E.Webscapes Design - specializing in custom blog designs for WordPress, BuddyPress, Movable Type, TypePad, Expression Engine, E-Commerce and more
It’s no secret that the majority of our clients here at E.Webscapes choose WordPress as their Content Management System (Blogging Platform) of choice. I’ve been contacted by the developers of Movable Type and TypePad, who wanted to know why? Asking if it was because we persuade our clients in one direction, or another. … The truth is? No – we don’t. We’re experienced in many different blogging platforms and will go which ever way our clients want to go. WordPress just seems to be the easiest, most flexible platform available. Not too mention the HUGE development community that keeps making WordPress better and better with each go round. Not too mention the price – you just can’t beat free!
A small disclaimer: A note about my own experience with WordPress and hosting? To be upfront, I own and operate a hosting company – albiet much smaller, and not even in the same league (not even close) than Yahoo with only 6 servers to our name at the moment. I’m not linking my hosting company in this post because I don’t want folks to think I’m making this post as a marketing tool for my own hosting company. I make mention of it only to make note that I see WordPress differently, from a web host standpoint..from the backend and the front end – I’m pretty well versed in it’s use. I’ve done hundreds of installs, custom installs, plugin configurations and custom PHP coding for my clients. I’m experienced enough with the tool to know when it’s working properly, and when it’s clunking along and holding on for dear life.
/ end disclaimer
There was much rejoicing when Yahoo! Hosting announced it’s decision to package a WordPress blog installer within their hosting packages. At first, I thought that was cool. Since then, I’ve done several WordPress blog setups on Yahoo! and am less than thrilled with the results I’m finding. It’s frustrating for me – - but really frustrating for our clients. I’d have to dig through emails and accounts to find the specific statistics – but I can say that after the intial set up on Yahoo!… about 80% of my clients left Yahoo and opted for different hosting after realizing the difficulties involved with trying to host WordPress on Yahoo.
Here are some details we’ve found – hopefully you will find this list helpful when making a decision to host your WordPress blog on Yahoo! hosting. We just don’t think it’s the best idea out there (and maybe someone will come along and let me know a ‘work around’ they’ve found in working with Yahoo! hosting):
Now – as a semi-technical geeky type person, I could probably spend a lot of time to find a work around .. or dig into the PHP files to see if things could be coded differently to get them to work with Yahoo. My clients, however, don’t want to pay my hourly fee to do it – and would rather go through the changing of webhosts, where things actually do work without all the hassle and headaches. I’ll tell you, though, if you spend any amount of time with Yahoo! techincal support on any of these issues – they will refer you to the support forums at WordPress.org. They provide the WordPress software – they just don’t support it.
From my clients standpoint – - ya know, the folks who just want to login and start blogging – they don’t want to worry about these things. They want a solution that works. Period. Yahoo makes it harder than it needs to be – and in my opinion, it’s not worth the effort when there are a multitude of hosting companies out there where you won’t find these issues and problems with upon install.
So, these are just my own headaches I’ve found when working with WordPress on Yahoo! Hosting. Maybe there are fixes for this out there that I haven’t come across yet? I’ve combed through the support forums at WordPress and Googled these issues to death – if anyone has any feedback that would be helpful here, please do share – I’m completely open to suggestions on these frustrations. In the meantime, I don’t recommend Yahoo! hosting for running a WordPress blog. It’s too much work on the backend for users who really aren’t used to having to do that much work – - and it’s more work than it really needs to be.
I started out this posting by explaining that we work with our clients on what they have and what they want. We usually do not try to persuade our clients one way or another one software or hosting – if they come to us with hosting already in place, we work with it. However, when clients come to us with Yahoo hosting intending on using WordPress? I now give them my feedback and experiences in working with WordPress on Yahoo hosting – and will continue to do so, unless I hear differently that there is an easy and useable workaround for the issues I’ve laid out.
To me, the absolute best thing about WordPress is it’s flexibility and ease of use. It’s less complicated compared to it’s counterparts, and for new users who don’t necessarily know a whole lot about the technical issues of setting up websites – - it is perfect! If a client hires someone to do the preliminary set up of their design and configuration/installations of the plugins they want – that user can maintain their own fully functional website without a whole lot of technical know how. To me.. to my clients.. that is a perfect world. My goal in this is to make things as easy as possible for my clients – - to get them to the point where they are completely self-sufficient in their efforts at publishing their own blog and website. I don’t recommend tools or ’solutions’ that make it more difficult… that, to me, is counterproductive.
