Yahoo Offers All-You-Can-Eat Storage and Bandwidth

Lucas123 writes "Yahoo this week opened up a new monthly Web Hosting service for small and medium sized businesses that allows unlimited hosted storage capacity and bandwidth for $11.95 a month. Yahoo had been charging $12 a month for 5GB of disk space and 200GB of bandwidth; $20 a month for 10GB disk space and 400GB of bandwidth; and $40 for 20GB disk space and 500GB bandwidth.."

Comments

Unlimited is easy.... when you redefine unlimited.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not unlimited at all.... they just redefine unlimited.

http://us.rd.yahoo.com/smallbusiness/Lwebhosting/home/bb/*http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/unlimited/

Re:Small and medium businesses?

[paitre]

This won't meet the needs of large businesses.

not even remotely.

And these are -explicitly- shared hosting accounts, and there are some restrictions - including how quickly you can grow your disk usage, and if you are using too much bandwidth you'll be flagged. Another is that they explicitly are saying that it's not to be used as a datawarehousing resource.

All things that a large business is going to want to do.

Re:Hmmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

Turns out you can have 500 gb of files, but coincidentally it takes just enough cpu to copy the file that they kick you off.

I've had that happen to me few years ago when I was inexpirienced dealing with hosting providers. I filled the disk with 30GB of data (most of it temporary). My limit supposedly 300GB. My account was suspended.

But you see, the tiny print said, I can host up to 300GB of data, but up to 5 GB of scripts and software, 5GB of backups and archives, 5GB of media and images and 5GB of text documents. Other than that, I guess I could spend the remaining 280GB on configuration files and folders.

It's a gimmick

[Dekortage]

Most small business sites will never use even 100gb of data. We offer shared hosting at ~$15/month for 200GB disk, 2tb bandwidth, and of our customers who use it, most could downgrade to cheaper accounts ($8? $4.50?) without a problem**. Yahoo knows this about its own customers, too, so this is likely a gimmick to give the impression of a "deal" while knowing most people won't actually consume much. Also note this quote from Yahoo's unlimited email FAQ: "The purpose of unlimited storage isn't to provide an online storage warehouse. Usage that suggests this approach gets flagged by Yahoo! Business Email's anti-abuse controls." Or, elsewhere in the help system:

So what does "unlimited" mean, really?

Disk space:
You can now create as large a site as you like (you won't face an upper limit, or "ceiling"), but we will place some constraints on how fast you can grow. In other words, you can add as much content as you want, but maybe not all at once. The vast majority of our customers' sites grow at rates well within our rules, however, and will not be impacted by this constraint.

Data transfer:
In most cases, if you use our service appropriately, visitors to your web site will be able to download and view as much content from your site as they like. However, in certain circumstances, our server processing power, server memory, or anti-abuse controls could limit downloads from your site.

You can also upload as much as content as you like each month, subject only to the rules that control how fast your site can grow (see above).

OK. What exactly is that speed of growth?

(**Yes, I realize that some Arrow Bay customers are reading this. Check your disk and bandwidth usage: if it's always significantly under what you're paying for, consider downgrading to the next package for your next billing cycle. Seriously.)

Re:One size fits all

[Dekortage]

Well, maybe you shouldn't go with a "traditional" hosting plan. Find a web hosting company like us (or, frankly, many others) who let you add bandwidth to your hosting account on a monthly basis. So in theory, you could have an account with 5gb of disk space and 10 terabytes of bandwidth...

Re:"Unlimited" my ass

[timster]

I just have to say that replacing the second "means" with "does" makes the quote 72% less awesome.

Re:One size fits all

[cliveholloway]

I recommend Nearly Free Speech - this will suit your needs incredibly well.

Unlimited == Undetermined

[Traa]

http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/unlimited/

Lots of disclaimers. No hard numbers. Definitely nothing to do with unlimited.

Re:Could this be used as a backup service?

[Em Ellel]

I was already looking into an online backup service (such as mozy.com) that would keep an off site backup of my files. Mozy has 'unlimited' storage too but only allows one person at a time to access the data. This would be great for mirroring files (such as class documents for students to access).
Does anyone know a good way to use this service as an automatic backup? I'm thinking rsync if they support ssh or sftp. Is there OS X / unix backup software like Mozy's out there that will do this with any web host, or should I use a cron job? Frankly - no. The terms flat out say that you cannot use it for storage of data. Its for running a public web sites and storage of data needed for the site only, you cannot use it to do backups, etc. Also, the terms also say that since these are shared servers, your load is only unlimited as long as it is not interfering with other services - i.e. it is FAR from unlimited - more like un-metered but at a their whim. Its a great deal for a small site to not worry about bandwidth overages but its not unlimited by any stretch of the imagination.

Re:One size fits all

[corvair2k1]

I have to also recommend nearlyfreespeech.net, which charges you for the bandwidth and disk you use on a daily basis. Very very reasonable.