Yahoo! hosting is total crap, seriously, don’t use it.

I’ve used many hosts in my time on the internet, using all sorts of backends handed off to me by clients or given to me by friends. Not all of them have been great, limited by their weak control panels and low settings… but none and I mean NONE have been as bad as Yahoo hosting. This is the third time I’ve had a problem with them and it’s not over simple mistakes, it’s about HORRIBLE coding and BAD decisions. My first issue with them was a O.o and a half. While clicking around their backend that looks like it was designed in the early 90′s, I seemingly BROKE the backend. I locked myself out, only to always get an error page when trying to get back in. I had to call support to verify that I had “found a bug” and it took them 3-4 days to resolve. You have to write some pretty bad code to make this happen.

After they fixed that bug and I was able to login again, I tried to start off on my original goal of setting up a MySQL database for use by a web application. Didn’t get to far there! I don’t remember this part too in depth, nor do I care to fact check the details in fear I may break this frail control panel but this innovative solution included using an iframe that passed your credentials to what seemed to be a stripped down version of phpMyAdmin that failed along the way… I tried it again and ended up in failtown twice. I can’t delete the databases because some information was lost along the way and now I’m stuck with two folders I can’t delete either.

Want SSL? HAHAHAHA, HAHAHAHA, Ha! If you want to use SSL, you can drop files in a folder they give you… HOW CONVENIENT!

Hmm, well I guess this actually brings me to my 4th issue with them. The popular method used for doing all sorts of nifty tricks with apache without having access to the httpd.conf, including URL rewrites/redirects (which I was using it for), the .htaccess file is not useable on Yahoo hosting. Yahoo’s faq says, o hai guys, here’s some info on htaccess but YOU CAN’T USE IT!. Now… one of the intents of my recent upgrades was to reduce the number of pages on the website (a legacy issue I was slowly working to resolve). The solution to streamline this process and avoid a bunch of 404s / bad links on search engines is to create rewrites/redirects to point users to the new pages based on the old URLs. With only 5 lines, I managed to cover all pages locally… but I can’t upload the .htaccess file to yahoo.

The solution? Recreate every old page and use a 0 second redirect…. soo…. that means I’d technically be increasing the number of files on the site by ~120% or build xml sitemaps and take the hit for a few weeks while the search engines re0index everything. Pardon my French but that’s some bullshit.

So just a warning, DON’T USE Yahoo hosting if you want to do anything more than host a few html files.

I much happier with Dreamhost, who is cheap, effective, scalable and uses a MUCH better (custom) control panel than any other host I’ve had. I can even use SSH without jumping through hoops our using a stupid autogenerated login name (sup 1and1?).