Lisa Sabin-Wilson is a creative designer and founder of E.Webscapes. She is the author of WordPress For Dummies and BuddyPress For Dummies, and is a regular speaker at national conferences on the topics of WordPress, blogging and design. Blog | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn
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Jon Spooner
19. Jul, 2007
what has happened since Feb 2006? any improvements on Yahoo’s end?
I am facing a site rebuild moving everything over to Yahoo hosting and am thinking about using WP2 but I have read two articles bemoaning the Yahoo => WordPress connection. BUT both articles were from over a year ago…
Well not sure if you will check this comment in the archives but thought Id give it a shot…
thanks
Jon
Lisa Sabin-Wilson
19. Jul, 2007
Jon – To be honest, I have no idea if things have improved on Yahoo, or not. My gut feeling says no – - however, I have not done a WordPress site set up on Yahoo … probably since this post. If it were me, I wouldn’t do it, but that’s just my personal recommendation. I believe they still restrict users from accessing the .htaccess file – that, alone, creates issues for me. I would recommend finding a host that doesn’t place those types of restrictiosn on their users.
Back up absolutely everything before you move and store that back up somewhere safe.
Back up your yahoo account after your move – - and back up often during your time with Yahoo.
Good luck!
Jack Crespin
29. Jul, 2007
I invite you to take a look at my blog, ambitousgrad.com, on Yahoo Small Business hosting. You will see that I have not gotten very far and am an absolute newbie to WordPress and serious blogging. I wanted to post my resume on my blog and made the blunder of trying to paste ditectly from MS-Word to the WordPress rich text teditor. As you can see I finally got it right, but now I have gone back to the basic editor.
The problem is that I am such a newbie that I don’t even understand the basic editing tags and can’t find them defined in the WordPress documentation. WordPress won’t give me support even tho Yahoo directs the user to them for support. The reason WordPress won’t give me support is that I am not on WordPress.com and Yahoo support — ROFLMAO!
Bearing in mind that I am also a business newbie, not turning a profit, what is your advice, please?
Bobby Leong
22. Oct, 2007
Hi Jack,
If you use wordpress, you should never copy paste from a word document as there are tags in them. what you can do is copy paste to a text file (wordpad/notepad) then paste to wordpress.
Or just type onto wordpress WYSIWYG editor.
As for Yahoo-Wordpress. I have a geocities pro hosting and they still do not allow htaccess so I must say for SEO purpose, choose a host that comes with cpanel as standard – wp is a one click install.
hope this helps
Anmol Mehta
09. Nov, 2007
My wordpress blog is currently hosted on Yahoo and I would not do it again. In fact I am strongly considering moving to another web hosting co. The .htaccess file issue and no ssh access are among some of the problems.
Getting plugins to work often means hacking them and its just very time consuming.
Hope this helps…
Don
13. Nov, 2007
I’ve just spent the past few weeks trying to get WordPress to work with Yahoo hosting. I haven’t had much luck/
Now you have to understand that there is a big learning curve for me…until I decided to start using WordPress, I had only built a couple of site using Yahoo’s SiteBuilder. So, I’m in the process of learning css, some (x)html and all the stuff that goes along with learning WP.
I’ve had nothing but trouble. I thought it was my fault, but now I learn that many of my problems have to do with my being hosted on Yahoo. No .htaccess means I have ugly permalinks, not great for a writer. I have trouble uploading images from the admin panel. And, for three days running I and a whole lot of other WP/Yahoo users got nothing but Internal Server Errors. Yahoo said it was a bug in their system, then a couple of days ago told me it was a WP issue. I did a fresh install.
Calling Yahoo is no help either. They just say they don’t support WP and refer you to the codex.
I might have to move on to another host, but I’ve never worked with anything other than Yahoo and I can’t stand the thought of having to learn a new system. I want telephone support also.
Anyway, if you’re considering running WP on Yahoo but haven’t made your final decision yet, you should seriously consider other options.
FaplefeHolo
06. Feb, 2008
Nice site keep it up!
