When we started out, we wanted to bring you the absolute best website building software on the planet. Since then, we’ve come a very long way, and yet we have so much more we want to offer to you. Today, we have announced the launch of our “Pro” package – which is the next phase of Yola, focusing on the needs of small business customers.
By offering enhanced features and tools, such as Premium Styles, advertising credits & bigger file sizes as part of our Pro package, we are able deliver real value for your money – while continuing to offer an extremely robust free option. In creating this package, we’ve made some changes to our free service. With Yola Free, you can create 5 websites with unlimited pages with 1GB of storage per site. This is more storage than most of our users will ever need, but in order to ensure that we can maintain a reliable and robust offering for everyone, we will charge for usage in excess of that. The Pro version of Yola will allow users to build up to 25 sites with 5GB of storage per site, upload files as big as 100MB, and upload HTML files to their site. In addition, Yola Pro customers will get a Premium Style, removal of the Yola Link and over $50 in advertising and stock photo credits. For more info, see the package details and our FAQs.
As a result of these changes, we are able to focus our development resources on the needs of our small businesses customers who are using Yola to promote their businesses. We’re excited to be launching Yola Pro and are looking forward to feedback on how we can improve our offering.
Vinny Lingham
Founder and CEO
I want to thank all our users and customers for all the input relating to the launch of our recent “Pro” package. Your feedback is very valuable to us. As a result of all the interactions and feedback from our users, we’re considering making some changes to our offering to ensure that everyone sees the huge value in what Yola is doing. Thanks for all the productive & constructive comments.
We are a small company and are very passionate about our product and our users, so it’s important that we offer a paid package to meet the needs of a certain portion of our userbase in order to ensure that we can offer a free package to those who cannot afford to pay for it.
Right now, we’re in the process of gathering data and analyzing it. Once we complete this, we will be in a better position to understand what your needs are and customize our Pro package to suit the needs of our paying customers, without significantly reducing the value of our free package. In order to maintain a free service for everyone, we do need a small portion of our users to pay for our premium packages to ensure that it’s financially viable.
We really value our community and trust that you will understand that as a startup company, we need to experiment to figure out what works and eventually come up with a win-win solution.
So, in the interim, please be patient as we deliberate – we are working around the clock to understand your needs better so please keep sending us feedback!
Regards
Vinny Lingham
CEO, Yola
I love it – the ability to upload .js, CSS and html is a fantastic addition. I can literaly not wait to see what i can achieve with this.
Hearing the word ‘limitations’ will I’m sure make certain users feel somehow hard done by but the limits are in actual fact very large, 1GB per free site is alot – I have over 400 pages on my site and today I learned I only use 8MB of space!
I’m Pro Pro.
Lee, glad you like the HTML upload!
Hi, I’m happy about the changes, just one thing… What If I need more than 25 sites?
Nikolay, if you want more than 25 sites, email support@yola.com. We’re collecting user feedback that we’ll use to determine what types of packages we should offer in the future.
I really don’t like the “new” account types. I just joined Yola to make a bunch of little sites with an easy builder and without having to pay. Now, you can only have 5 sites? No, I don’t want to create a new account I reach 5 sites. Thanks a lot Yola. Now I think I’ll go and join some other free website builder.
John, sorry you don’t like the new account types. If you do want to create more than 5 sites, you can buy a Yola Pro account for $49.95 per year that will give you the ability to create 25 sites.
Please explain how this is a feature: Yola has been advertised as FREE all over the place for the past who knows how many years. Now it’s in fact NOT FREE.
Quincy, Yola now has both a free and a paid option. With the free option you get our free site building tools, 5 sites with 1GB of storage per site and free hosting. With Yola Pro you get more sites, more storage, HTML uploads, a Premium Style and advertising credits. Yola Free is, in fact, free. Yola Pro is $49.95 per year.
about the new stuff,
I’ve used yola for a year now and even bought my own domain. my site has worked out very well but now I am close to exceding the size limit and feel that the free users will get the stale biscuts in this whole idea. you guys will now probably give the paid users great constant updates while leaving the free users with nothing new for months on end. what happened? you guys used to have a great thing going: no ads on our sites, completely free and wonderful tools. now you are going to become just like the other hosts that I turned away from because of their “premium” services and hefty prices. my site is nonprofit yet it costs? $20 per year is fine but now? if I want to make it any better it will cost a total of $70 per year! maybe I should start looking for a new host, “AGAIN” good way to lose customers. why wouldn’t you just put ads on the main website? note to new users: if you plan on building a nice big website and have little spare cash, I recommend looking for a different host.
sorry yola you guys jumped off the deep end…
Techboy, we still have wonderful tools that you can use for free. What we’ve started offering today is a new pro package that has more storage, HTML uploads and a premium style, but you can still build a great looking website for free.
