Six Apart partners with Yahoo!

Yahoo! and Six Apart just announced a deal to make Yahoo! hosting the preferred small business host for Movable Type. Yahoo! currently hosts about 30 million individual websites including hundreds of thousands of small business sites. Yahoo! is using FastCGI, making Movable Type run a bit faster than a typical hosting install.

Movable Type is available on all hosting plans including the starter $11.95 package. Users of other blogging software may have to pay $8 more for Perl, PHP, and MySQL support for their accounts. Customers can visit a special page on Six Apart’s website to purchase a Yahoo! Small Business hosting account with Movable Type.

The current Yahoo! installation of Movable Type uses version “3.2ysb5-20051201,” a custom Yahoo! Small Business build.

Six Apart has previously asked web hosts for $5 a month per installed user. A small business license would fall under Six Apart’s commercial licensing program that currently charges $26 an author for their 50-author package. There is currently no mention of the financial terms of the deal, and I don’t expect either side to announce or confirm payments.

Yahoo! offers free limited web hosting for all small businesses that add their information to Yahoo! Local allowing small businesses to start a small web presence. Yahoo! will be encouraging upsells to their small business hosting service and a weblog might be a key selling point for small businesses wanting to make frequent news updates to their site. The deal could represent a significant recurring revenue stream for Six Apart.

The Reuters article also mentions Six Apart is currently developing a version of Movable Type using an Oracle database backend.

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