Yahoo! will become Movable Type's preferred hosting provider for small businesses. The service will be targeted at small businesses, which commonly use Movable Type over other blogging services focused more on individuals such as Google's (google.com) Blogger or Six Apart's Live Journal.

Movable Type says it has optimized its software for the Yahoo! hosting environment, enabling 140 percent faster performance over typical hosting environments. 

"Blogging is quickly moving into the mainstream as companies grow their businesses by using blogs for marketing purposes, for internal workgroups and even for content management," says Anil Dash, vice president of professional products, by Six Apart. "By partnering with Yahoo! and customizing Movable Type specifically for their environment, we have created the best Movable Type experience on the web. Professionals now have an easy way to install, customize and expand their Movable Type weblogs, all hosted and managed by the recognized leader in website and blog hosting."

Yahoo!'s hosting packages start at a regular price of $11.95 per month and include a free domain, blog hosting, email, 200 GB of data transfer per month and 5 GB of disk space.

Rich Riley, vice president and general manager of Yahoo! Small Business, says the company is committed to providing the blogosphere with a flexible and scalable blog hosting service.

Having entered the Web hosting market in late 2002, Yahoo! now hosts over 30 million domains.