Sigh. Yet another hosting company throws around the words unlimited and people fail to read the fine print. Here's just a snippet of the parts of the agreement that stand out the most to me (comments in bold mine):
What is appropriate usage?
Yahoo! Web Hosting is designed to serve the web hosting needs of small, independently owned and operated businesses in the United States. It is not intended to support the greater web hosting needs of large enterprises or internationally based businesses. - Makes me wonder how strict they are on this. Unless it's a PAY Sims site, I'm not sure a Sims site can qualify as a business...
Yahoo! Web Hosting is also a shared web hosting service, which means a number of customers' web sites are hosted from the same server. To ensure that Yahoo! Web Hosting is reliable and available for the greatest number of users, a customer's web site usage cannot adversely affect the performance of other customers' sites. - In other words, if your site ever grows popular enough and starts getting insane amounts of traffic, sucking most of the server's resources, you're probably going to get kicked off the server pretty quick. How noticeable it is and how quickly traffic would become a problem would depend mostly on how many OTHER users are stuck on your server and how much of the server's resources they themselves use. Hosting companies today oversell like crazy.
Additionally, the purpose of Yahoo! Web Hosting is to host web sites, not store data. Using an account primarily as an online storage space for archiving electronic files is prohibited. - It'd be interesting to see if they'd complain about a large amount of zip files. I mean, if it's PART of your website, I don't see why they'd complain, but still.
So what does "unlimited" mean, really?
Disk space:
You can now create as large a site as you like (you won't face an upper limit, or "ceiling"), but we will place some constraints on how fast you can grow. In other words, you can add as much content as you want, but maybe not all at once. The vast majority of our customers' sites grow at rates well within our rules, however, and will not be impacted by this constraint. - Notice how they don't say a word about what the rules that limit how fast you can grow actually ARE. Since they're just launching this, they're probably going to test the waters and end up setting a stupidly low limit with a stupidly low growth rate. Most people who buy hosting space barely use it and just stick on either some blogging software that doesn't use much by way of files (mostly DB space) or a few, simple, small HTML files, thus seriously skewing any data they may gather from the initial people who sign up.
In general, all hosting companies are doing this now: Unlimited this, unlimited that, but when it comes right down to it, if your site grows popular enough and starts eating a lot of server resources, the hosting company is going to notice, and at that point you either pony up the dough for the next "tier" or get kicked off.
Granted, most Sims fansites will never have this problem, but it's something you have to consider. Obviously, MATY/PMBD, MTS2, and yes, even TSR would not be able to be hosted by this, and depending on how the rules get set up as it goes on, even most moderately trafficked sites would probably violate something in the fine print.
Additionally, I'm extremely leery of companies that don't explicitly spell out EXACTLY WHAT THE RULES ARE because that makes it all the harder to ensure you don't violate them. The current company I'm hosted at has many similar rules about resource usage, etc, but at least they make it completely clear what I can and can't do, and so far I've done a nice job of keeping within their boundaries.
Meh. Anyhow, after all that rambling, my conclusion on this is: no thanks, Yahoo!, I'll pass. Spell out your rules and stop this secrecy stupidity, and then maybe we'll talk, IF I like your rules.
PMBD
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