Charmskins

There are many great places to host your Wordpress installation all over the web and several are even recommended on the Wordpress Codex. Personally I’ve never used any of those, I’ve been using GoDaddy.com hosting for several years now and have had no major issues with them. In fact I love their prices and their 24/7 phone support should any issues arise. And I’ve never had any problems either.

But, this article isn’t about the best place to host your weblog, it’s all about the worst place to host it. There’s one hosting company on the web that you definitely want to stay away from for Wordpress and that company is Yahoo. To be fair I’ve never used their web services or their e-commerce offerings and they may very well be quite good. The issue that I’m talking about is setting up and running your Wordpress weblog on their servers.

The first issue is using their one click installer. Currently it installs version 2.0.2 which is a fairly old version. WP has made leaps and bounds in improvements, bug fixes and patched many security issues since then. The latest version is light years ahead of the Yahoo installer version. As of this writing the latest version is 2.2.1. Sure, you can upgrade your Wordpress install yourself manually by uploading the lastest version via FTP. Unfortunately the Yahoo version database has been altered and doesn’t include all the necessary table fields needed. If you do the upgrade you’ll find you get errors in the categories section under links_count, posts_private and links_private. This means you’ll have to log into your phpmyadmin and manually insert the missing fields yourself.

The next issue is that their one click install forces the installation into a sub-folder of your site, not the root directory! This means you now have to either reset your domain name DNS to now point to a sub-folder or you’ll have a wonky link to your site. Something like http://yoursite.com/blog is what you’ll end up with. It doesn’t require any explanation to see how lousy that is unless your install is a blog attached to a web site that’s in the root directory.

The next issue and the worst of all is permalinks, Yahoo does not allow the use of an .htaccess file which is required by Wordpress to clean up the links and make them “pretty” and more search engine friendly. What you do get is “ugly” links that look meaningless because it’s just a number.

Here’s a couple of examples with the same post names and how the links will look, you decide which is better:

How I Spent My Vacation
http://yoursite.com/how-i-spent-my-vacation/

OR

How I Spent My Vacation
http://yoursite.com/?p=123

The second example is what you end up with using Yahoo hosting, not very pretty is it? And there’s no workaround! You’re stuck with the ugly links! In closing, make sure you get the hosting that you need and deserve. Don’t just settle on the cheapest or most convenient, ask around and do some checking before you’re stuck with a dog of a web host. After all, once you’ve settled in you’ll probably be there for a long time!

tags: wordpress, hosting, yahoo, .htaccess, permalinks, database