Yahoo Small Business (also known as Aabaco Small Business) is a provider that specializes in personal and small business shared hosting.
Click here to see the #1 rated web hosting
Yahoo Small Business was pretty popular back in 2007-2008.
Here is how they’ve trended over the years:
Features
Yahoo Small Business offers some unique features that set them apart from their competition (see: Wix, OVH, and FatCow).
Here are some of those features:
1) Live Insights iPhone App: Any serious ecommerce website needs to have a good tracking tool. Google Analytics is one of the most often used tracking tools, but it’s not without disadvantages. It takes too long for non-analysts to process the data from Google Analytics, making it hard to react in real-time. To combat this problem, Aabaco provides Live Insights app for iPhones.
It’s a much more user-friendly and intuitive website traffic analysis tool so you can keep your finger on the pulse of your business. With this tool, you get a snapshot of your top keywords and top referral sites. You can monitor your customer activity as it happens, chat with customers to increase your chance of closing sales, and get better insights on what actions you should take for your business. This can be a valuable asset to see real-time data that is affecting your bottom line.
2) Developer Network: If you have the business acumen but not development talent, it’d be best to outsource that part of the job. Aabaco has a professional developer network that can connect you to many partners. By hiring developers, you can customize your online store and add features that can help you find more customers. You can also use developers to make your website more visually appealing.
Aabaco’s Developer Network doesn’t just connect you to programmers or web designers. You can also find professionals offering marketing services like SEO, SEM, email marketing, social media marketing, etc. Because these developers have already been vetted by Aabaco in order to be part of their network, you can rest assured you’ll have a better experience working with them than hiring someone from a crowdsourcing site.
3) Localworks: Aabaco is geared towards small business and ecommerce storeowners, so there’s a heavy emphasis on local marketing. Through an add-on service called Localworks, they help you list your website on over 50 local directories, including the major ones such as Yahoo, Yelp, MapQuest, Superpages, WhitePages, and more. The listing part is just the beginning, as tracking how each listing does is more important. Localworks tracks the performance of each listing.
Without this service, you’d have to list your business on the local directories manually or hire someone else to do it. Localworks provides a detailed step-by-step guide to help you create a profile for your business that makes it stand out. This includes using photos, videos, or any other edge. If there is inconsistent or incorrect info, you can make corrections and push them to all your directories, so they’re always up-to-date. Ensuring your image is consistent across all local channels will help you develop your local branding.
Customer Support
Yahoo Small Business offers claims they offer technical support available 24/7 via chat, phone, and email, but users seem to have trouble reaching the support team at times.
Not the best company to go with if you really value customer support and like having friendly knowledgable reps available to handle your requests at any time (try Globat, SiteGround, or WebHostingPad).
Reviews
We checked Internet review sites to see how people feel about Yahoo! Web Hosting. We found that customers were most impressed by their features and pricing.
One customer pleased by the host’s amenities states: “Yahoo! Web Hosting rocks because of 30-days satisfaction guarantee, $100 credit for search marketing, high disk space, multiple account accesses, World famous WordPress blogging, virtual unlimited databases, inbuilt site search capabilities.”
Another reviews agrees saying: “The Yahoo Webhosting is marvelous! For a low price you can have a perfect Webhost, it has allot of features and is smooth to use.”
Not all reviews were positive. We found several customers upset by the move to Aabaco for Yahoo!’s technical support.
One frustrated reviewer warns: “they changed support to Aabaco and since then wait times of at least 40 min for tech support, email app stopped working, can’t log on consistently, etc.”
Another customer lists his problem with the host: “Web and domain hosting control panel is not accessible half the time and when it works it’s painfully slow. No SSH access, FTP is slow, web file manager hardly usable.”
Pros
1) Emphasis on Small Businesses: Aabaco has a big emphasis on small business, as shown in their logo. Existing Yahoo Small Business customers can set up their accounts with Aabaco.
2) Uptime Guarantee: Aabaco has a stated uptime guarantee of 99.9%.
3) Comprehensive Tracking and Reporting: Tracking is vital to the success of any ecommerce website. Aabaco provides free Live Insights tracking app for iPhones or desktop. You receive detailed recommendations on how to improve your search rankings. In addition, you can set up your own Google Analytics or Yahoo Web Analytics.
4) Interactive Features: Aabaco offers many interactive features to enhance your website; some are free, others are paid. These features include photo and video galleries, customizable forms, widget boxes, and more.
5) Tiered Plans: While Aabaco’s emphasis is more on small business and ecommerce, there are three plans to meet the needs of a wide range of customers.
Cons
1) Limited Basic Plan: Aabaco’s most basic plan is very limited; you can only build 10 pages and no site backup is provided.
2) Only One Domain: With all three plans, you can only host one domain.
3) Shared Hosting Only: There is no VPS or dedicated server option.
Summary
As former Yahoo! Small Business, Aabaco Small Business offers many tools you can expect as a small business and ecommerce store owner.
For serious ecommerce stores, their premier plan with unlimited disk space and bandwidth is ideal. Their basic plan feels a bit too limited, although priced competitively. With Aabaco, you’ll have access to a tracking app that’s more user-friendly than Google Analytics, so you can keep track of your website and react in real-time.