Yahoo Promotes Premium Web Hosting

Furthering its move from free to fee services, Internet portal and communication company Yahoo has introduced two new GeoCities Web hosting packages, aimed at advanced and small-business users.

GeoCities Plus offers users site-building tools, 25MB of storage, FTP (file transfer protocol) access, and increased bandwidth for sharing photo and graphics files, the company said. The Plus package, unveiled on Monday, costs $4.95 per month, with a one-time $10 setup fee.

For small-business users, Yahoo is offering its new GeoCities Advantage package, which offers 20 SiteWizard templates and advanced editing tools, plus 100MB of storage. The Advantage package also comes with a domain name and up to 15 subdomains. It also includes Yahoo Mail Business Edition, which provides five separate 25MB mailboxes. Additionally, the small business edition has PHP (personal home page tools) scripting capabilities, which allow users to make Web sites that can be tailored to each visitor, the company said.

GeoCities Advantage package is priced at $19.95 monthly, plus a one-time $25 setup fee.

Searching for Subsidy

Like other Internet-heavy businesses, Yahoo has been exploring new sources of revenue since the burst of the Internet ad bubble. The portal, originally launched as a search engine site, is increasingly emphasizing fee-based content and services.

In addition to charging for bells and whistles associated with its e-mail and financial services, Yahoo began offering premium search content in January. The Premium Document Search provides access to a research library of more than 70 million pages of full text from more than 7100 sources, including thousands of health, science, medical, academic, and trade journals, as well as newspapers and magazines. Subscribers can also tap into archived news from more than 60 U.S. and international newswires.

The premium content service is available for $4.95 monthly, which provides access to up to 50 documents. Summary views of the documents are free, and users can also pay per document, with prices depending on the item.

Last week, Yahoo dropped AOL's MapQuest service in favor of generating its own online travel instructions. The company developed its own software platform for offering maps and driving directions online, instead of licensing the MapQuest service. Yahoo representatives said at the time that the company wanted to have control over such an important site resource.