.htaccess problems: what are the alternatives?

NB: I'm not a programmer or developer.

I hired a developer to build a site for me using WordPress and Yahoo Small Business web hosting. Yahoo doesn't support .htaccess (I have no idea what that is), so my developer tells me that my site has to include pages with addresses like sitename.com/?page_id=47 instead of sitename.com/service, for example.

Is he correct? Is there really no way to get normal-looking page names without .htaccess? Are there no alternatives?

Please note: advice like "switch your hosting service" or "leave Yahoo" is unhelpful. For now, I'm stuck with Yahoo.

Your help is much appreciated.

If you are going to use Wordpress on that hosting platform, then you are stuck with the "ugly" URL's. Wordpress, and most other PHP-based CMS systems, use the .htaccess file like this, and rely on it being there. When it doesn't work like that, then unfortunately there's no alternative that's available.

You might want to contact Yahoo and ask them about it. The feature you need is called URL rewriting. I have no idea what web server Yahoo hosting using, but most web servers support some sort of URL rewriting functionality, so there is some possibility that you could set it up even without using .htaccess. Someone who knows their system would have to tell you how though, if it is possible. If they don't support it, then you are stuck.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks#Permalinks_without_mod_rewrite

You may also try this which mitigates .htaccess use.