Internet mega-brand Yahoo! was founded back in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo and went public two years later. As an internet portal, Yahoo! offers everything from e-mail to games, news to instant messaging, but is mainly web directory and search engine. Yahoo! has more than 500 million users world-wide and claims to be the world’s largest global online network of integrated services. While not best known as a web host, Yahoo! Is in fact a major player in the hosting industry, using it’s vast economies of scale to drive down prices.
Company and Services
Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale California, and has many offices globally across Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia and Canada. It currently has more than 13,000 employees. Yahoo! launched its hosting division – Yahoo! Small Business – in 2002.
Today, thanks to its substantial brand power, Yahoo! is one of the largest web hosting providers in the world; focusing on shared hosting via the Linux platform.
The features of the Yahoo! package are fairly simple when compared to many others in the industry, and may appeal to customers with little web knowledge and basic requirements. However, it does come with unlimited disk space, bandwidth and emails, as well as easy-to-use web design software. There is also the Merchant Solution package for e- commerce customers , which the company claims that powers one in eight online stores.
Yahoo! aims to provide 99.9% uptime with its hosting, but does not guarantee it. It does, however, have a 30 day money back guarantee and lots of resources, covering everything from advice on getting your website up and running, to tools and strategies to market your site. More technical enquiries are dealt with via 24/7 email and phone customer support.
Yahoo! supports a number of charities – see Yahoo for Good (http://forgood.yahoo.com/index.html and http://uk.promotions.yahoo.com/yahoo-for-good/) for lists of US and UK/Irish charities. Yahoo! was PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice for hosting in June 2008.
Related Links
Resource library: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/webhosting
Help: http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/r-index
Corporate blogs: http://ycorpblog.com/subscribe
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