I would host all my websites with Yahoo!…..

… if they let me have .htaccess file.

Working with one of my websites today I realized that if only Yahoo! would allow to have this “magic file”, I would host my every single website with them. Yahoo! Web Hosting was the first ever provider I have conducted business with. It was not until I have learned about WordPress that I began to consider other web hosting providers. And the only reason I moved my blog to Bluehost, was that Yahoo! does not offer to have an .htaccess file. You still can host your WordPress blog with them as long as you do not care about benefits of using .htaccess .

So day I was updating one my websites powered by Affilistore with a datafeed of about 2000 products. If you are not familiar with Affilistore, it is a website building scrip that allows you to rapidly create websites using the datafeeds from your merchants. During one of the steps Affilistore imports data from CSV datafeed to MySQL database. To do that with a datafeed of 2000+ can put some heavier than usual load on CPU resources. I guess this can be compared to deleting hundreds of spam comments in Akismet plugin. But today the website I was working on went through an ultimate test of endurance. I made few mistakes in preparing/adjusting the datafeed to fit the needs of my website uploading and deleting the datafeed to and from MySQL database 3 times in about 30 minutes time frame. The result? My site is still up and running. I doubt anyone noticed anything strange, beyond maybe website being slow than usual between 9:30 – 10:00 AM.

In the process I kept in mind discussion about web hosting happening on Andy’s blog and I thought to myself that if only Yahoo! could give me that magic file named .htaccess, I would keep all my websites with them. Few of other web hosting providers I use promise 99.9% uptime but it is only Yahoo! Web Hosting that really delivered on promise.

Other web hosting providers can learn from Yahoo! and maybe invest into better and more capable equipment. My dream is that one day Yahoo! will had to us .htaccess- my web hosting headaches would be over.

P.S.
By the way, if you are having a CPU related problems with your WordPress, chances are that it may be caused by one of the plugins. Lucia has written a plugin that may help you to identify bad plugins.