Yahoo Small Business Blogging
When we moved to Yahoo hosting at work, I had hoped that the WordPress blogging would be a real service offered.
No-one in customer support knows anything about it, of course. There is no-one in charge of updating the WordPress installations.
Dreamhost and Bluehost both have one-click updates to the WordPress installation. Not only doesn’t Yahoo, but if you update manually, it breaks the blog.
WordPress as installed in the “Beta” is several versions behind, and there is no-one responsible to business owners for that service.
I put in a feature request some time ago, with no response.
After letting me know that they knew nothing, and had not power to do anything, and knew of no-one who had power to do anything, a representative at “Customer Care” finally gave me a number to call corporate headquarters for the team in charge of feature requests.
They gave me 408-349-3300 and said that once I called there, I would be directed to the right people.
Instead I got a truly rude operator who informed me that unless I had a specific name, she wasn’t transferring me anywhere.
And this is all for Small Business Owners! I’ve had to recreate that blog four times since we started there. What of the small businessperson who is less web-savvy than myself?
I’m really thinking about recommending that we use another host. We went to Yahoo for better reliability on uptime, but this is beyond annoying.
They need to either enable a one-click update, or else allow people to manually update.
The way it’s handled now is shameful. I am disappointed in Yahoo!
6 thoughts on “Yahoo Small Business Blogging”
Hi, I left Yahoo at the end of March for the same reasons about WordPress that you mentioned. (Went to Bluehost) I was able to upgrade just before the move. If you stay with Yahoo, I posted the procedure on my site
Good luck
So sorry to hear about your bad experience.
I find it amazing who many companies still underestimate the power of a blog entry that reports about the bad experience a user has made.
I have been happy with Yahoo at work except for this matter of the blog. I would certainly blog to update this entry if they did one thing to address the problem (grin).
The power of the forum is big, too. They should take a look at the long posts at WordPress on how unhappy people are with the lack of any Yahoo WordPress support. There is even a call to remove Yahoo hosting from the list of recommended sites for WordPress installations.
Whoever was in charge of setting it up at Yahoo should just script in the updates, too. I am sure that the WordPress people would be very helpful (they rock, generally) and they could also consult with DreamHost and BlueHost on how to do it. I’m guessing it would only be a couple of hours a month or something like that. Small investment, big return.
A status page on their feature requests, and a page to request features directly would be nice too! I just think it’s amazing that there is no way to communicate with any decision-maker on this issue. The customer care people at Yahoo have been great, but they know nothing about WordPress, have no way of finding out about the status of feature requests, and are left dangling with no information for a customer in this kind of situation. That operator at Yahoo corporate, though – that was really uncalled for. She was just nasty. Ah, well.
Thanks to the lovely resource posted by Ray (above), I’ll try again tomorrow to update the blog at work. I think they should pay him for that, and add it to their help pages! There is no way that even the above-average small business owner would know to try the things that he suggests.
Here at my own domain, I’m very happy with Dreamhost.
Dreamhost is probably the best when it comes to upgrade their packages. Yahoo! hosting is the only host I ever heard of that at least won’t let you upgrade WP yourself.
Using the directions, I was able to update. I had to do an additional step of using MyPhpAdmin to grant privileges under the user id in the wp-config original file.
Of course, now the databases aren’t quite right… I still get a server error when I try to import the database sql. Looks like I’ll be cutting and pasting all those posts.
Sigh.
There’s another problem too. On the blog page, there is “WordPress database error: Unknown column ‘link_count’ in ‘where clause’ SELECT * FROM wp_categories WHERE cat_ID > 0 AND link_count > 0 ORDER BY cat_name ASC” whatever that means.
I can’t seem to add categories through the blog admin… so back to the WordPress Forum and PhpAdmin.
Solved it, finally. See Geeking Out.