Backstory

Back in the day I landed my very first website gig. I found a company that had positive feedback and placed well on a rating site or two. I didn't really know what I was doing, but I had a gig. The company I chose for my host was CI Host. They were not good, and in the end they were dodging my calls and I had to issue some stop payments with my credit card company.

I got another gig for another site, and I needed a host. At the time I decided to just go with a really big company to compensate for the issue I had with the previous host. That company was Yahoo. It seemed like a great idea at the time for a few reasons (big company, search engine, nice control panel, supported perl and PHP).

Today

I outgrew Yahoo as a host a few years ago, but reconfiguring and moving sites around is a pain. Dealing with your clients' historical email is also a consideration. Well, Yahoo hosting finally got in my way enough that I am out. Here are my beefs:

• No Apache Server-Side includes. I can do them with the sites I have on Network Solutions and Dreamhost.
• PHP still version 4. This isn't really a beef that I have. I don't really care what version of PHP they have because I don't want to deal with PHP. However, I was just recently forced to upgrade to PHP 5 on Network Solutions.
• phpMySQLAdmin is busted. The version of phpMySQLAdmin that Yahoo uses is crazy old and only works in IE on the PC. Seriously. I tried it Safari, FF (Mac and PC), and Camino. No dice. I had to upload my own version of it to deal with the databases I have for the Yahoo sites. There is no other way to log into those databases.
• No MX record for Yahoo mail. I can't setup a custom MX record to have mail routed to Yahoo's Business Mail solution. Dreamhost has this built into it's control panel to use Gmail for email. So if I want to host the web content on another host and have the email remain at Yahoo I have to setup a static IP address at the web host (which you have to pay for), have the nameservers point to Yahoo, and have an A record pointing back to the static IP.

The Yahoo webmail interface is good. I don't have any complaints there. Their cave-man approach to hosting just gets in the way of my being a productive webmaster for my clients. It will end up costing some of them more than it should, too. Don't get me wrong, I can host their sites for a fraction of what Yahoo charges ($20/month!!!), and even with the static IP address and Yahoo Mail they still end up ahead. It's not as cheap as no static IP and free Gmail, though.

Life is about choices, though.