Internet Usage Rises in China
BEIJING — The number of Internet users in China has reached 298 million, nearly equal to the population of the United States, according to official figures. Although only 23 percent of Chinese use the Web — compared with 73 percent in the United States and 22 percent worldwide — about 88 million people went online in China for the first time last year, a 42 percent increase over 2007, the official China Internet Network Information Center said on Tuesday.
China surpassed the United States as the biggest user of the Internet last June.
In 2008, there was also a spike in mobile Web surfing, with 117.6 million users, a 113 percent increase over the previous year.
Internet use is restricted in China and the government regularly blocks Web sites and blog postings that it views as a threat to state security. Last week, officials announced a crackdown on 91 Web sites that it said featured lewd content. It also shut down Bullog, a popular blog aggregator.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/world/asia/15beijing.html?ref=world
Published: January 14, 2009
Below flowdigram show the market shares of China major hosting companies.
Top five companies are
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1
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XINNET.COM
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23.4718 %
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2
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HICHINA.COM
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17.58 %
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3
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DNS.COM.CN
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10.4998 %
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4
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DNS-DIY.COM
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9.4025 %
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5
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CNOLNIC.COM
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4.2901 %
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There are also a few junior hosting companies rising in the market. They usually come up with much more competitive price and fast customer service responding time, such as EBLHost, the hosting company my site is hosted.
Reason 1 Anyone who runs a business in China and also owns a website might frequently find his website is blocked and unblocked within China but no way to find out why. In these cases, most likely you are banned by GFW（Great Firewall of China, a firewall to filter sensitive information from overseas）. An ISP host might hundreds of websites on one server, if one of the sites contains “sensitive” content, the IP will be banned, and your site may not be accessed in China. That is bad for a business running in China. If you are not going to setup your own server and want to make sure your site won’t be affected by GFW, you’d better host your site in China.
Reason 2 – Speed, have to say, china has limited undersea fiber links to us and eu. The speed is quite slow for Chinese to visit websites in us IDC, and vice versa.
So, if you wanna more visitors from china or doing business with Chinese, better host a Chinese version website inside china to get good online presence.
I will write more about how to host a website in china next time.<–>
Have to say “hosting in china is much more expensive than that is in us”. I just built a small website for a shenzhen company ( job hunter — willcan executive search ) last month. After job done, they asked me to move their website and email box to a new server.
I recommended EBLhost to them as I want to host their site on a cpanel host ( easy for me to maintain and backup ) . When I show eblhost ’s quote to them, they were suprised by the price
“Gee, so cheap!” me panic … They told me they host their site with http://www.net.cn/ the top one hosting and domain provider in china with a space 300M, ￥1150/year(plus mailbox). My god, a space with limited managed service can be sold in $150/year. But eblhost ’s standard package ( 1G space ) with cpanel licence only $40/year.
Can I raise the quote? …
Looks i have to learn more about china hosting market, i believe there is big space left for good overseas IDC or hosting company like hostgator etc