To the admin, I really don’t want to pay $50 just to make a few little websites for fun. I’m guessing this is a way of sucking in money? I would really like the ability to have just a bit more sites available in the free version. I mean really, was there a site limit for free in the past? I don’t remember for sure. Why strip features from the original version and make us pay for them? Just so you can get a lot of money?
I’m completely floored. This will really change my business plan as a website designer using Yola to build websites and offering free unlimited storage and bandwidth as part of the incentive to buy from me. This is quite unexpected especially in view of the article posted Sept. 8 on Mr. Lingham’s blog and I quote: “we decided from the very beginning that we wanted to create a business where the basic services are all free (website hosting, free site building software, free bandwidth, and no advertisements) and we charge our customers for add-ons and other value added services (domain names, premium styles, subscription packages for extra features – coming next month).” The limitations placed on the free service is very unexpected!!
my point is that just because I might reach 1 gb, and need 1.2 gb I’ll have to pay out $50 every year for 200 megs. not cool
Well, I’ve been using Yola for almost 5 years now, but i guess it’s time for me to say goodbye. I really am disappointed with Yola lately. First the new name; Yola… SynthaSite was alot better, and sounded more professional, Then the Premium Themes, Paying for the Footer to be removed, Limited memory, and now only 5 free websites. Well, i think Yola has made a huge mistake, and as i can see and can tell already, they are going to loose alot of they’re customers. Yola/Synthasite has always been known to be free and fun, Now it seems like all Yola wants is money. I do understand that it’s costly to buy servers and memory and pay for your employees and other things, But those are things you think about when starting a free web host business. To be truly free. Well, i will miss alot of memories i have with Yola/Synthasite. If it wasn’t for them, i wouldn’t have made my websites and inspired myself to become a professional web designer. Well, Thanks Yola/Synthasite, I will really miss yall, and always miss Monique from support.
Maybe i’ll come back in year or two, and see if Yola becomes free and fun, with no limits, because the internet shouldn’t have any limits.
Sincerely,
Nathan Morales
ToxicProductions@inbox.com
Been with Yola for a while now after dealing with webhosting that gets charged monthly. Granted, $50 is more expensive than free but where I am based, $50 is still free!
I just started using Yola a month ago and have loved my final product. I don’t mind paying for my Domain name (@ $20) I know your making mony on that, but it was worth it. I don’t mind paying for premium layouts and such, idont even mind paying $50/ for hosting fees and whatever eles the pro pack includes. I do however have plans on some major site building in the near future and a 25 site limit (even after paying $20 a domain name) just won’t be enough! Can you make it $50 for 25 sites but allow me to buy another 25 sites on my same account? Please let me know about more sites soon….I’m already pricing out host servers and web design software…
Thanks: not wanting to leave!
Fatcow web host is wayyyyy better, its only about $10 more than yola, but they give you UNLIMITED SPACE!!! and unlimited bandwith and a free premium domain name, yola charges for them. they also give you unlimited mailboxes and emails for your domain name. i just signed up and they even have 24/7 live support and they help you wonders!
nathan,
I looked at fatcow and I have to agree with you, if you are willing to actually pay for yola stuff why not just use fatcow? in the long run it comes out to be cheaper because you get a domain with the pakage plus some ad cash among other things. the problem for me is that I already have a website that took me a very long time to make on yola. if I could transfer my website I would.
Well the price is not overly priced, but what concerns me is the amount of unpredictable changes, i do think it’ll impact alot of people if they had plan on their business. With all changes comming out consecutively, what will happen in the near future? …
im not sure if i have the peace of mind… lol
And really does Premium really offer that much more of a difference? i saw the change log and i dont see much benifit?
25 sites / unlimited space and bandwithd / 12months at JUST $50? where is the problem? do you want 6, 9, 12, 2435 sites for free? CREATE A NEW ACCOUNT!!!! it takes 1 minute!!!! where is THE BIG PROBLEM?
As one who is very happy with Yola, and am quite prepared to go with the Pro package, if I consider the extra facilities are worth the money, I have a couple of points that need clarification.
I currently have three sites that I paid the fees to become stand-alone .com domains, and am currently working on two more that will require the same standing.
Am I correct in presuming, if I opt for the Pro package, this only applies to building facilities, and sites will still require .com domain registration. If this is the case, then the limit of five sites does not apply – being only applicable to free sites.
Please clarify.
I have already been with Yola now for over a year and I am very dissapointed. First the footer and now this. Very dissapointing. Yola will lose plenty of people in no time!
Great now I have a dumb footer and my visits dropped by 10%
Also, No HTML,CSS,JV for the free version?
Man this is disappointing more like a downgrade to me.
Last, Yola’s home page says there is no forced ads…. LIES, lies Yola!!!
Can’t wait to find a new free host and web builder 😛