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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.."
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?
.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!
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
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.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
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?
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
Hey Slashdot admins, are you moving over to Yahoo? I bet that'd cut back on your hosting costs by quite a bit. That'd also be a great test of how truly unlimited it is.
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.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it does.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
3 months later, an upset Yahoo Exec was overheard saying,
Tis no man, tis a remorseless eating machine.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
They already are moving into this area.
What do you think they're building all those shiny new datacenters for?
Not unlimited at all.... they just redefine unlimited.
http://us.rd.yahoo.com/smallbusiness/Lwebhosting/home/bb/*http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/unlimited/
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.
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.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
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.
expandfairuse.org
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:
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.)
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
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.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I try my best with my own modest server, but $12 a month? I'll bite, Yahoo will you host it?
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.
Hmm, maybe Microsoft will sign up for an account and try to ruin Yahoo so their stock tanks and they can buy them cheaper?
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
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.
The company that came on and said 40 hours a week peek-time. Unlimited off-peak. Then several months later declared "Unlimited".
;-)
And we've never gone 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.
Wasn't until broadband came around that prices were able to be raised again.
It's not always an impossible thing...
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?)
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
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
No, you've got it all wrong. You're going to get unlimited storage and data transfer, at very high speeds. Unfortunately, all your pages will be modified in real time to include a nice little header: "Yahoo Hosting: Powered By Microsoft!!!"
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
heh.
Oh, your going to buy us? thats great, here's the keys. BTW, we have ten million people using unlimited bandwidth and storage. Good luck.
The next day every geek int he land is putting up and pulling off 10s of gigs of files.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/unlimited/
Lots of disclaimers. No hard numbers. Definitely nothing to do with unlimited.
What do you think they're building all those shiny new datacenters for? Heating? When I need to warm up my apartment, I just pull a 500Gb drive for a moment and then put it back in and warm up while my RAID 5 rebuilds.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
I had the $11.95/month plan before it went unlimited, and it survived Slashdot just fine. It barely even slowed down at the peak. I switched to inmotionhosting to save some money, but I don't know how they will do under the same conditions. I supposedly get 15TB of monthly data transfer, which works out to about 50MBps continuous. Wikipedia only uses about 48TB/month according to something I read.
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.
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
Looks like we just solved W3C's problem.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch