You might be surprised but online payment is alive and well in China. Compared to a few years ago, making online payment is getting easier everyday.
The only caveat - you have to read Chinese. Most of the payment interface are in Chinese only or have badly translated English interface. If you do not read Chinese, online payment can still be a challenge.
At 59Box, one of the things we wanted to do is to make it easy for customer to pay us. (We don’t understand why many companies here make it so difficult to pay them.)
Beside the usual cash and crediting into bank account, we are lining up a few popular online payment options. You can find the information on our Payment page.
Online Credit Card payment
Credit card is getting more popular in China especially with the young and mobile working professionals. Integrating with credit card processor for China issued cards is pretty straight forward. We had integrated with ChinaBank Payment to process local credit cards.
In order to accept cards issued outside China, a more beat-about route is required. Currently we are going through the process and hopefully will be able to accept all credit cards very, very soon.
AliPay
Have not heard of AliPay? It is a service similar to PayPal, with some China favor thrown in. Just like PayPal, you can sign up with your email and make payment to another email address.
We have an AliPay account and is integrating the payment process. So if you have an AliPay account, you can choose this option.
Online Bank Transfer
Internet banking is also becoming popular option nowadays. By far the best internet banking platform we have seen is from Industrial and Commercial Bank (ICBC). Ask for the internet-banking service when you open an account.
With Internet banking you can do online fund transfer to our account. There is no charge if your account is in Shanghai and a small charge if outside of Shanghai. Our account information is on the Payment page.
Transfer with ATM machine
OK this is not strictly online but still very convenient if you hold an account with any of the local banks below. Simply go to the ATM and do a fund transfer to us. Our account information can be found on our Payment page.
- Bank of China
- Industrial and Commercial Bank
- Bank of Communications
- China Construction Bank
- China Merchants Bank
- Agriculture Bank
So there you have it, payment made easy. But it does not stop here. If you still need other options like PayPal, Moneybookers, Western Union, etc. Just get in touch with us.
March 21st, 2007
We are great fan and supporter of the open source movement. When getting ready our hosting service, one of the questions we asked was whether to go open source or buy commercial softwares.
We like to go for open source, but it means more work. The extra work probably cost more than if we just pay for the commercial products. But we thought, since we are at it - bring new ideas to hosting in China - we might as well introduce and promote something we believe in - open source.
Open source is huge in the hosting space. For example, eight of the ten most reliable web hosters run their sites on the open source operating system Linux. (Someone should start a similar measurement within China but not surprised if there is one already.)
But Windows hosting is huge in China. Just about every hosting company provide Windows hosting. And just about any small, medium website is hosted on the Windows platform. Not sure how many of those are licensed copies, though. Ever notice in China Linux hosting seems to cost more than Windows hosting? Looks like some cost is missed out somewhere. Imagine BSA going into the datacenter and start shutting down each server that does not have a license. Gives you a grin thinking about it doesn’t it.
We decided to stand behind what we believe in and use open source control panel for hosting as well. Sorry cPanel and Plesk fans, we like them very much too, save us lots of energy, but it is open source all-the-way this time.
Virtualmin is the control panel we will provide by default because we know and use it for a long time. There are a couple more open source control panel around and we like very much to partner with people who can support these panels.
Please get in touch if you like to showcase your favorite control panel to our China hosting users. We can work out a win-win-win business model for you, we and the open source project.
March 10th, 2007
IP here is not Intellectual Property, yet another hot topic in China, but Internet Protocol, as in IP address.
Here’s an interesting visualization of IP allocation per capita (via Ip Assignment, Per Capita).
The colors indicate 1 IP is available for how many people in the country.
Notice that China, among most other countries have less than 1 IP per capita. (Exact value is not provided, interested to work that out?)
If the rate of Internet growth in China holds true, China may be running out of IP soon. Or is it?
My interest in this was aroused recently I enquired about getting more IP addresses to provide VPS service. To my horror I was told that IP is assigned 1 per rack space and would cost almost as much as a co-location to get another. Checking with a few more providers gives basically the same answer. The reason? “IP demand is very ???” (interesting term here, how do you translate it succinctly?)
According to 2006 IPv4 Address Use Report (somewhere near the bottom), China distributed 98.02M addresses compared to US 1366.53M. This information, if put together with another data - China’s 137M Internet users, second behind US’s 207M users but with only 10% penetration - does make the IP shortage scenario look very real.
