A large amount of the world uses Yahoo! Mail for sending and receiving email. Many use Yahoo for hosting too so that they can use the sameYahoo! Mail that they’ve always been used to, on their own domain name.

When you want to switch to your own domain, Yahoo! tempts users to go for their hosting service which allows you to build your own website in addition to having a custom email address. People don’t have time to think, people trust Yahoo!, people just pull out their credit card, pay $45+taxes and sit as though a magic wand is going to land on their laps and save them from the devil of a server they’ve only just begun to experience.

Since it doesn’t they take help from people like me sitting idle and waiting to help others for free. I say it’s a piece of cake, this sort of thing is what I do everyday and it should be no different now. I was wrong!

The day begins when someone I know sent me the username and password of his account to upload Wordpress and get it working immediately. I tell him it will be up in 5 minutes. He’s thrilled and he continues to wait on Skype while I’m struggling to find why phpMyAdmin isn’t working. I switched to Windows, opened IE6 and it worked. Is Yahoo! taking inspiration from the MCD?

I added the database, but wordpress refused to accept it. I searched around Google, played FIFA 07 online a couple of times online, and finally found I out that though the host Yahoo! tells it’s users to use is “localhost”, the host which works is “mysql”. And this came from a Wordpress Support forum and not from the support staff who were clueless about the issue.

Wordpress finally agreed to work with Geocities, I started the famous installer and in a few seconds I could see the friendly Dashboard. I opened the Hello World post and tried uploading a photo and that was exactly when Geocities decided it was the right time to send me a friendly “500 Server Error”. Again, I sent a message to the support staff and Yahoo! responded promptly telling me the server does not accept files over 2MB in size.

After resizing the image and uploading it, I published the post and it worked. This was the first time that it took me an hour to get Wordpress working properly and this happens to be my 27th Wordpress installation(not including the ones on my website).Unfortunately, Yahoo doesn’t allow .htaccess files which means you can’t increase the default upload limit nor can you use beautiful permalinks.

If I get time in the near future, I’ll post screenshots and explain how Yahoo has successfully create the least user-friendly and least intuitive web service ever. The interface you see after logging in looks more impressive than anything you’ve seen but you’ll just realize why people keep saying it’s the “inner quality” that matters most.