My China Web Hosting Experience

Am working on an e-commerce site for a China client called BCLN. In the process, I faced one of the difficulties for oversea people to enter China Internet Market.

China is well-known for its Internet censorship, extremely slow surfing speed and others horribles experience. Some descibe it is protected by the CHINA GREAT FIREWALL. No one can get throgh this, not even Google.

I was a loyal lunar pages supporter until i realized their server connection is too slow accessing from China. I actually purchased their dedicated hosting package for my client and have totally no problem access in Malaysia. However, after i get here, it is totally different.

My client complaints that it is slow and unstable. In the end, i decided to find a local hosting.

In many cases, China IT is quite similar with Malaysia IT.. full of pirated software and pro-microsoft. That means, i cant easily get a quality PHP server that comparable to lunarpages.

I believe my requirement is low: Cpanel, PHP5, MySQL with unicode support, Mod Rewrite enabled. Maybe i had a bad luck, i din get to find my favorite server here. Most of them are IIS and ASP base. (Probably, setting up a unix hosting company in China is a good idea)

Like many others that wish to setup website that is accessible in China with China local server, i switched from one host to another. None that i encountered can provide me Cpanel. If you can get a PHP4 with mod rewrite enabled, you should feel satisfied.

It came to the last day before i present to the client. I was trying my last and googling to solve this problem. And last i came to a blog, setup by a "Guai lou" that studying in China. His blog lead me to HostGator.

For some unknown reason, HostGator is extremelty fast, both in China and Malaysia. I have totally no problem access it from Shen Zhen, and the speed is even faster than my access to lunarpages from Malaysia.

I am quite happy with this oversea web host that work well in China. I think I will continue using it for a long time.

Btw, my client site is http://www.bclnshop.com