Reliable server providers outside mainland China?

[elina]

Does anyone know some reliable server providers outside mainland China, and ideally they could use Chinese language to communicate with us through email or telephone?

This one recommended by Gato before is pretty good, their price is far more cheaper than the one we’re using. The only downside is their Chinese customers support is not 24hours X 7days, so that when it’s necessary to contact them, sometimes we need to use our limited English to communicate with them, which is time-consuming, which could cause misunderstanding during reading their (or writing our) English emails.

[onebir]

I don't know of any personally, but it occurred to me that hosting companies based in Malaysia, Singapore or Hong Kong might fit the bill for you. & if you're using a web search, using the location - rather than ability to provide Chinese language support - might give you more hits....

[elina]

Thanks for the suggestion.

We found this site does not support ASP we use to our site. We will do more searches in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and still better to hear other people who actually use a certain hosting company, rather than random look for in the search engines.

[gato]

The only downside is their Chinese customers support is not 24hours X 7days, so that when it’s necessary to contact them,

What are the hours for ICDSoft's Chinese tech support? Do you really need 24x7 Chinese tech support?

There are many hosting companies out there that try to maximize profit by putting as many users as they can on the same server, sacrificing uptime and speed. Since you are running a business, using a bad host could be costly. Ideally, you'd have some user feedbacks to rely on and stay away from those that do not have much of a track record for reliability.

[elina]

The following 2 sites recommended by Gato are run by the same company, which have excellent service, such as promise to reply an email enquiry within 1 hour (actually within 5 minutes to my email, impressively!), but they don’t accept websites with ASP scripting language:

http://www2.icdsoft.com/hosting.php

https://www2.suresupport.com/faq.php/38/210

The supported server-side scripting languages on our servers are PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby (along with the Rails framework), and Tcl.

Currently, Java, JSP, ASP, and ColdFusion are not supported on our servers.

Now we think we will try to use English to communicate with the server providers outside mainland China and the Chinese language customers service is not a must, does anyone know server providers outside mainland China with the following qualifications:

1. reliable

2. accept websites like ours written by ASP scripting language

3. accept PayPal payment

[gato]

Maybe you can ask icdsoft about other hosting companies, as well. They might know another company who meets your requirements.

It seems that to run ASP, you need a Windows-based server. However, most hosting companies use Unix operating system-based servers, thus ASP options are more limited.

[elina]

Thank you, Gato, no hope there, their reply (within 1 minute, amazing, I think they prepare some templates for answers):

Unfortunately we are not affiliated with other companies that support ASP. We are running Linux on our servers, thus the ASP or ASP.NET frameworks are not supported on our servers.

You will need to look for a Windows hosting company, that will support ASP. Since we have no affiliations with such a company, we cannot recommend one.

We are sorry we cannot help here.

If you need further assistance, do not hesitate to contact us again.

Best Regards,

[elina]

How about this one?

http://www.lunarpages.com/basic-hosting/

So far from the information we found on the Internet, the review is positive, does anyone actually use it or hear other people’s feedback?

[imron]

Lunar pages has horrible service. The company I work for used to host its site there until a few months ago. One day they decided that our site had been using too many resources and without warning moved us to a restricted server. They didn't tell us what resources we had been using too much of, and we have a pretty basic site which is just a content management system and a searchable archive. Nothing really resource intensive. So we had no idea what had caused the problem, and they kept saying we had to fix our site before moving us back to a production server. The upshot was that none of our clients were able to log in for two days while we tried to resolve the issue. We still don't know what caused the problem, we told them we'd fixed the problem (but in reality hadn't really done anything but make a few minor changes) and then after a period of monitoring (a day and a night) we were eventually moved back to the production server. The whole process was laughable, and througout, we got the feeling that the whole exercise was just an attempt to upsell us to one of their more expensive packages (they'd repeatedly say stuff like - well, you would have this program if you were on our blahblahblah package).

What was worse, is that due to the time differences, calling customer support was a nightmare. First of all, they only have phone support during American working hours. After that it's via email and their online support system only. Their system is setup so that if you send an enquiry asking about the status of your problem, then your problem gets moved to the back of their work queue. In addition, you rarely get the same person dealing with your support request and so you find yourself having to repeatedly explain the situation.

We were so fed up, that we immediately started looking for a better host, and eventually went with rimuhosting who have been excellent, and who have excellent 24 hour support. Unfortunately for you, they only provide Linux-based hosts.

Anyway, I would avoid lunarpages if you want to be running a business site.

Edited April 12, 2009 at 01:34 AM by imron
its/it's

[gato]

Elina,

Try this hosting company "8 to Infinity" based in Singapore. They offer Windows-based servers and claim to the largest budget hosting company in Singapore (but how many hosting companies are there in Singapore?).

http://www.8.to/win2k_web_hosting.html

It would be better to use a company that is in roughly the same time zone you are in.

[elina]

Thanks for the helpful information, Imron and Gato.

What was worse, is that due to the time differences, calling customer support was a nightmare. First of all, they only have phone support during American working hours. After that it's via email and their online support system only. Their system is setup so that if you send an enquiry asking about the status of your problem, then your problem gets moved to the back of their work queue.

Like many Chinese people with 哑巴 English, our oral and listening English level is terrible, we cannot telephone the customer support, emails will be the only way for us to communicate with the server providers, so we hope to find a swift email service support like icdsoft company.

In addition, you rarely get the same person dealing with your support request and so you find yourself having to repeatedly explain the situation.

Familiar feeling, we dealt with PayPal before in that way.

Gato,

After we find a certain server provider company, and then we use this search to see the feedbacks about the company on the internet:

http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=www.8.to&btnG=Google+%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&meta=

We have seen the first 11 pages in the above results (until we found this thread ), the informations are all news release written by the www.8.to company, no customers feedbacks (no matter good or bad) can be seen. So we cannot decide how trustworthy they’re.

We have found the following ones with Windows-based hosts, and need to spend more time to check how reliable they are, any reviews on them?

http://www.ixwebhosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.planBusinessPlus

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/hosting/shared.asp?isc=cjcmsc001t&ci=9009#tabs

http://www.micfo.com/windows-web-hosting.html

[imron]

emails will be the only way for us to communicate with the server providers, so we hope to find a swift email service support like icdsoft company.

Still avoid lunarpages. Like I said, you get a different person emailing you each time, and you end up having to go through everything you've already been through several times. Customer service both on the phone and via email was horrible.