Can't Find Site at Yahoo Web Hosting Because It Is a Starter Web Page

This morning, I could not find a Yahoo Web Hosting Site. Where did it go? I could not seem to figure it out.

I was in the Yahoo Domain Control Panel when I noticed something. I noticed that the site was a so-called starter web page.

What is a starter web page? At Yahoo it is a web page that runs off of the domain interface rather than the web hosting interface. In other words, you don't really need a hosting account in order to have a starter web page.

Here's how I found the starter web page:

1. I went to the Yahoo Domain Control Panel
2. Once in the Yahoo Domain Control Panel, I noticed some links on the left-hand side of the page. Each link was a domain name. I clicked on the domain I was looking for.
3. Next, I scrolled down a bit. There it was! There's a link called Edit Starter Web Page that comes after all the other links you need in order to work with your domain name.
4. I clicked on Edit Starter Web Page and it allows you to edit, in a primitive way, your web page. It is much like editing a review on Amazon, or any other website, where you have limited editing capability.

Earlier, I tried finding the domain under the Web Hosting Control Panel at Yahoo, but it was not there. So, apparently, you can put up a quick webpage yourself by hosting your domain at Yahoo. Later, you can extend the capability of this page by buying Yahoo Web Hosting in addition to already having registered your domain at Yahoo. This appears to be the basic idea.

While a nice little feature, it is confusing for a web developer like myself who is looking for the page. Doing a whois lookup on the page reveals Yahoo DNS servers. So, where is the page?

I figured out where the starter web page was by looking around and getting lucky.

Ed Abbott

Finding the Yahoo Control Panel

Can't believe how hard it is for me to find the Yahoo control panel! Each time I try to google the Yahoo control panel, I'm sent to a page that invites me to sign up for Yahoo Web Hosting as a brand new customer. Not what I want.

Here are the steps that make it possible for me to successfully find the Yahoo control panel:

1. Google yahoo small business sign in
2. In the search results, I choose the first link that appears. In my particular case, the first link that appears is https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/servicecheck.php.
3. A Yahoo web page with the word control panel embedded as a link in the page appears many times. Apparently this page is known as the Business Control Panel. It has a few control panels embedded in it.
4. Choose the control panel that is appropriate for you. For example, click on Web Hosting Control Panel if this is the control panel you are looking for.
5. Once you've found the web hosting control panel, you can flip over to the domain control panel by clicking on the tab on the horizontal navigation bar. The horizontal bar is found at the top of the page and the tab is on the right side of the bar.
6. Flip back and forth between web hosting and domain by clicking on the tabs of the same name in the upper right-hand-corner.

OK. I'm there. It only took a few minutes to find the control panels at Yahoo. Now that I've written it down, in the future, it will only take me a few seconds.

OK. I've refined this even further. I've figured out the URL of the Yahoo Business Control Panel:.

https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/services/

I'm always trying to find an easier way.

Ed Abbott

Yahoo Web Hosting Tabs

I'm working on a Yahoo Web Hosting site again. It appears to me, after a quick glance, that Yahoo Web Hosting is organized under 3 tabs:

• Domain
• Web Hosting
• Store

The 3 tabs interrelate in an interesting way:

It appears that the first tab, Domain, establishes the domain you are working on. Once a domain is chosen, it carries over to the next tab.

The next tab is Web Hosting. In the Web Hosting tab, you can change domains by either going back to the Domain tab or you can use a pull-down menu under Web Hosting that does the same thing.

So, basically you have two ways to change domains. Under the Domain tab itself or under the domain pull-down menu found underneath the Web Hosting tab.

Looks like I will be spending very little time today on Yahoo Web Hosting. What appeared to be a problem is not a problem at all.

Years ago I worked on a Yahoo Store. That's what the third tab appears to me to be all about. The Store tab suggests that you have a Yahoo Store or could potentially set one up.

Yahoo Store is a dedicated e-commerce store interface. The last time I worked on it, it was totally separate from Yahoo Web Hosting.

Basically, Yahoo Store is a way to setup your shopping cart.

Whereas most shopping carts involve third party software that is not native to the web hosting company, Yahoo Store is entirely native to Yahoo. It is their dedicated store platform. Again, I'm remembering back several years.

