59Box – China Web Hosting Blog

Not even Google is spared from China

January 16th, 2010

The now famous post by Google regarding their new approach to China is a must read for anyone planning to host in China. As a company operating in China, we are glad that Google brings to light the practices and length that China is willing to go in order to police the Internet.

While on the surface it seem that business practices in China is increasingly capitalistic, business driven, there is an under current that if you do business in China you do it their way. This is especially so in matters dear to the central ideology which, least we forgot, is still communism.

For the longest time we tried to explained that in order to host a website in China, one need to register the site with the authority and obtain an ICP number. Many think it was unthinkable or we are joking until their site got shutdown. Then they think we are to blame.

Recently, China decided to step up their policing of the Internet and ordered the shut down of datacenter and inspected individual server. Without notice. Can you imagine something like this happen in the datacenter where you host your server?

Well, it can happen in China. In fact this is not the first time we encountered such cases in our operation history.

We had client with racks of servers serving hotel operation across China affected for more than a day! We appreciate that they understanding that things like this happens in China.

SLA? Sure the datacenter can give you a SLA. But when the government official come knocking, whose side do you think they will stand? No one says “no” to the government. No one. (Until Google maybe)

If even Google is not spared, be assured that your server hosted in China has the possibility of being monitored if need be.

There will be customers who do not understand and decided to pull out thinking we are bullshitting them. We had long since decided our approach to China. Worry less about losing customer and helping sincere customers to host in this minefield environment.

Posted in China Internet, Hosting in China, Our views | No Comments »

Offsite backup service launched

June 23rd, 2009

We are happy to announced that we are launching our offsite backup storage service. We had been looking for offsite backup for our own data and finally came upon a solution that works for us.

We think that this backup solution will meet the needs of many people and so packaged the solution into 2 easy, pay as you go, plans.

For $1 per GB per month, you get unlimited upload and download to backup and store you data.
If you need more than 10 GB, cost per GB goes down to $0.70 per month, still with unlimited upload and download.

Access speed is relatively good from China (server is in US, we are using it for our own China servers) and we would be happy to setup a test account for serious customers who wants to try out.

Of course, there are free storage services around and there are dozens of storage services that cost more or less than ours.

As mentioned, we had been looking for backup storage ourselves and what we found met our requirements. So what we believe to be the value of our backup storage service is as follows:

Use any backup tool, open source or commercial. You do not have to download and install a specific software to work with the storage. No proprietary backup format to lock you in as well.
Support any way you transfer – FTP, SFTP, rsync, webDAV,
No large storage commitment, why buy 20G with you only need 2G?
No billing for upload and download. This can become important if your data changes and you do backup daily.

Most storage provider worth their salt would be RAID protected, we have that as well.

Check out the plans and sign up now!

Tags: backup, storage
Posted in 59Box, Services, Updates | No Comments »

Questions about China bandwidth and speed

June 16th, 2009

Not too long ago I made a comment on a blog about China bandwidth and also responded to a number of questions from clients about the network and bandwidth in China.

So this post is a compilation and putting down my thoughts on this topic. I must say after a few years in the hosting business in China, we are still learning and trying to understand the network and environment better.

China is perhaps quite unique in the sense that it has a really huge internet population and there are huge demand for reaching content outside and inside of China.

According to CNNIC, the international bandwidth is 640,287 Mbit/s (Dec 31, 2008). Wikipedia has a list that shows the number of users in China is greater than the EU. I have not found data about EU international bandwidth but I suspect that with most EU countries having their own international bandwidth, the total is probably more that China.

Therefore is doesn’t matter if you are connected to a huge pipe at either end. If you are coming in or going out, there is a narrow congested pipe in the middle.

The US has the advantage that the Internet start there and they whole world is connecting there. But there will probably come a time that the world want to connect to China and India (which from the Wikipedia data is just 7% of population but already the top 4).

An area we have yet look into is private transit and bandwidth, so if you have any insight into that I would love to learn more about it. We are also venture more into this area as well and hope to bring some exciting products that meets the requirement of customers in China.

Internally, the China Internet network is also unique and interesting as well. Other than the US and maybe India coming up, there isn’t another country that need to network so many people and cities.
My guess is that at the present moment, the network in China is not as well developed as in the US. No hard data here but I think it is easily a good guess.

Then there is the also problem that the two major network providers don’t like talking to each other. Well things has gotten better over the last few few years. It used to be that going to sites on the other provider is even slower than going to the US.

Guess all these are what makes things really interesting for us. An interesting, challenging and growing environment that is China.

If you have information or experience, perhaps share with us in the comments.

Tags: bandwidth, network, population
Posted in China Internet, Hosting in China, Our views | No Comments »

Customer Support and Account Management Portal

June 11th, 2009

Introducing our new customer support and account management portal. It has been running close to a month now. And we are now getting very comfortable managing our service around it.

New customers who signed up for our VPS are automatically added to this portal. Existing dedicated server, colocation and VPS customers that signed up before the portal was setup will be migrated into the portal as payment becomes due.

With this portal, you can

Maintain and update you information with us.
View the services you have with us, the period and the due date
Get a copy of the invoices and record of transaction
Send support request and questions.

We believe that with this support portal in place we can better manage all the support tickets and services in one place. Also with this system in place, it has allowed us to start hiring more people into the sales and support team.

If there is any suggestion for improvement, please send us an email or leave a comment. Looking forward to serve you better.

Tags: support
Posted in Services, Updates | No Comments »

Server/Website uptime monitoring service

June 2nd, 2009

We are exciting to launch a new service – Uptime Monitoring. Sign up for a FREE trial or visit the demo to explore and experience the features before decide if you like to upgrade to the professional version.

With this service you can monitor your website, web server, vps or dedicated server from multiple worldwide locations.

