Best Web Hosting 2008: Expert Webmaster Reviews

Price

Yahoo is the #1 web site destination in the world and receives more of our internet traffic than any other web site has for the past 8+ years. As the #1 site in the world Yahoo has learned that quality may cost a little bit more but that having made the investment in the best of breed technology, the savings in downtime and aggravation far outweighs the investment. Yahoo does cost a few dollars more than some of our other featured hosts on our list but it is absolutely worth it for those of you who want a get up & running fast, easy to use product with incredible reliability.

In addition to the free web site designer and ecommerce storefront features you also get a Free Domain name plus $100 free Yahoo search marketing and an additional $50 free Google search marketing which allows you to send targeted traffic to your site for potential purchases. Add to that a free web site search submission tool to get your site listed in many more top ranking search portals.

Score: 8.5/10

Server Reliability And Performance

Yahoo certainly knows server hardware and how to make their systems and hardware reliable. Again we go back to the fact that Yahoo has the #1 web site in the world and has literally billions of hits each day with news feeds and streaming video that is hosted by their data facilities. They have transferred this technical expertise to their web hosting and storefront ecommerce services and to say that the result is outstanding would be an understatement. The only thing that might out shadow their easy to use get up on the web fast technologies is the fact that they have probably the most reliable servers in the industry.

Score: 9.5/10

Uptime

When you have the opportunity to view a world class data facility, especially one like Yahoo’s, and you start to compare that facility to almost any other you have seen the differences are immense and awe inspiring. We’re talking about absolutely everything that you can think of including 24x7x365 monitoring, multiple backbone links to the internet through several top carriers to make sure your site is lightening fast and is always available. The facilities are further protected UPS power supply standards which means that if power is lost to the building or the grid, there is a wall of batteries that instantly switches on making sure that there is no drop in power to all of the servers. The batteries are then backed up by diesel power generators and enough fuel to keep those generators running for weeks. This is another terrific area of Yahoo’s service to their customers who rely on their 99% uptime guarantee to keep their online businesses online.

Score: 8.5/10

Customer Service

Yahoo is one of a few web hosting companies featured here who does not have around the clock customer service. They do have extended call service weekdays from 6am – 6pm PST and they do have excellent email customer service 24x7x365 and they are the only one of our web hosts which we are currently featuring here which supports a multiple language control panel with multiple language email support which is why they are such a tremendous draw for web sites around the world.

Score: 8.5/10

Customer Feedback

The feedback we have seen is that many people really like the ease of use and features that Yahoo provides to build a site quickly, get it out on the internet in front of the right type of visitors and start making money without heavy programming and the need for an expensive developer.

There is some limitation to the yahoo service in terms of sophistication and you cannot place hard core gaming, music storage or file sharing software on the servers which is good for those of you who want a reliable business platform and not as good if the servers are more for hobby or extra curricular activities. For servers that handle more of the multi media part of the internet you probably want to look at a VPS or Dedicated server.

Score: 7.0/10