North & South website hosting in China

[yogapeace]

Hello friends,

There is this issue in China where hosting on certain bandwidth providers makes it so that your servers are accessible fast in the North part of the country & on other providers, they are fast in the South.

Does anyone know of sound solutions to this problem that are provided by some hosting company in China?

Does hosting in HK using Singtel solve this problem? (Audience of website is mainland China population)

[bill]

There are only 2 telecoms in China. One for the North and another for the South. I've found that as long as you get good speed in one area it will generally be good for the entire country. Some of the fastest hosts I looked at while in Shanghai a few months ago (South) were based in Beijing (North). Just get someone with close ties to either one of the major telecom's pipes and it looks like you're good to go.

Hong Kong hosting is not something I looked at. I don't know whether they would fall under a different set of rules/regulations or whether that would be an entirely different 3rd option to consider.

[DamonHD]

Hi,

I am hosting in Beijing. My hosting provider has centres in Beijing, Shanghai and HK (plus elsewhere in AsiaPac such as IN/AU/SG), and after extensive discussions here and with the provider Beijing seemed to be as good a bet as any, especially given that the majority of my Chinese users are actually in Beijing.

Getting through the "great firewall" can seem to add as much as 300ms RTT delay as far as I can tell, so being inside it for Chinese users, and outside it for other AsiaPac users, seems like a good idea.

Rgds

Damon

PS. Interestingly the MRTG bandwidth monitoring machine for my BJ host is in HK...

[edited by: DamonHD at 8:33 am (utc) on Dec. 21, 2006]

[yogapeace]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for the information. I'd gone out of town after posting this & I'm just catching up.
I'd appreciate it if you can provide specific hosts that you found to be fast in both parts of the country.

We use Hi China & they said they offer a service which provides fast speeds in both north & south, but we have to purchase this plan
[net.cn...]

and keep the hosts synced up manually. That seems like a pain!