News update of hosting industry and popular web hosts. This ensures we keep update with ongoing events and do necessary preparation if anything happen.

IX Web Hosting Finished Migration to Site5

EIG IX web hostingIX Web Hosting Finished Migration to Site5

From the very being of year 2018, IX web hosting started migrating customer to site5/Verio/Dotster based the server platform of customer account. After one year processing, the migration is overall finished and IX official website finally closed.

However, just like most other transition handled by endurance group(know as EIG), the IX web hosting migration give their customer lots of headache with numorous complaints. Either web service not functional properly or not familiar with new policies or even support latency etc..

Till present, Endurance purchased over 100 hosting companies(almost all popular well known names) and reached with over 1.4 billion group value! Based the company current size and amount of supported web services, they’re creating more than 10% internet traffic which is unbeatable high comparing to any other IT company.

Following let’s find more about this event, split the case and see what kind of condition we’re working with. And how we can go well by following the right sight.

Is IX Web Hosting Good?

Probably not so many people give positive reply now due to the long time migration. But it was indeed good or perfect choice for hosting service. Not to mention their numorous hosting features and very good price, IX web hosting had been very carefully doing customer support either online or offline. Their people keep updating knowledge base from every case they’re experiencing and communicate fastly on different channels.

For hosting plan, they’re sole company who can give up to 15 dedicated IPs for free while it’s charged $2/mo everywhere else. That’s why IX is always primary choice for SEOer, you can save a big amount if you’re running a web development service with SEO support. That’s also how IX advertised itself.

IX web hosting also provides multiple grade plans including cloud server to support advanced web requirements. Either you need windows or linux platform, we can always find a suitable solution on their website at competitive offer.

ixwebhosting features

Why IX Web Hosting Closed?

Since it’s a simple acquisition by endurance, why they don’t hide the process behind but close IX directly and move customers to other place? From the years finance report of SPS Commerce Inc (Actual company name of IX web hosting) we have found the company year revenue has been going down. That means it does not create too much value if endurance keep the service running as it was.

Why their profit is going down? There’re two reason. First there’re more and more competitors with much lower cost service(regardless the actual quality) which has taken a lot of new customers. If IX web hosting remain unchange it will surely loose and loose. Furthermore, IX still used windows server 2003 for shared windows hosting which is not acceptable nowadays. There’s not any sight showing they’re going to upgrade. If we want to use new windows server system, we must use VPS or cloud server plans.

Secondly, the company provides too much which results in abuse of resource. Let’s say their 15 free dedicated IPs and free 3 domain name registration. Generally if we purchase such service separately the total cost will be $390/yr. But we can get with only $7.95/mo with IX company. Once our hosting account setup, we can claim directly from control panel. That means no matter if we really need or not, it will be given and the resource will be deducted from database. It’s a huge waste.

Is Site5 Good Enough?

Not exactly as announced though it was good from our earlier review. Not to mention the IX transfer process to their platform, the site5 updated terms of use is not fair at all to users. Extremely high restriction to account usage and no explanation account closure, what kind of service it is while it’s not cheap at all? See this AUP page on site5 for details.

Because site5 is just a small part of Endurance group. Either from the current hosting plan design or general web site structure, it seems the main purpose is to serve existing customer and hold new customer migration such as IX web hosting. Comparing to any modern service provider, we don’t see too much company or service introduction, the team behind or network specification etc on site5 web pages. The site content is maximumly simplified comparing to 3 years before when it’s not under endurance control.

Furthermore, site5 can only accept linux server accounts. If you’re windows based customer from IX site, you’re now dealing with Verio who provides very similiar windows server features like IX (also windows server 2003)

Where to go Next?

Well, that depends what you’re going to use exactly from IX side before.

For example if you’re really trying to take advantages of their free IPs, you can not find a better offer on the web. And most probably you can not purchase so many dedicated IP address under shared hosting plan. So it’s highly suggested go with VPS or dedicated server. Currently, most server side configuration can be done quickly via web panel so you don’t really have to be familiar with server setup. But of course it will make things easier if you can manage a server well.

Other specifications such as free domain name is available from most other web hosting providers so it’s easy to find an alternative choice.

Although migration experience of IX is not good at all due to its complex service structure, it doesn’t mean endurance is completely bad. On the other side, endurance is quite powerful in IT especially cloud computing. They’re centrally managing with over 1 million servers in data centers from different locations of the world. Either from financial or technical properties they’re actually the top giant from industry. Endurance did have broken multiple hosting brands like easycgi or globat, however they do have powered more successful names such as hostgator and bluehost. Especially on iPage site, its probably the only place in the world you can get such low cost plan with fruitful features and high performance server.

ipage hosting feature

Hostgator China Reviews

hostgator china

Finally, Hostgator launched their Chinese version support. If your business is located in China and looking for leading web hosting support to business, now you have more choice from a leadership provider. This article provides in-depth guidance of hostgator China hosting like plan features, price and comparison to US site. We also provide a basic FAQ for quick understanding.

Hostgator China Hosting Quick view

On May 15, 2014, the hostgator news center announced their new business expansion in China – a completely new design with Chinese language and style. Like any other language specified sub site, hostgator China is dedicated for Chinese speaking clients with local support. In general, it comes with all server plans and features on original site but with different support features.

Hosting plans

Hostgator China provides shared, VPS, Dedicated and reseller hosting plans which is the same as mother site. Further more, they added HK server option to follow local market needs. Based the difference between US & HK, plan technical features and price are adjusted accordingly.

