Durango Bill’s
Reviews
GeoCities/Yahoo Web Hosting is
Strongly Not Recommended
Topics covered
Yahoo Web Hosting (a customer review/rating for both Free and Premium
Web Hosting)
Strongly Not Recommended
PageBuilder Woes
Do you enjoy being trapped in quicksand?
Yahoo’s Customer Service Department
Actually it’s
“Yahoo’s Customer Aggravation Department” under a
pseudonym
Banned by Yahoo
Google shows thousands of hits using
combinations of: blacklisted/banned by/from Yahoo. There are many
other victims - including “Yours truly”.
You can’t win, You can’t break even, and
You can’t get out of the game
If you go with Yahoo, you will lose.
It’s an ill wind that blows no good
There was a positive
Happiness is . . .
Yahoo is getting what it deserves
How to start up your website outside of Yahoo
Avoid being trapped in a similar mess
Yahoo Web Hosting
(Free and/or Premium)
Strongly Not Recommended
Yahoo/GeoCities entices you with “GeoCities FREE Web
Hosting”. Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman once
wrote a book titled “There's No Such Thing As a Free
Lunch”. Mr. Friedman knew what he was talking about as it is
still true.
You can start up a “Free Website” at
Yahoo/Geocities. They will of course plaster their advertising on it to
pay for the “free service”. If your site is at all
successful, Yahoo will send you a notice that they will periodically
shut it down because you are exceeding your bandwidth limit. Your
choice is to either put up with the periodic shut-downs, or start
paying for a “Premium” service. So much for “FREE Web
Hosting”.
PageBuilder Woes
If you use either the free or premium services at Yahoo,
you will probably use their PageBuilder editor to create your web pages
– assuming it is working properly. In 2002 Yahoo tried to install
a new version of PageBuilder which not only didn’t work, it
destroyed people’s preexisting web pages. Furthermore they
didn’t offer
the old version as a backup. This was documented at Geek.com under the
headline “Yahoo! PageBuilder woes”
(http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2002apr/gee20020401010990.htm).
Also check out the thousands of complaints that have
showed up on the Yahoo Message Boards over several years. Both free and
premium accounts have run into problems.
http://messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=GN&board=1600630256&tid=whywontitwork&sid=1600630256&action=m&mid=1
For example:
Msg # 1: “Why won't it
work?”
Msg. 500: “WARNING-Do NOT use pagebuilder”
Msg. 1000: “Re: Why isn't pagebuilder working?”
Msg. 1500: “Having problems launching pagebuider”
Msg. 2000: “Re: Why won't it work?”
Msg. 2500: “Re: STOP BLAMMING YAHOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” …
“when I go to save the page it gives me an error on the
saving”
But enough of the “Free Web Hosting” and
“PageBuilder” woes. Let’s go on to Yahoo
“Customer Service”.
Yahoo’s
“Customer Service” Service Department
Yahoo claims
to have a “Customer Service”
Department. If you want to contact them, Yahoo’s Customer Support
telephone number is: (408) 349-1572.
Alternate
unconfirmed numbers are:
(408)
349-3300
(866)
562-7219 (Unconfirmed
- but you might want to try this
one first.)
(408)
349-5151
(408)
349-7572
(866)
800-8092 (Unconfirmed - there have been reports that this one also
works.)
(866)
781-9246
Note: The above list is getting a little old. If you have recent
telephone numbers that work, please forward them to me so I can post
the information for others.
Bill Butler
lisabill@mywdurango.net
(Remove the “w” for a valid E-mail address)
Typically, if you call Yahoo, you will get a prerecorded voice
answer. You will not get a human being that can help you with your
problem. However, you will have a choice of several other selections.
Each of these other selections will take you to another
prerecorded announcement, but not a human being. Each will again give
you several selections that take you to another prerecorded
announcement. You will never reach a human being that can answer your
question.
In reality, Yahoo doesn’t have a Customer Service
Department. Yahoo has a Customer Aggravation Department that
masquerades under the title “Yahoo Customer Service”.
Other people have had a similar problem. If you run a
Google search using “Yahoo Customer Service” some of the
results that come up are (all from page 1):
Want to join the club? But it could be worse, and in fact, it was.
Banned by Yahoo
Suppose Yahoo was (is) your web host. Then suppose Yahoo
banned you from their Yahoo Search Engine. (Yahoo marks your website
files so that they won’t be listed in any Yahoo search.) However,
Yahoo doesn’t tell you that they have done this. If you ask them
why, at best, you will get an automated reply that says you are
violating their terms of service.
This doesn’t tell you anything as it doesn’t
specify which “Term of Service” or which of your web pages
might be a problem. In short Yahoo has a mystery
process that decides
whether you should be “Banned from Yahoo”. The logic is not
known. In practice you will never be reinstated in Yahoo’s Search
Engine. Sound unreal? It has happened to me. Yahoo blacklisted my
entire website starting in late 2004 - at least six months before I
wrote this page, and continues to ban all of my web pages from its
search engine.
