webhosting in china

[fraser1999]

Hello everyone

I currently have a website hosted by yahoo small business. it's not viewable in china - apparently I share the IP address with someone who has been blocked

does anyone know a (preferably UK based) webhosting provider who is 100% reliable for china?

or alternatively, if I was going to set up a parallel com.cn site with someone like china telecom what are the best options? are there any reliable chinese providers who can be dealt with online? (I read chinese, although would rather use english!)

Thank you!

[smalldog]

No such thing as 100% reliable! If you share a server with a site that becomes blocked, you are likely to become blocked too. You could reduce the risk by having a dedicated IP address but that would be no guarantee of not being blocked -- exactly how blocking works is not public knowledge.

You can have .com and other domains hosted in China -- it doesn't necessarily need to be .com.cn. I used to have a site hosted in China with www.wsine.com. Very basic service but reasonably cheap. I paid for it online through my China Merchants Bank account and it was set up pretty quickly. However I found that Chinese hosting providers are not cheap when it comes to features like mysql databases that US providers offer as standard.

[roddy]

Any will do. Yahoo are a bit of a special case due to association with Geocities, I've been told - think it was someone on here that told me that, can't remember who. I've probably used five or six different webhosting companies over the years and never had any blocking problems - there are, relative to the size of the Internet, very few blocked sites, and the chances of winding up on the same server or IP address as one is minimal.

For UK based webhosting, I'd recommend 34sp.com - I have most of my sites on a reseller account with them. Not cheapest, and you pay extra for some things which are standard elsewhere, but reliable and support is very good.

If you are concerned about access from China, you might want to look at HK based hosting. Tends to be pricey in my experience, but load speeds from China are very good and will generally take international credit cards, have English language support, etc.

[mikelove]

They're not UK-based, but before we switched to our current dedicated server we hosted with Dreamhost - we were with them for several years, never had any blocking trouble, and thanks to their excellent choice of backbone connections the latency to China was delightfully low by US standards. Dirt cheap, too. And they'll give you a unique IP for an extra $4/month, thus ensuring that you won't run into trouble sharing an IP with a blocked site.

Incidentally, this site is a great tool for evaluating the quality of a web host's link to China - they'll do a traceroute from their system in Beijing to your server and give you the latency time, number of hops, etc.

[fraser1999]

Thank you all for the help there - problem is now solved I think.

Have moved to 34sp.com as recommended; really excellent customer service, and cheaper than Yahoo too.

According to Mike's website f(connection to Beijing) all is A-OK - though if anyone in China right now has two seconds to spare and would like test it for me I'd really appreciate it; they can do by clicking here.

Thanks again for that - it's helped me take a big step forward; really, it seems this forum provides a service that just isn't available anywhere else.