I was delirious with Swiss Chalet chicken last night, and decided to go nuts and order Yahoo! Small Business Web Hosting. They seemed pretty cheap, have a good network (of course — it’s Yahoo!), and decent space and transfer numbers.
Once I got in, I was pleseantly surprised to find they had a pretty good control panel. I set-up phpMyAdmin pretty easily through an automated process and moved over my Wordpress install and set-up the MySql database. Everything was going really well until I hit a snag: they don’t let you create custom .htaccess files. As you can tell from the rewritten URLs all over my sites, I’m a big fan of .htaccess, so that was a deal breaker for me.
I called up their Support this afternoon and explained the situation. They said, “no problem”, and took care of deleting my account and refunding the full price I had paid. There were no problems, no crusty support or billing people; it was generally a pretty good experience.
I don’t think Yahoo! will ever meet my hosting needs, but the amount of Dev I do really does make me a fringe case. For 99% of people, they seem like a pretty good option. At the very least, they are friendly to talk to on the phone and that goes a long way 