Virtual hosting provider out of China

This month, I helped a website to change its hosting service provider.

China is a fast growing market for virtual hosting, foreign hosting
providers have good business opportunities because:
1. In general, many Chinese hosting providers are not good enough. They
either provides low price but poor service, or simply high price.
2. There is a lot of regulations. Many personal webmaster feel uncomfortable
to file personal information in police office. My friend was requested to
enroll a class which cost RMB 610, just because he placed the server in
Guang Zhou city. That's really too much for a non-profit personal website .
3. For silly reason, the net speed between north China and south China is
slow as snail. But the connection to other countries are good enough for
simple Internet service.

Sure there are risks to choose a foreign host provider. As the rumor tells,
there might be an "unknown" wall. Any IP might be blocked without any
explanation. But the benefit worth the risk.

When choosing the host, price, hardware, security, service are most
important factors to compare.

We selected 4 candidates and let the users poll on them:
bluehost.com
ipower.com
www.dreamhost.com
www.hostgator.com

Although it's a small community, the site has a lot of users from all over
China. To test the hardware especially the network connection, we asked our
users to launch the homepage of each host provider and report the time cost.
So it's very smart to use a simple homepage!
www.bluehost.com and www.hostgator.com are fast for most our users. I heard

www.dreamhost.com is good but they give very poor result.

www.hostgator.com allow its customer to store adult material, which might
attract some webmasters, but we don't want to get blocked just because our
neighborhood is blocked! So we chose www.bluehost.com at last.

The website has been running on bluehost for about 20 days. The service is
good. But I must warning you bluehost only allow you to use 20% of the cpu
time. If you own a hot website, you have to buy better service from bluehost
or just consider other companies.

Tags: vhosting, virtural hosting, bluehost, ipower, dreamhost, hostgator