You can receive downtime alerts via email or buy credit to receive via SMS text message on your mobile.

Other features includes

Selectable monitoring interval between 1 – 60 mins
Manage multiple servers, websites and ports
Advanced monitoring options
Unlimited email contacts
Unlimited SMS contacts (per message fee applies)
Customizable public report

Sign up for a FREE trial now!

Tags: monitoring, uptime
Posted in 59Box, Services, Updates | No Comments »

Our China server Speed Test

May 28th, 2009

We had added one of our datacenter locations to SpeedTest.net.

Since there are not many test sites hosted within China, we became the default sent-to for areas near and north of Shanghai. Immediately within the first few hours the results are very revealing about the bandwidth and latency situation within China.

Try it here:

Tags: bandwidth, latency, speed test
Posted in China Internet, Updates | No Comments »

Using Data Encryption and SSL in China

May 10th, 2009

The use of data encryption is regulated in China.

Like many regulations in China, there are often difficult to interpret areas and enforcement is often non-standard across different administrative locations. When in doubt, many people either adopt a do it until questioned approach or not to do anything at all.

In the case of encryption, this has prevented the widespread use of SSL in websites. Even among e-commerce or social websites, SSL is hardly used to protect the transit of personal data and sensitive information.

In fact, you will hardly see any web hosting company even mentioning or providing SSL certificate.

This article has an interesting comment:

If you encrypt data in China, you have to provide the Chinese government the ability to access the keys. By this regulation, the Chinese should be able to get access to [Secure Sockets Layer]-encrypted traffic, too.” The result is that businesses tend not to use encryption in China …

If you are using any kind of encryption in your servers in China or even VPN, you are well advised to seek opinion from a qualified laywer.

More information:

China IT Law

Tags: encryption, regulation
Posted in China Internet, Hosting in China | No Comments »

Banning of China Server IPs

April 11th, 2009

The Great Firewall of China has gained quite a reputation for user based in China. Many people are familiar with the case of not able to visit certain websites hosted outside of China. Wikipedia, was for a certain period blocked.

Lesser known however, but also causing the same inability to visiting websites hosted outside of China, is the fact that some sites actively blocked China IPs. The reason for doing so varies from site to site, common ones includes

blocking as a result of past spammers using the same IP or IP range
using a block list compiled by someone (that may be outdated)
excluding users from certain locations deem undesirable

A similar related problem is with IPs listed as spam host on RBL (real time black hole list) sites like SpamCop. When an IP is listed, sending email to a server using the list will either reject or drop the email.

It can be frustrating when to learn that your IP has been banned. It had happened to me a few times this week with a few sites. On the one hand, I was angry because I was banned through no fault of mine. I know I’m taking it too personally, it was not me, but anyone using the same IP or IP range that I had. On the other hand, I was reminded that one of our business goal is to help people and businesses to deal with challenges of hosting in China and this was one of it.

While banning IP is a situation not unique to China, it is common. We had dealt with a fair number of situations of banned server IP to know what to do and what works. Where many China providers will tell the customer “tough luck”, we went out of our way to help solve the problem.

Existing and future potential customers, let us know if you have a server IP banned and need our assistance.

Tags: banned, IP
Posted in Our views, Services | No Comments »

China Internet Population exceed 298 million

March 27th, 2009

China Internet population now exceeds 238 million according to a BBC article Surge in Chinese internet users. That’s almost the same as the population of the United States. Last year growth was a staggering 41.9% and it looks like the growth is still not pausing for a break.

Wikipedia also has some interesting information,

While much has been publish about the control of content and the restriction of access to certain websites in China, less attention is put on the strain such a big internet population put on the infrastructure and the challenges and opportunities such a large population present.

Data from CNNIC, the China Internet Network Information Center, indicates that the international bandwidth is 640286.67Mbps (about 625Gbps). That’s an average of about 2Kbps per user. Do you feel a little slow accessing international sites from China? Or slow China site from other parts of the world?

Are you planning to tap the China Internet potential? We like to be your partner.

Tags: china, internet, statistics, trends
Posted in China Internet, Our views | 2 Comments »

10,000 Unregistered Web Sites in China Shutdown

March 18th, 2009

A few weeks ago Bloomberg ran an article on the shutting down of unregistered websites in China.

In the article it was stated,

“Companies that offer Web site hosting services were told to close unregistered sites by 6 p.m. local time yesterday, according to the Piper Jaffray report. The circular sent to so- called Internet service providers ordering the closures also mandated that all new Web sites must get government approval before opening, the report said.”

This isn’t exactly new news, the requirement to register website (beian or 备案) had been there for a couple of years already. From time to time, due to pressure from higher up or as a show of force, events like this happen, often unnoticed or unreported until an article like this decided to give it a spin.

Considering a shared hosting server can host in the range 100+ sites, this could amount, in aggregate, to a couple hundreds of server. Not a lot in absolute sense for China as a whole. But it is enough to cripple any company that have overlooked the requirement.

And this had been the sole reason why we had been holding back shared hosting. Although there is a demand, the extra administrative effort to comply to this requirement held us back. A black sheep could result in the server being shutdown affecting other legitimate customers, creating many angry customers. Not something we like to have to deal with.

So what exactly does the regulation says? There are many hearsay floating around as to what is required but in fact the documents are available online (in Chinese, of course). When I have the time, I will make a translation of it.

Registration is rather simple but you will need a local contact person and local address. If your website has nothing out of line, you can get a registration number approved in a week or so. (The approval time can varies, keep Murphy’s Law in mind and get it done early if you are planning a website with an unmovable launch date.)

We are not lawyers but if you have any question on hosting in China, we can share our experience with you. Drop us a note.

Tags: beian, china
Posted in Hosting in China, Our views | No Comments »

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