Here's an article on the history of Yahoo Store:

Viaweb

As you can see, Yahoo Store was purchased from another company. It was than integrated into Yahoo's other online services. Knowing this history, it is easier to appreciate why Store is its own tab. Yahoo Store came before Yahoo Web Hosting (I'm guessing) and is a completely separate and distinct entity because of this history.

Fortunately, I don't have to deal with any of this today. As said up above, I have no problem to fix at this time.

Sometimes the easiest fixes come when I'm doing little or nothing. While writing this article, I discovered that the fill-in form on my client's website was working after all and so there is no need for me to worry about Yahoo Web Hosting today.

Ed Abbott

Discovering Yahoo Web Hosting

Today I'm discovering Yahoo Web Hosting. I've worked on Yahoo Web Hosting before. However, this is the first time in a long time.

The first thing I notice about Yahoo Web Hosting is that I need to sign out of my email address for Yahoo and sign back in using my client's Yahoo email address.

So, apparently, Yahoo works a bit like Google does. One account gets you into many many things. Also, logging out of one account and into another gets you into an umbrella account that covers many Yahoo products and services.

The umbrella account sort of approach seems to be unique to both Google and Yahoo. Maybe not entirely unique, however no one else seems to glue so many services together under one account

After switching email addresses, I googled Yahoo hosting. This seems to take me directly to the Yahoo Web Hosting control panel.

So, I'm guessing that you get an advertisement for Yahoo Web Hosting if you are not already logged into a Yahoo service, such as Yahoo Mail, and you get your web hosting account if you are already logged in.

Being used to working on websites, the first thing I'll want is FTP access. Yahoo Web Hosting seems to have one of those awful File Manager web interfaces which is not so bad if you only work on one website and you don't know what you are doing. In other words, a great beginner's tool. However, for me, uploading and downloading files through a web interface is painfully tedious

So, I need an FTP access. Looks like this is the path that will get me there:

Web Hosting Control Panel > Manage > Password Manager

OK. Discovering where to create an FTP account is not too painful. Looks like it's just a matter of creating a username and a password.

After you've created an FTP username and password, the actual login process seems to be to treat your username as if it were an email address. So, for example, if your username is johndoe and your domain is smalltownflowers.com, the FTP unsername would be johndoe@smalltownflowers.com.

However, when creating the FTP login, you'll want to create the johndoe part only and leave the domain name off of the name you create. So, when creating the FTP login, the username is shorter than when you do actual FTP access, which requires that an @domainname.com be added to the username.

Now for the first time, I see the following message.

FTP access was successfully enabled. To sign in to FTP, enter the user name "johndoe@smalltownflowers.com."

So, it is clear. I just needed to look around a bit.

The first thing I notice when I try to login is that the following command line will not work:

ftp smalltownflowers.com

Whereas this command line actually reaches an FTP server:

ftp ftp.smalltownflowers.com

So apparently you have to add the ftp subdomain to the domain name to reach the ftp server at all. Many web hosts allow you to leave off the ftp subdomain. Yahoo is not one of them, apparently.

One thing I've learned in working with various web hosting companies is each one is a little bit different. Just like people, each web host is slightly different.

Update: August 2, 2015

Today I set up a new Yahoo FTP login. All of the above seems to be true except that Yahoo no longer allows cleartext logins. The following error message results if I login the same way I've done in the past:

421 Sorry, cleartext sessions are not accepted 
on this server.Login failed.

There's a simple fix. Just use SSL. Here's the command line under Linux that gets me in:

lftp -u myusername@mydomainname.com,mysillypassword ftp.mydomainname.com -e "set ftp:ssl-allow yes"

Note that my ftp client used above is something called lftp. Note also that I've faked my ftp username, password and domain name. So, really, the only thing of interest above is the fact that I've set the switch ftp:ssl-allow to yes.

So, it looks like new ftp accounts at Yahoo Web Hosting need to use SSL. Interestingly enough, my old ftp accounts for other domains at Yahoo Web Hosting continue to work. So, I assume, going forward, only some kind of secure login that is not cleartext will be allowed on new accounts attempting ftp login. While old accounts seem to be able to get away with clear text, now accounts need SSL, or possibly, something else that I don't know about that Yahoo will accept that is not cleartext. However, I myself have looked no further than SSL and know of no other way to FTP into Yahoo Web Hosting with a new FTP account.

Ed Abbott