As of today, it’s official. You can get MovableType on Yahoo! Web Hosting.
And I’ll let you in on a little secret. Even though it says “Yahoo! Small Business Web Hosting” you don’t need to be a small business to use it. Individuals and Big Business can use it equally well. It’s MT for anyone.
Given that blog hosting services seem to be a dime a dozen, why would you bother considering Yahoo? Here are a few reasons (thanks to Anil for helping with this list):
Yahoo! scales. Yahoo can handle it when a blog gets slashdotted. No sweat.
You probably already know this, but Y! Search Blog and the Y! Developer Network both use MT (of course, I set both of those up, so I might be a bit biased).
Yahoo! servers run FastCGI, which is an order of magnitude faster than typical hosting environments. It might have been possible to rig this up yourself with a lot of work in the past, but now it’s just there.
No need to install MT. Really. No tarballs. No chmodding. Hallelujah. Upgrades are easy too.
Lots of pre-installed plugins: stylecatcher, spamlookup, nofollow, wysiwyg, Yahoo! search, BigPAPI. Plus there’s plugins for all your favorite Yahoo services, from Flickr to del.icio.us.
I’ve talked with the Yahoo! Web Hosting folks quite a bit about blog hosting over the past few months (and done some testing too). And you know what? They get it. All along the way, they’ve been asking what the typical pain points are for bloggers. They’ve thought a lot about what we can do that other hosting providers have trouble with (scaling, easy upgrades, high bandwidth limits, etc).
Oh, and Dave Winer thinks we’ll have a WordPress offering soon too. Wouldn’t that be cool?
Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.
Visit Jeremy’s blog: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.
