Web Analytics RiceHigh's Pentax Blog: YAHOO Web Hosting SUCKS!

Saturday, November 14, 2009

YAHOO Web Hosting SUCKS!

This was what Yahoo announced and advertised before they closed the Geocities on October 26:-

http://one.yahoo-email.com/w/webview/fzd23092bsglkw5/496510022

Quoted:- "What You Need to Do
Not much! After October 26, 2009, when GeoCities closes, your friends and family will still be able to view your web site as usual. When you sign in to your GeoCities Control Panel, we'll show you how to move your entire GeoCities account — including your files, images, and monthly bill — to Yahoo! Web Hosting with just a few clicks."

"During this process, we'll ask you to choose a domain name. A personalized domain name (such as widgetdesigns.com) can make your site look more professional — and you'll get one free as part of your new service. After you choose a domain, you can manage your site with your new Web Hosting tools. We'll also redirect visitors from your GeoCities web address to your domain."

I was so naive to believe what they said. On October 29, I was asked to choose a domain name. I followed exactly all the procedures as prompted, entered all the information and most importantly, paid immediately as required, for $20.85 for 3 months for the first payment! Then I was waiting for my new domain to be and my site to be online again. But since then, nothing happened, my domain has ever "Pending" and has NEVER been Active and my site has been all down! It has now been more than two weeks (but they promised three days)! And, all my files cannot be found and they are all gone! (When the files are all gone, "redirect" what??)

In addition to the never-active domain, I have tried to re-upload some of my old html pages to see if re-direction works (as there is a temporary page link before my domain works, if it could). Unfortunately, this re-direction doesn't work neither, all of my old Geocities links will only be forwarded to the temporary main page of my pending domain. See this example for my K-mount Technical Page (of which I have uploaded the html page for testing). Click the link and you will know! :-(

I send several emails to the Yahoo "Support", they seldom responded and each time I have to send a number of emails and waited for days before I could get a totally useless and irresponsible response. It seems that they don't care for anything. The ONLY thing that they have succeeded to do was to bill me immediately before anything happened. Since that and then, they have NOT provided me any service and nothing has worked. In fact, what they have done are Indifferent from Thieves and Robbers, if I had to describe what has been happening!

Anyway, now what I have to do is to cancel the Yahoo account and urge my money back. But I bet they would rob me without giving me back my money and ignore completely till the end of the days. YAHOO! is simply Robber!

Btw, for the days to come, I shall repair the death Blog pictures and images first and I shall give priorities to blog images and then the pictures and links contained in those more popular articles. I think it is just impossible for me to repair all the death links but I shall choose to recover those as far as possible, one by one, with priority.

Next, if time allows, I shall choose to re-publish (and maybe also update) some of the useful and key old articles of mine, like the K-mount Technical Page, Exposure Bases and Testing Page, Flash Technologies and P-TTL Page and so on..

Finally, I apologise once again hereby to my readers for all the inconvenience caused. It is just my fault to trust the Yahoo! despite that their past track records are really rather poor - my only hope was to keep my old links without any changes, but now surely it is in vain! I don't mind to pay more expensively, but even I paid, it didn't work! (and possibly it will never work!)

Update (11-23):

Yahoo finally admitted there were issues and they have just resolved all those a few days after their had acknowledged all the issues that I had reported and they apologised also.

I did accept their apologies. This story tells once again if problems persist and the service provider or the product manufacturer just ignores the problems but just only know playing around and try to fool the customers and users, the situations will only deteriorate and the customers will go away, with anger.

In fact, I have been finding a new hosting company recently and will surely go away and buy another service if Yahoo continued to ignore me in that way and didn't admit the issues (and haven't resolved those). I think they have done the right things just in time, before I "switched", although they have been unreasonably late - my site, control panel and tools have not been working for almost one month!

Now that my new domain is now active and all the found ridiculous system errors are gone. Re-direction works but only at root level for the homepage only but all hosted pictures within the Yahoo server will be re-directed automatically, if they are linked from the Yahoo pages (so that I do not need to edit my old Yahoo pages for all those picture links just because of the change of domain). As for my Blogger pages, I am trying to repair the links as far as possible when I see the death ones. Or at least I have repair most of the links under the tag "My Photos". (And, the full size samples in some of the articles will be re-uploaded / re-edited the links, when I have the time, at a later stage.)

