Yahoo! launches! flat!-!-rate! web! hosting! Yahoo! web site hosting operations are getting a whole lot looser when it comes to counting gigabytes. The well-established small business web hosting arm of the second-banana search firm is moving to a flat-rate model. Subscribers to the new service will pay $11.95 per month, and are welcome to take up as much disk space and …
...by squeezing us poor sods who just use Yahoo for domain registration.
My domain's up for renewal this year. I have it registered via Yahoo(!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111!!!!!!!!!!!!!) On Monday they mailed to let me know the price for this registration was increasing by 30%: from $9.95 per year to $12.95 per year.
I was scratching my head wondering how it suddenly got 30% more expensive for them to record in the Big Book Of Domain Names* that I own www.happyassassin.net; now I know. It didn't. They just need the lucre to subsidize the hosting service. Sigh.
* disclaimer: Big Book Of Domain Names may not actually exist.
Simple idea: use the email to have archives of your files. Just make up an automatic emailer for those files you want to save. Must have lots of space on their servers.
Of course, with 500Gbytes coating only $140 or so, get it yourself.
Didn't the BOFH have some business plan for this?
I *REALLY* wish some government or law agency would do something about all of these companies offering "unlimited" anything. Whenever I hear that word now I'm reminded of the Netflix exec who said something to the effect "Unlimited doesn't mean as many as you want". Terms of use should not be able to change the definition of "unlimited". If Yahoo's servers are unable to cope with the bandwidth and disk space required, then they are not unlimited, and it is false advertising. Period.
wot complete bollox!!! got on the unlimited hosting bandwagon too have they. They're a couple of years behind though, as many hosting companies have used this endlessly as a marketing ploy. You see, as any self respecting person who has any knowledge about hosting will tell you, diskspace and bandwidth are the least of you worries. What you're actually concerned with is resource usage of server ram/cpu. that's what bolloxs up a server (also disk i/o). So in theory, you may have "unlimited" diskspace/bandwidth, but in practice if you try to use up any sizable portion of that, you'll bring the server down (but before you do, your account will be disabled faster than you can say "exclamation mark"). The logic behind this business model for many hosting companies, is that the majority of customers will use their "unlimited" resources reasonably (i.e: the standard plans really, 1 gb diskspace, 20 gb transfer etc), and that only a handful of suckers will actually take "unlimited" at face value and proceed to royally bugger up the system. Hence those will be booted and told to bugger off else where, so that they don't ruin it for the other "nice" customers.
So you get a great marketing gimmick, lots of gullible customers, and kick out the ones that are really bothersome....brilliant....
"So what does "unlimited" mean, really?" yahoo writes, as if "unlimited" is not a word people would be familiar with.
It means they'll offer less than before, only this time they wont tell you how much you can actually use. They can then cherry pick the users they want to keep on their massively oversold service and save up enough cash to fight off M$.
Unlimited seems to have been confused with the word unstated in the past few years.
This announcement is inconsistent with my recent experience of Yahoo Small Business.
On 1 Feb I received an email from Yahoo reminding me that my .net domain registration ‘will renewal’ on 3 March. In the middle of the email, there was the statement:
“Beginning on March 11, 2008, Yahoo!'s annual domain renewal price increases from $9.95 to $12.95 per year”
So my renewal of just a domain will be more that the basic email account with a free domain.
Does anyone know what it is with Yahoo and it's "US-only" everything? I was looking at their ad-placement service (YPN) the other day and that too was only available in the US. Other organisations seem to have no problem with the reality of international commerce, or the legal and financial issues involved -- even far smaller firms than Yahoo.
I'm not sure what proportion of internet users are inside versus outside the US, but I'm pretty confident that excluding all non-US customers isn't good business. Pretty characteristic of that particular firm though.
theotherone said:
"You see, as any self respecting person who has any knowledge about hosting will tell you, diskspace and bandwidth are the least of you worries. What you're actually concerned with is resource usage of server ram/cpu. that's what bolloxs up a server (also disk i/o)"
Maybe by offering unlimited disk-space they're hoping customers will start generating more static pages rather than generating everything on-the-fly like we did in the good old days when disk space was expensive...?
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