————————————–
http://www.dasofte.com
GregB
14. Feb, 2008
The general problem seems to be that Yahoo wont allow any files/folders on its host that contain a ‘dot’ in the name eg prototype-1.4.0 or .htaccess are unacceptable names. As most plugins/mods seem to have been written with some files containing the ‘dot’, you are very limited as to what you can actually achieve over and above the vanilla installation. My favourite blog software is nucleus, because it is so customisable, but contains many Yahoo ‘forbidden’ files. The answer seems to be, as said above, move host. I support the comment that a host using cpanel would be the easiest for most non techy users. I’ve never heard of E.Webscapes before today (sorry guys), but why not move from Yahoo and give them a go as I assume they will give you CPanel hosting.
Dennis
15. Feb, 2008
Hey Guys…
I have really bad news!!!
Yahoo is still just as bad as ever!
Wooo!
I tested the mail thing…and you can only receive mail on a form if the person sending it is on the same domain as you are. Basically…you can send yourself form mail, but nobody else can.
: )
I’ve got too much junk on yahoo right now to move it all around, so I’m gonna try to make a form program work anyway. Should be able to get it to function, just not great. But eventually I will be moving my site. No question about that. Oh, and I did a manual install on yahoo…that saved a few problems.
BTW Lisa…why would they have such a problem with the .htaccess? Why would they do that?
Mark
28. Feb, 2008
Still no improvement on Yahoo’s end, but this is an easy explanation of a manual install that puts your blog in the root directory and makes semi-pretty permalinks: http://natespost.com/index.php/install-wordpress-on-yahoo-server/
Nathan
02. Mar, 2008
I did a manual install and everything seems to work pretty well. Description is here: http://natespost.com/index.php/install-wordpress-on-yahoo-server/
Jen
04. Mar, 2008
Agreed — great post. Yahoo Business Hosting and WordPress are not a good fit. The email form issue is a HUGE issue for any business that wants to make it easy for prospects to get in touch — basically, every business! I’ve tried every email plugin I could find and none work.
Here is a page of WordPress recommended hosts — Yahoo has been removed: http://wordpress.org/hosting/
-Jen C.
SiteDiagnosis.com
Marie-Lynn Richard
18. Apr, 2008
Thanks for a great article. It addresses issues I had not even noticed when trying to get my client’s blog set up right. His RSS feed is broken and I could not get it to work. It is my opinion that his blog is doomed if he does not have a working RSS feed. I noticed that Yahoo installs the “Add to My Yahoo!” plugin by default and I cannot deactivate this plugin. My question is: “Is Yahoo killing the native feed so that all feed requests are forwarded to the “My Yahoo” by default?”
Edward
05. Sep, 2008
I have been using WordPress hosted by Yahoo! as well. While for basic needs, Yahoo! makes it very easy to install as many WordPress blogs that you wish, however the issue with the email forms and contact forms is a deal breaker. I created a job posting site with WordPress and if you want to email the posting to a friend, the senders email must have the same domain name as the blog. This also goes for the apply now form with a resume upload. It works only if the senders email domain is the same as the blog domain, now that is just worthless!!!
Heather
03. Nov, 2008
I wish I had found this information a few months ago. I’ve worked hard to make the WordPress blog work with my Yahoo hosting. Have talked with friends that seem to have this effortless ease with WordPress, and they describe buttons, functions, plugins that are no where to be found in what have.
The hard part is now I’ve got so many blog posts up there. I need to start over somehow. I don’t even know how to backup the blog so that I could transfer the information. Yikes. Using Yahoo for blogging was a terrible mistake.
LIn Wood
23. Apr, 2009
I just happened to find this post after doing some research on yahoo hosting . First, let me just say, if you are thinking about it, DON’T!!! Find another wordpress friendly host. Ever since I set up my site with yahoo hosting it has been hell, and all that time I was thinking maybe it was my screw ups. I’m fairly versed on the technical side so this is not a case of “the newb.” I went through about 5 build ups and tear downs of my site just to get things to work on yahoo hosting. My site is still down so, bye bye yahoo.
Danyel
24. May, 2009
2009 Update
I found this post whilst searching to see if “it was just me.” I thought I’d be doing a quick conversion of a 4 page html coded site to a Yahoo WordPress install.
