Friday, February 15, 2019

Switching from Yahoo Small Business to New Google Sites

Yahoo's Site Hosting worked well for me for many years, and then came the change to Yahoo Small Business. Whatever Yahoo did when they switched to Aabaco caused no end of frustration. Most of the time, I couldn't even find a place to log in! Every link led to a sales page. For a long time, I couldn't find a phone number for tech support. When I finally did, it was helpful at first. Each tech would give me very specific instructions, have me bookmark a log-in page, have me sign in under my domain name instead of my old personal site name... but these fixes were oddly temporary. The bookmarks would work for a session or two, and then expire or something. And the confusion! Was it Yahoo? Was it Luminate? Was it Aabaco? They used all of these site names and locations at various times. Tech Support often gave me conflicting information. One would have me sign in under my old user name; the next one would say, "Never do that! Sign in under your domain email!" I suppose the real problem is that my site and site-building history covered a number of years. It must have seemed quaint, to Tech Support, to chat with someone who still used the site's Text Editor instead of Site Builder to build pages.

As always, switching hosts was a nightmare, but I have done it. My site is now on New Google Sites, and we'll see how long those last. Google, after all, has quite a track record for discontinuing services at the drop of a hat...