If you run a Google search using “banned from
Yahoo” (exact phrase and use the quotes), you will get about 835
hits (as of 5/18/05). If you vary the search phrase to “banned by
Yahoo”, you will get another 783 hits. “Blacklisted by
Yahoo” only gets 64 hits, but if you leave off the quotes and
just use blacklisted
Yahoo you get 132,000 hits. (Not all of these are
relevant, but a quick browse shows large numbers of them are relevant.)
And you want to pay for this “service”?
You can’t win,
You can’t break even, and You can’t get out of the game
At one time,
Yahoo
was the host for my website. It would be much easier if Yahoo would let
you
have access to the “Registry Key” that would let you change
the domain
information. This would allow a seamless transfer to another web host.
(After
you have your files set up with the new host.) Then you could close
your Yahoo
account at everyone’s convenience.
Unfortunately, Yahoo won’t let you do this. (Or at
least, didn’t let me do it.) The only option I had was to
completely shut down my Yahoo hosted website. This
triggered a sequence of events that allowed my domain name registrar
(Melbourne
IT) to send me the registry key. After getting the Registry Key, I was
able to
restart my website with my new host. The following is a chronology of
some of
the problems I had with Yahoo.
Did Yahoo foul up my account? If I went to my usual
website management page, there was a
link for
“Manage my services”. This opened up another link to
“My services”. Presumably
this would lead to screens where I could cancel my account with Yahoo.
Except I
was informed that I didn’t have an account with Yahoo –
thus I couldn’t close it.
(The “Service Options” link on the site management page and
other access routes
to “my account” produced similar results.)
No problem, just use Google (Google is your friend) to
find a telephone number inside Yahoo where you can reach a real person.
I did reach Yahoo tech support.
Together we
walked through the problem. Tech support was unable to close my
account, but
they assured me that “Yahoo billing” could solve the
problem. They then tried
to transfer me to billing, but instead the line disconnected.
After again calling the number that Google found, I
managed to reach Yahoo Billing. Together we
walked through the process of closing my account. Yahoo billing was
unable to
close my account. The problem was then “kicked upstairs”.
Eventually someone found
a “Delete Key” that worked.
It’s an ill wind that blows no good
Finally, there was a positive to my problems with Yahoo.
Yahoo’s accounting problem included their mechanism for charging
me the usual fee for hosting my website. In researching the problem, I
discovered that they had not been charging me anything since August
2004. I notified them of this two weeks before I closed my account.
They didn’t charge anything in the subsequent two weeks. I
suspect it would have cost Yahoo far more to figure out what happened
than they would get for the normal web hosting fees.
Happiness is . . .
The graph above shows the relative performance of
Yahoo’s stock price vs. Google’s stock price. Since late
2004 Google has soared while Yahoo has dribbled.
My entire web site has been banned from/by Yahoo’s
search engines since late 2004. It seems probable that I am not the
only victim of Yahoo’s lack of consideration for its customers.
If you treat your customers poorly, they will go elsewhere. Guess what
that does to the financial “health” of your company?
How to start up your
website outside of Yahoo
Avoid being trapped in a similar mess
The best way of avoiding the above problems is to avoid
Yahoo as much as possible. If you are looking for free web hosting, try
running a Google search using:
free web hosting reviews
to get some information. However, as noted earlier, “There's No
Such Thing As a Free Lunch”.
If you want to create a serious web site, you are far
better off paying for a web hosting service from a web host that is
reputable.
Again, use Google to search for:
web host reviews
or
web hosting reviews
There will be some variation in the results, but you will find some
good recommendations for under $10 per month.
Most of the better web hosts will include some kind of
editor to help you build your web pages. Most of these have at least
“What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) editing very
similar to an ordinary text editor (e.g. Microsoft Word). Some offer
additional HTML editing.
If you want to build your own pages on your own computer,
and then upload the finished product to your website, I would recommend
KompoZer (http://www.kompozer.net/).
It’s free. As a courtesy, you might want to add “Web page generated via
KompoZer” somewhere on the page. This is the system that I am using,
and it has been working well.
If you want to search further, remember that Google is your friend
(Yahoo isn’t). For
example, try
free WYSIWYG editor reviews
You could also buy web page editors from several sources. For average
web pages without animation, etc., the free stuff works well.
I hope the above information will help you avoid some of
the problems that I have run into with Yahoo.
Recommended Web Host
(Added 11/20/06)
Since the above Yahoo fiasco, I have transferred my
account to iPowerWeb, and they have been my web host since early 2005.
They have provided excellent support and charge only $6.95/mo. (2 year
plan) They have “24/7x365 service - Live Technical Support”
- with real people who can speak and understand “American”.
You can check their packages at: http://www.ipowerweb.com/products/webhosting/index.html
Note about
Google’s/Yahoo’s search engines
For reasons unknown and for which Yahoo refuses to
disclose, this entire website has been banned/blacklisted from
Yahoo’s search engine. Other websites have suffered a similar
fate. If you are trying to find information via Google’s search
engine vs. Yahoo’s search engine, you should understand that
Yahoo’s results may not include the information that you are
seeking.
Bill Butler
Return to Durango Bill's home page
Web page generated via KompoZer
