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Yahoo! Web Hosting

Yahoo! offers fewer levels of Web hosting than most other companies in this roundup, targeting customers with only basic needs. But what Yahoo! lacks in breadth it makes up for in exceptional ease of use and unique features such as automatic site snapshotsa convenient backup-and-restore mechanism. Yahoo! Web Hosting's prices are aggressive, too, starting at $11.95 a month for a small-scale plan with support by e-mail only. For e-commerce capabilities, you must sign up for a Yahoo! Store, at $49.95 a month plus transaction fees.

Although Yahoo! has offered Web hosting of sorts since its 1999 acquisition of GeoCities, it was only toward the end of 2002 that the company launched a more traditional, business-oriented hosting service. The service focuses entirely on shared-hosting plans running on Linux and supports only a limited selection of scripting languages. Its interface borrows heavily from that of the more consumer-oriented Yahoo! GeoCities. (See the sidebar "Easy Site Building on the Cheap.")

But Yahoo! Web Hosting builds beyond GeoCities, offering direct FTP access and the ability to create database-driven Web sites using MySQL and PHP. Power users may bemoan the absence of both lower-level access via telnet or SSH and CGI scripting, but that won't bother customers who want to manage their sites and storefronts with a minimum of fuss.

What may bother them is the hoops the service makes you jump through to set up e-mail accounts. Each POP mailbox must be linked to a Yahoo! user name, and any employee who doesn't already have a Yahoo! account will have to create one and suffer through a tedious (and very insistent) series of marketing questionnaires and opt-out e-mail solicitations. Yahoo! should address this if it's serious about serving the interests of paying business customers.

Despite this e-mail setup drawback, the user-friendliness of Yahoo! Web Hosting makes it a good choice for the budget-conscious.