systems requires them.
In my case i was not able to use wordpress pretty permalinks because of this. 
Only one database user.
This appears to be a crazy. We are only allowed one database user. If we try to create a user via their administration panel or through phpMyAdmin, it says no permission.
Strangely, i found out that it is possible to insert/edit the user table in the database.
Poor control panel
The web administration software offered by yahoo is not upto the mark. It looks outdated. Most of the functions are not intuitive and appear confusing. Also many steps are required to do for even simple tasks. It comes no where near to cPanel, plesk etc.
There is no facility to install any of the common PHP applications. (CMS’s, blogs, forums, etc etc)
The only software that can be installed from the web administration panel is phpMyAdmin 2.6
For every other thing you need to upload via FTP.
No shell support. No cron. No access to php.ini.
The web statistics page is not good. They provide an additional access log and you have to use your own statistics program to import and view them.
I am not so impressed with their customer support. For my email to them on why i cant upload .htaccess files, i got a reply 2 days later, they asked me courteously to
“dial 99001xxxxx and press option” 1″ for YSB and “1″ again for existing
customer between 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM (Mon to Sat)”
As the word ’small’ in their name, Yahoo! Small Business is perfect for small websites with a set of static HTML pages.
But for some serious business, may be even for blogging, you have to think twice…
One response so far
Yahoo is worthless web hosting provider… I had also same type of experience, I am moved to Hostgator and dreamhost…