Yahoo charges 11.95 a month for a web hosting starter package. They are about $5-8 more expensive than the average web hosting service (Monsterhost got best reviews). BUT I thought a large company like Yahoo would at least provide TIMELY and ACCURATE service.

In the Small Business Support area you would think support for businesses putting their sites on their servers would get timely responses. See my start up days below. Once they finally figured out something went wrong during the processing of my package upgrade they told me the escalation process would take 2-3 BUSINESS DAYS to fix the problem. How much money is that for you? I needed a site fast. So I signed up for a yearly contract of just email and a beginning page. It was lacking any links so I upgraded to the hosting plan to get a real site. Well they deleted my starter page immediately and now its over 2 days since I received the Web hosting starter package confirmation and active status and I cannot publish a new page because they had a problem processing. They cannot replace the starter page with my company name and email and they cannot get my real site up for a total of 5 days. So now I have no site. It took 5 calls to support personnel who each gave me a different story about the upgrade plan and how long it would take.

Pretty bad business tactics if I say so. SO if time = $ for your business DON't use Yahoo Small Business services to support your company's site!

Gayle Ostic

Time line of service calls :

I purchased a custom email plan to start a business and website. I mistakenly thought I could modify the website once they gave me a starter page. Once I realized I could not get a site going I upgraded to a web hosting plan.

1. I called customer service about upgrading and they told me my yearly charge from the custom email would be forfeited once I upgrade. So I hung up.

2. I decided to call again thinking I could get a credit since it was less than 24 hours from the time I purchased the email plan to upgrade. The next support person guaranteed that my next billing cycle would be prorated to reflect the $34.95 I was charged for the yearly service. So at that time I upgraded to web hosting.

3. Within minutes I received a confirm email regarding my upgrade and stating I now held a web hosting contract. When I looked again at the starter page I made during the email plan it was gone. I quickly went to work using the sitebuilder tools with the web hosting plan to create a new site. Once I finished I could not publish it. So I called customer service for the 3 rd time. The rep told me my account was in pending status and it could take 24 hours for the upgrade to take place. I was angry this was never told to me before. Even the confirm email said nothing about how long the status would take before active. In fact, on my login it states active for web hosting.

4. The next day I tried all day to publish and nothing. At the 24 hour period I called again and the first thing the support rep told was this could take 48 hours. I waited 15 minutes on hold to get a manager. I had to leave to pick up my son from school.

5. By 8:30 that evening I called again to try and figure out this BS. That rep went to look up my account status and dug deeper to find out something was very wrong and there was more than just waiting, there was a problem in the processing. He escalated the problem to engineering and came back to say it will take 2-3 business days to rectify. My monthly billing plan stated 6/19 and I would be billed again on 7/19. I said one - this shouldn't take this long you have a serious problem in your support infrastructure to fix this. Two I better get my billing date moved tot he 25 th. I am not eating 7 days (5 business ) days of a monthly plan with no site. ( I have worked for 25 years as a systems engineer for computer h/w and s/w venders I know for a fact that getting these things fixed should not take 2-3 days. For a small business support group that is totally UNACCEPTABLE.