Yahoo! Web Hosting Services

Yahoo provides an extensive web hosting service. It is particularly helpful for those who don’t have any web building experience as well as those that do. Yahoo! is one of the largest web hosting services as they host more than 30 million websites. They have the experience and reliability needed to build your website.

Yahoo! Web Hosting offers you three options to create your web pages. The first is to use their Site Builder tools and do it yourself, use your own tools and Yahoo!’s scripting tools (they support third-party design tools like Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive, and Microsoft FrontPage (2000 and 2002), or you can hire one of their professionals to create a web site for you (they offer an affordable way to do this).

If you choose to build the site yourself, you can download Yahoo’s SiteBuilder software. It takes the user step-by-step through the sitebuilding process. The good thing about it is no technical experience is required to build a professional-looking site. PC Magazine said that Yahoo!’s Sitebuilder offers “exceptional ease of use”. There are over 380 design templates to choose from if you do not start from scratch. Once you have a starting point, you can use their Site Creation Wizard to walk you through the rest of the site construction. There is 24-hour support and their Getting Started guides answer user questions quickly.

Web hosting plans start with a minimum of 5GB of disk space and 200GB per month of data transfer. If that’s not enough space, then an upgrade with more disk space and bandwith is available with Yahoo’s Web Hosting Standard or Professional Plans.

Yahoo! boasts a solid reputation of reliability and security. Their well-noted uptime is consistently at 99.9%. This ensures that customers can access your site almost all the time. Additionally, they back up your web pages so no changes are lost. All data on your web pages are safeguarded against tampering and fraud. Extensive physical and electronic security measures protect their data centers. Other security features include: shared SSL certificates, password protection that allows your customers access to all or part of your site, and advanced anti-spam and virus software aimed at protecting your email.

Their pricing plans are affordable for whatever your needs are: Yahoo! Web Hosting Starter: $11.95, Yahoo! Web Hosting Standard: $19.95, and Yahoo! Web Hosting Professional: $39.95 . All plans are billed on a monthly basis and include a $25 setup fee. Regardless of the plan you go with, the price of the domain name is included. With automatic domain locking, unauthorized transfer of your domain is prevented.

Yahoo! also offers a lot of flexibility with the email addresses available under your domain name. Gain credibility with an email address that matches your domain, such as yourname@yoursite.com and 2GB of storage. All email messages accommodate up to 20MB of attachments, so you can send and receive large files.

Each email account includes spam software. It’s compatible with Microsoft Outlook and other popular email clients so that you can use the program you’re most comfortable with when sending email. Also, there are over 200 email addresses available so you can give accounts to everyone on your staff or your friends.

In addition to site building tools and the extensive email features, Yahoo! also offers blogging options. Two of the most popular blogging tools are available through Yahoo!: WordPress and Movable Type. If you want to host a blog on your site, Yahoo! makes it possible. It’s easy to post entries to your blog as often as you life. This allows your visitors to get involved with your site by reading your posts and leaving comments.

Finally, there are web site enhancements like PayPal buttons, photo galleries, guestbooks, community bulletin boards, or your own content portal. Counters are also available that help you keep track of the visitors to your site. In addition, guestbooks and premade email forms collect visitor feedback that help you decide how to maintain your web site.