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

Hmmm.

[FredFredrickson]

Interesting to see a big company like Yahoo try their hand at the "unlimited" marketing game. Anybody who's had experience in the past with any company who offers "unlimited" knows better- Anybody remember Comcast "unlimited" broadband?

Bunches of online hosting companies offer "unlimited" services with as much space or bandwidth as you need- and all these companies have a disclaimer in their TOS that explains they can't use more than .0001% of their resources. 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. Or some hosting companies go ahead and say it in the TOS- you can't have more than 1% of the alotted bandwidth, other than that it's unlimited!

Eventually, yes, they get brought down. Law suits, investigations, what have you. They will eventually add their limits to the fine print, just like everybody before them. The catch? Everybody with the host will suffer horrible service up till the day the limit is defined, and after that, it probably won't get much better. That is, if you're not already kicked off their service for using too much of the unlimited service. Anybody not completely disgusted with the service at this point will most likely be offended that their freedom is being taken away and may leave out of protest alone.

You'd think Yahoo would learn better than start a huge marketing campaign on a service they can't possibly keep profitable. Think about it- Yahoo Music Unlimited just closed! It was a nice idea, except it wasn't making them money! This is a huge PR disaster waiting to happen.

Let's just take them up on the offer and get rid of them. Somebody call Google and explain to them there's a new host that will host Google's search engine for $12. We'll see how long Yahoo stays unlimited.

Re:Hmmm.

[ThePromenader]

I really didn't understand how they can offer "unlimited" disk space until I read this in their "terms and conditions" (the fine print, whot):

"You acknowledge that the Web Hosting service is offered as a platform to host and serve web pages and web sites and is not offered for other purposes, such as remote disk space storage. Accordingly, You understand and agree to use the web hosting service solely for the purpose of hosting and serving web pages as viewed through a web browser and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other equivalent technology."

So in other words, websites and databases (for websites) only (will they police this?). Yet there are companies out there offering unlimited disk space for remote storage, and how they go about this, I have yet to understand. Perhaps something along the same lines as Yahoo's former offering?

Re:Timing

[paitre]

They already are moving into this area.

What do you think they're building all those shiny new datacenters for?

Unlimited?

[WK2]

So, is this unlimited, or "Comcast Unlimited (TM)"?

Yahoo's service has been going downhill for years, and now Microsoft is going to be running things. I can imagine some arbitrary restrictions, or "random" failures, that makes this service not so great. Unlimited bandwidth is nice, but if your pages take 20 seconds to render because the download speed is 128K/s, or if it takes 1 week to upload 100 Gigs, it stops looking so good.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't tried this service, and it sounds great. I just wouldn't give my hopes up.

One size fits all

[rastoboy29]

The thing that annoys me about most hosting plans is that they scale up disk space and bandwith together--as if one inevitably follows the other.  For example, I have a miniscule website that hosts a ~200 meg game download.  So I need a whopping ~300 megs of disk space.  But when I get a spike of downloads, I can hit several gigs of bandwith per day.  But I would have to purchase additional "disk space" along with bandwidth if I were going with a traditional hosting plan.

Annoying.

Re:Unlimited is easy.... when you redefine unlimit

[tompaulco]

I think there is something missing within their service terms, like numbers. Okay, so you might not be able to grow as fast you want, well, before I sign on the dotted line, how fast CAN I grow?What happens to people who exceed this amount? Bounce to a higher rate plan, get charged extra for the extra growth?
I think Yahoo is just the latest company to cash in on the "hidden a-la-carte" fee structure. Just like cell phone plans, "Free checking" and just about every other "flat rate service", you can no longer tell in advance what you are going to get charged for something, and every time you tear open a bill, you know there is a good chance that it is going to be 50% higher than the month before because of some obscure item buried deep in the fine print.

Re:The Quota Super-sizing Trend

[eebra82]

Or is it an effective way to attract customers from HostGator who find that 1,000 gigs of disk space is simply not enough? Almost nobody needs this, but some might be influenced by it. I don't think it's so much about attracting customers who need a kazillion gigabytes of space as much as it is attractive to people who just want a service that works without any added costs. I mean, how is a regular guy supposed to know if 50 gigs per month is enough or not? This is flatrate. Use it as you please, just pay the fee and we [Yahoo] will sort the rest.

Re:Small and medium businesses?

[DragonWriter]

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.

Heh. "Unlimited bandwidth", but if you use "too much" you'll be "flagged". IOW, Yahoo! has just joined the long-tradition of "unlimited" hosting services where "unlimited" means "we won't tell you up front what the limits are, but they sure exist, and you'll sure be nailed for breaking them."

Better off getting an account where the limits are disclosed, and you can pay to get them raised.

Uh-oh, says Microsoft

[Tibor the Hun]

I think Microsoft's sphincter just imploded.
Didn't they just figure out a few months ago how to bump up Hotmail storage up from 2 MB? (And still no IMAP or POP for free?)

Why now?

[ghjm]

1. Yahoo isn't the smartest kid on the block, but they aren't *that* dumb. Nobody with a vague clue offers "unlimited" bandwidth or storage. And Yahoo has a vague clue.

2. Isn't it funny that they did this right after the Microsoft takeover offer?

It's possible that this was already in the works and has nothing to do with MS. But it's just so self-evidently stupid that I wonder if senior executives were involved. What's the strategic angle? Do they now accept an MS takeover as inevitable, and want to discredit MS as much as possible post-takeover (because it will be MSHoo, not Yahoo, who gets sued over the "unlimited" claims)? Or are they hoping to attract so many unprofitable bandwidth leeches that their service becomes undesirable and MS loses interest? Or is there a more subtle angle to this?

-Graham

Re:Anyone remember Netcom?

[morcego]

back. Dial-up pretty much was forced away from a per hour rate to a flat $20 fee for unlimited. And the whole industry was moved to a $15-$25 price point.

This is not a good example, since dial-up usage doesn't scale very much. You only have 24 hours/day, and your bandwidth is no more than 56k.

So, you see, if your average user stays connected 3 hours/day, the heavy user will only use 8x time amount. Now, if you consider broadband and your average users transfer 2GB/month, a heavy user will easily transfer 400GB/month. Thats 200 times more. And according to a quick calculation here (could be wrong), it is theoretically possible for a user to use 1.3TB/month on a 4Mbps connection (note: actually bandwidth usage, including protocol overhead etc).

If you consider webhosting, things get even worst. An average user will store 500MB, and transfer 2GB/month (if that). While a heavy user can easily reach 500GB and transfer 2TB/month. In both cases, 1000 times more (or 1024, if you like).

Unlimited can easily become a real nightmare.