A few problems in China web hosting market
With the biggest population and the growing economy, China is considered the biggest markets in the world (if not ye, it will be). Everyone would like to take a share in the market, but there are so many things in china are different with international standards, hosting business is one of the things.
In China, many hosting companies are not running with the same operating system with their oversea competitors. Basically, the problems are
1. Technical support, most supports are at very low level and only few of the companies provide 24X7 service.
2. payment methods, credit card payments are usually not supported. Instead, direct deposit or alipay (a Chinese online payment transaction company) are widely used.
3. Instability. Most hosting companies provide windows servers. cPanel and other worldwide popular administrative software are rarely used here while most companies use self-developed software (pirated versions sometimes). These software are simple and instable. Windows servers are infective to virus, as a result, server down or slowup are frequent.
4. The market is non-standard. Small service providers are everywhere provideing cheap but inferior services while products from the bigger ones are even more expensive than hosting with oversea companies.
5. Government supervision, the well-known GFW and ICP certificate requirements make the situation even more complex.
After all, it is not easy to hosting in china.
China Web Hosting
March 18th, 2009 at 12:41 am #
Nice article, straight to the point. Something to add would be regarding email hosting in China, most Chinese hosts do not have reverse DNS in place, which results in many email providers rejecting emails sent from Chinese servers, which can be a big no-no for companies.
Cheers,
Chris
Alex
March 20th, 2009 at 4:36 pm #
Chris is correct, I used couple email hosting companies in China and they didn’t comply with the industry criteria at the start, but when I figured out the problems, emailed the instruction and asked them to fix, they fixed them eventually.
I now have 2 dedi servers in China, the hardware and support is okay if you can manage the servers yourself, but I have to say the China Telcome’s network sucks, it has Intermittent problems to oversea networks, and you have to wait for days for them to fix it.
Alex