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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.."
Will this service continue after Yahoo is bought? Is it just something to cause their price to go up before they are bought by claiming more customers?
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Yahoo's move is the inevitable endgame in an ongoing arms race between major shared hosting firms, who have been super-sizing the disk space and data transfer on their accounts for two years. Here's the larger question: Is this just a marketing gimmick; a bright shiny "UNLIMITED" bauble to dangle in front of small business folk? 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.
Storage space has been a big issue of contention on Dreamhost as well. I signed up for their service, feeling happy that I had 500G of remote storage to use as I pleased. It turned out it wasn't that simple.
Unlimited sounds great, until you start using a large amount of space and Yahoo has to find some reason to say that you're not complying with their terms of service.
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.
Maybe the two are connected. It could be that closing their music service is leaving them with some extra bandwidth/storage/servers and they'd rather bring in some revenue then let those resources sit idle.
Keep in mind that Yahoo can deliver unlimited bandwidth much cheaper than a hosting company can. You have to keep in mind that Yahoo has an expansive network and they are doing settlement-free peering with all of the Tier 1 ISP's, as well as anyone else who happens to be hooked up to a common peering point. Hell, even at our regional hosting center we're connected to a peering point and we peer directly with Yahoo, bypassing the Internet.
The point is that all that bandwidth doesn't cost Yahoo nearly as much as a traditional hosting provider would have to pay for it.
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Even if they police this, it appears I can now start that web-hosting business I always wanted to start: I'll give you 10TB of storage and 1 TB/month throughput for, say, $1/month. If I can sell that to 13 customers then I'm ahead, right? And I'm a legitimate business, right? So they can't cut me off, right?
(Since it has to go through HTML, it'll run through some html-based web-management system like plesk, but at the rates I'm offering, how could you say "no"...)
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How about $8 for 500gb of disk and 5tb of bandwidth ? Or even 8tb of bandwidth or 700gb, if you get the right promocode ? Dream host..ing ? (this is what a professional calls "surreptitious advertising", just in case you wanted a contrast to your spamlink). There are some people competing in a lunar-cyclish page way, and HOSTs drinking GATORade are out there as well. and of our customers who use it, most could downgrade to cheaper accounts ($8? $4.50?) without a problem**. Wow, that sounds reasonable, especially your recommendation to downgrade after the stars. Heartfelt, even.
Say, why don't you automatically downgrade those people if they are below usage, and automatically upgrade them to the next-higher tier when they exceed their limits ? Now that would be service. I'm sure some companies offer it. 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." Yupp, and I especially like that kind of language. You neglect to mention, of course, that Arrow Bay's (limited) service actually contains teh same kind of language
Certain dreamy hosts have changed their "interpretation" of their ToS in that way recently, as well. If anybody ever sells you any hosting service with > 20 gb of disk space, you can be all but certain that they really only mean "in theory", never "in practice".
Oh, do you know where I found that package ? Not near the limits. Not at all near the limits. You first go to the legal terms of service, then search another link way down on the page, then scroll way down (it's the second to last paragraph). That seems really open and honest. Really.