Comments (5)

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TWICE you deleted my post showing your domain is active and fine. What are you so paranoid about? Any doofus can find that info in a heartbeat. It's up to you to figure out what you probably broke... ;)
I've been using Yahoo web hosting for some years. It got a little squirrely a couple of years ago when they were moving to a new server farm but other than that, I've used their service since 2001 wthout incident. But then I didn't try to transfer from GEOCITIES either.
Well i don't think it sucks, it has a nice package free domain name, customer support, 5GB of disk space and the rest of them. I have someone is using it and she said that since she has being using she has never experienced any incident. It also comes with a grand opening email that announces site launches. Maybe it had problems but that doesn't mean its not reliable.
1 reply · active 608 weeks ago
It got a little squirrely many decades ago when they were shifting to a new hosting server village, but other than that, I've used their assistance since 2001 without occurrence. But then I didn't try to exchange from GEOCITIES either.
I have a client who insisted on going BACK to Yahoo Webhosting after I switched them to Bluehost. It was right when Bluehost got hacked/attacked and they had serious downtime issues for nearly an entire week sometime around August of 2013. The clients reason for wanting to go back was some issues they were having receiving/sending email which I think was some conflict between their ISP (verizon) and Bluehost. It was never resolved as they don't have an in-house IT people so I told him, "Find, ok I'll move your Wordpress based website back to Yahoo."

Well, what a &*#@ing nightmare it has been dealing with Yahoo webhosting. Guaranteed hold time of more than 1 hour each time I call their 'tech' support. Their control panel (if you can call it that) is the worst p.o.s. control panel I've ever seen. It's massively confusing, extremely limited in options and doesn't make any sense. Even the tech support guy admitted that their service is really messed up. In fact, the tech support guy had to guess what I was looking at because his screen didn't match what I was seeing on the Control Panel so everything he was telling me to click on simply wasn't there. After 3 phone calls, I still have not resolved all the issues of trying to set up a simple Wordpress website. I had many issues simply trying install phpMyAdmin which was incredibly frustrating. Once I got that set up, there were still more issues as somehow there were already 6 databases created. The 'tech' support guy could not tell me which ones I could delete, nor could he answer why there were six databases set up. My clients previous website at Yahoo didn't even use a database. Naturally I deleted all the databases to start fresh. This caused phpMyAdmin install to awry. So then I had to walk through the process AGAIN of getting that set up. And oh by the way, it's an older version of phpMyAdmin and there is no way to upgrade.

Also, accessing the FTP is a huge pain. I could not connect using FireFTP which is the free plugin I use for Firefox that works great with EVERY OTHER WEBHOSTING company in the world. With Yahoo webhosting, I had to download filezilla from the filezilla project website, install it, then use that to connect.

After I get Wordpress installed, I figured out that only the homepage is working. It appears that mod_rewrite isn't work. So naturally I look to the .htaccess file on the server. Oh whoops, Yahoo doesn't allow .htaccess. WTF you have go to be kidding me!?!?!

So now I'm on the phone yet again, holding for over and hour, waiting and waiting and waiting, so I can hopefully get the mod_rewrite problem resolved so my client and his online viewers can see more than the #*#@ing home page!

Then there is the problem of resetting passwords for the emails that were previously set up by my client before we moved his stuff to Bluehost. Emails were set up on Yahoo webhosting account and I can't find anywhere to reset the passwords for the emails through the control panel where the user can create and edit settings for email accounts tied to the domain.

Yahoo webhosting is truly the most piece of sh!t business I've ever dealt with, and that's saying something because I used to have ATT internet and phone service. Their services are just horrible and it's hard to believe they still have customers. I told my client after I get this fixed that I will not deal with Yahoo again for their website needs and if they need additional help, they will have to call someone else. So I dumped my own client because their refusal to go with a real webhosting service. I'm not saying Bluehost is the end-all-b-all, let's face it, their service has gone downhill over the past year, but still...ANYONE is better yahoo webhosting.

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