Yahoo wipes out small business hosted storage limits

Computerworld - Yahoo Inc. this week introduced a new monthly Web Hosting service for small and medium sized businesses, which provides unlimited hosted storage capacity and bandwidth.

Subscribers to the new service, priced at $11.95 a month, are free to take up as much disk space on Yahoo's servers as they need to transfer data, store information or secure e-mail without fear of shrinking capacity restrictions, the company said. The service is only available in the U.S. from Yahoo's Small Business division and costs $11.95 per month.

Previously. Yahoo had charged companies $12 a month for 5GB of disk space and 200GB of bandwidth per month; $20 a month for 10GB disk space and 400GB of bandwidth; and $40 for 20GB disk space and 500GB bandwidth, said Guy Yalif, director of web hosting products for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo.

The company's 1.5 million small business customers will soon receive instructions on how to migrate to the new model, Yalif said.

Yalif said the company has enough capacity to handle the increasing requirements, though he declined to provide details. Yalif said the service is not designed to be a "hard drive" in the sky but rather a mechanism to help the small business users quickly get in line with growing online demands. He said Yahoo will monitor the service to prevent any illegal activities.

Kaitlyn Sharp, CEO of Houston, Tex.-based Custom Plumbing & Hardware has used Yahoo Web Hosting for a year to support her decorative hardware and plumbing showroom business. The new service eliminates any need to postpone new efforts due to limited storage capacity.

"I'm thinking about doing maybe some online sales and putting a lot more detail in the system. But people were saying 'you have to have a lot of storage [for that], you sure you can keep this on Yahoo?' At least I don't' have to worry about that anymore," said Sharp.