But Andy Oram presented the other side of the argument - there isn’t an IP address crunch. In fact, Asia-Pacific used up only 13.9% of the IP allocated. This is much inline with the rest of the world.
So what is the true picture of IP allocation in China? This article and this APNIC article may enlighten.
But my question still remains - how to get more IP? Is anyone able to introduce me into a guanxi circle to get a block of IPs?
March 4th, 2007
Many things are cheap in China unfortunately web hosting is not one of them.
I not saying this so that we can get our customer to pay more. (And we will never do that, ever.)
Before we became a hosting company in China ourselves, we tried to find hosting with rock-bottom price like those American hosters (for like $5 a month, unlimited everything!). After talking to people and understanding the market, we learnt that the are factors with make cheap hosting very unlikely.
On critical factor is IP scarcity (more on this topic another time). Economic 101, scarcity increase, demand increase, price increase. There are just too few IP to go around. I recall a source mentioning the whole of China has as many IP address allocated as Stanford University.
Monopoly of infrastructure. Again Econ 101, monopoly or oligopoly props up prices. Datacenters, backbones are owned by a few powerful players. There isn’t any real competition to drive down price or push up service level.
Finally, surprise, surprise, server hardwares are not cheaper (and often more expensive) in China. For example, check out Dell’s price for the PowerEdge 860 in US and in China.
So with a high base cost, the price can only go so low. As price goes lower, service and reliability suffered.
Our journey to drive down cost and improve reliability for our own hosting usage led to the decision to set up a new hosting company and share our effort with customers.
As we grow, we are committed to find innovatives way to push the standard and value of hosting services.
March 2nd, 2007
Google is reportedly trying to buy gmail.cn, a close resemblance of their free email service gmail.com. The owner however refused to sell.
It would be interesting to see the outcome of this episode.
If you are doing business in China, it is a good idea to register your domain name under .cn and .com.cn as well. Both are top country-level domain name (or ccTLD) for China.
The .cn domain is one of the most registered country level domain according to CNNIC. It ranks 4th with 1.8 million names.
Just like many things in China, the domain name industry has its own perculiar China bend to it. I hope to share more of my encounters and experiences in this blog from time to time.
February 28th, 2007
For those that are in China, I hope you have a great Chinese New Year holiday. It look like not many people took our China hosting survey over the holiday period.
So if you haven’t, head over and give us your thoughts on how we can be the hosting company that you want to do business with. Do let your friends in China know about us too.
Technically we are operational, however the holiday season delayed our work somewhat. Frankly we underestimated the holiday disruption. So it will take a little longer to test and get ready.
But if you have any hosting requirement right now, please give me a buzz. (021) 54243435 or email sales (at) 59box dot com. I will help get your website up and running.
February 27th, 2007
Before we officially launch (after the Chinese New Year), here’s a little survey about hosting in China.
Let us know your thoughts about hosting in China. Leave a comment here if the survey is inadequate to express yourself.
Getting and maintaining a hosting in China can be challenge. For those that had experience with hosting outside of China, it is just not “what you know it to be“.
Let us know what your concerns, hopes and wishes are for China hosting. Our pleasures are in getting those solved.
February 15th, 2007
沪B2-20070010. That’s our newly minted permit as an Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Shanghai China. This string of code is a must, according to China’s regulation, for company providing ISP (or hosting) service. Look for it if you are looking for hosting in China.
So what does the number means to you? For the start it is an indication of our focus on providing a legitimate hosting service that meets the expectation of customers and the society that we operate in.
Our services include web hosting, domain name registration, managed server, server co-location and related web services - services to help companies launch and maintain their web presence, specifically in China.
Having used many hosting providers in China over the years for our own hosting needs, we have had enough of endless issues and decided to take things into our own hand. After going through the channels, we finally got ourselves approved as an ISP.
We are probably the first hosting company in China to launch in English and with a company blog. Hopefully this brings some familiarity to customers accustomed to the language and to open communication channels.
If you are new to this market or you had been going around in circles looking for the right hosting partner in China, we might just be THE ONE that you are praying for.
Thank you for dropping by our blog. We are expecting to start business after Chinese New Year. So in the meantime, leave us your comments and we look forward to serve you!
February 11th, 2007
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