The initial one-click install went well unfortunately Yahoo installed v. 2.6.1. Not thinking much off it, I went ahead and did a manual upgrade and that’s where the problems started. Realizing I may have overwritten specially written Yahoo files, I deactivated (delete says Yahoo) the install and started over. Same problem with an outdated install and no “Yahoo” way to upgrade. Also found many of my theme functions did not work as expected.
I’m pretty WP savvy, enough to know that the Yahoo WordPress does not (immediately) work (as expected). Not interested in spending too much time in trying to make it all work.
Steve
31. May, 2009
Wow, this post has some staying power, thanks to Yahoo’s refusal to improve their hosting to accommodate WordPress. I have numerous blogs hosted on another hosting company and a couple of MT blogs hosted on Yahoo. I was about to add a WP blog to one of my sites that I’ve had for about 5 years. I should have done this long ago, but oh well.
I was going to use the standard Yahoo hosting WP install, but it will only install v 2.6.2. I wrote to Yahoo tech and they indicated they had no plans to move their install to a newer version in the immediate future. I though no big deal, I’ll just download 2.7.1 and FTP it to the directory I wanted to use. I did that, renamed the sample wp-config file and changed the parameters to point to the proper mysql database.
I was elated at my success until I discovered none of my permalinks were working. A little bit of research later and here I am. No writing to HT access? That really sucks, and what sucks even more is Yahoo’s apparent indifference to the entire problem. I am dreading the thought of moving my entire 300 page site, that I made with Yahoo sitebuilder to one of my other hosting accounts, but it looks like that is the only answer, especially as I will probably be using the blog for the rest of my site development anyway.
amidivine
06. Jun, 2009
Well, it’s 2009, actually, just over halfway through 2009 – and as best I can tell, yahoo as neither done anything to fix the problems described by others here or to perhaps WARN their hapless and soon to be hairless (from pulling it out in clumps over weeks of frustration) web hosting clients who want to WordPress as their primary web site.
I’m your basic educated beginner – but I had begun to think maybe I’d had a stroke without knowing it and lost all ability to follow directions.
Apparently, from this and other articles, I may still be mentally intact *as much as I ever was* and there is even a solution – dump yahoo, write the cost and the pain off to ‘didn’t quite do my due dilligence, now i’ve been warned,’ and get as far from Yahoo and their inaccurate, deliberately dishonest, and totally egregious pretence of being a real webhost as possible.
Yahoo, shame on you~!
amidivine
Wendy
27. Aug, 2009
I’m glad I’ve found this post, I thought I was just being an idiot! :>) I’ve done quite a few WP installs, tweaked the stylesheets, plugins, etc., so I thought I was pretty experienced and knew what I was doing. Until I tried to install WP with Yahoo’s hosting – ay yi yi, I’ve been trying to merely change my permalinks, a simple fix, for TWO HOURS with no workaround available. I’m done – no thank you, Yahoo!
Travis
16. Sep, 2009
I’ve been working with a Yahoo hosted WordPress client’s site for a few years now. I have to agree with the above – it’s terrible. They offer no support for their poor coverage of WP, and play stupid whenever you ask them a real question. I’m now in a bind because they won’t let me update automatically, and the manual update is going no where.
nate
27. Oct, 2009
I use this for my permalinks – /index.php/%postname%/
Works well for SEO and rss, and is as good as it gets for yahoo.
Justgage
09. Feb, 2010
I’ve been using yahoo hosting to build a ecommerce website off of wordpress, I’m a pretty tech savy guy for the most part and I must admit, yahoo makes webhosting heck for programmer. As I write I’m trying to move wordpres from the blog directory to the root and it’s just horrid, I’m yet to get it to work yet and now all my links are broken. Somehow my PHPmyadmin doesn’t work all of a sudden so I’m having to do it via the yahoo backup system which I’m not sure will even work. Yahoo’s help is useless it just says “don’t move wordpress from one directory to another” and now I see why.
Warren
24. Feb, 2010
Its 2010. Yahoo still no better. I too am considering switching hosts. I found this blog post after looking for support as to why Custom structure URL’s do not work, after digging into it deeper I have learned that this is because I am hosted on Yahoo. I would not host on Yahoo for anything wordpress related for anything in the future again.