Shared Hosting – Available for both linux and windows solutions. However, some technical features downgraded comparing to its mother site like number of supported domains, sitebuilder service etc. The Chinese version is simplified a lot or maybe more features being developped but not yet published. At the meanwhile, their standard 45 days money back guarantee reduced to 30.

VPS Hosting – Similar but also simplified for some features like supported IPs, it is 2 on mother site plans but only a single IP supported on Chinese version. Also, the vertualization technology is not specified here and no promotion offered.

Reseller Hosting – Similar but some difference on disk and bandwidth allocation. Also, free whmcs is included for all reseller plans on mother site while not supported for copper plan on Chinese version.

Dedicated Server Hosting – Only linux server provided at the moment and cpanel is not included for free. There's steps to configure your server during sign up process and you can choose control panel service and storage service.

Price

Generally, much better price is offered on Chinese version site. For example, the basic shared plan is offered at $3.96/mo, after default 20% discount then deducted to $3.168/mo. On Chinese version site, the basic plan is configured at ¥15/mo(about USD2.5). Similar for VPS, reseller and dedicated plans. But please be noted their price for Hongkong server is a litte higher.

hostgator china features

Hostgator China FAQ

When hostgator China launched?

It's launched on May 15, 2014 with another partner site – hostgator russia

Where is the headquater of hostgator China?

Hostgator China headquater is located at Xiamen, Fujian province.

What's the server location of hostgator China?

It's still the same server from USA data centers but just offered for Chinese support. They also partnered with Hongkong data center service.

Is 24*7 support available?

Not at the moment, their official business time is am9:00 – pm17:00, but with our observation, their support is always started later. Currently they provide support through QQ chat, Hot line phone calls and helpdesk ticket.

Is there any coupon code available?

Seems not, the registration procedure is different than mother site. You have to register an account first in order to sign up hosting service.

What're the server specifications?

  • DELL E5530 2.40GHZ Xeron Quad Core
  • 48GB RAM for every hosting server
  • 250GB RAID 1 mirrored OS drive
  • 1 TB RAID 1 mirrored data cache

Visit Hostgator China to check more http://cn.hostgator.com

HongKong vs Japan vs Singapore for Asia Hosting Choice

Asia is well known for its prosperous economy and population. However, there're not so many famous data centers to support the fast growing IT requirements. People always need to research a bit in order to find the right asia hosting provider. Till present, those leading data centers are mainly located at Japan, Hongkong and Singapore. This article provides side by side guidance and comparison of the tree locations and find out the best choice for hosting.

Networking

With no doubt, all the three areas have the best network specifications in asia. Especially for Japan, it manages one of the 13 root DNS servers(10 in USA, 2 in Europe) based its powerful internet abilities. Japan is also the terminal service provider of multiple Asia countries like China. Comparing to any other country/district in this area, Japan is unbeatable for international competition.

Hongkong is leading because of its bridge role to connect mainland and oversea net. For Chinese web users, they always have to select Hongkong for decent performance.

Singapore is doing the best in south asia for its modern and advanced international connections. It's also the primary consideration for lots of oversea companies who want to setup their asia IT services. Especially for hosting company who is trying to get asia customer orders, they advertise heavily to have data center service in this area.

Support

There's big difference with regarding to support. The three areas are featured in different parts while they're all leading in technologies. Let's see one by one.

Japan, the main weakness is lack of English language support. Most services are pre-configured via Japanese thus you have to be familiar with the service itself in order to use it properly. When there's a problem and support is required, we might have to wait longer till issue fixed.

Singapore is completely English based country. Most services are provided with English, no matter for domestic or international users there wouldn't be any problem in using the service. That's why they're liked by lots of international groups seeking for perfect IT solutions.

Hongkong is a little different from the two. It's tightly connected to China mainland on many areas. Comparing to any other location, Hongkong has the best geographic advantage for Chinese users. People from HK and China mainland can speak both Chinese and English. Being one of the main internet gateways, Hongkong is primary consideration when Chinese user needs same level hosting service from USA.

Business Environment

All those three areas are open market and actually play important roles on international business. Especially for Singapore, it occupies very good place to serve different markets. For internet services, Singapore is considered the gate of southern Asia. Being a famous international center, there's not a barrier at all to make business there. This is why lots of international hosting providers configure data center service in this area to support their asia clients.

Hongkong and japan are also great. However, with regarding to hosting, they have different targeted markets. Hongkong is mostly liked by Chinese. As we know, it's not so easy to put up a website in China, webmasters have to apply ICP license in order to keep the website online. Also, the governmental institutes will check hosted websites on server every few periods. Because of this, lots of mainland hosting companies rent servers from Hongkong and USA datacenters to give people alternative choice. Hongkong, for its great connection and friendly policies, it's liked by millions Chinese webmasters. About Japan, it's also pretty open but they're still popular from local or eastern asia districts.

Conclusion

As from above explanation/comparison, the three areas come with different features to support our hosting requirements. If your targeted market is eastern asia, japan & hongkong should be primary consideration. If we want to serve southern asia clients, there's no better place than Singapore. But if we want to deal with Chinese users, Hongkong is definitely the best choice from any side comparison.

Alibaba, One-stop service for businesss success

alibaba service

No matter what kind of business you plan to open in China, you might realize the alibaba company services can not be avoided. Those services like website hosting, online store, payment gateway solution and even online shopping. The powerful ecommerce empire is almost dominating the Chinese online business. Today we provide side by side view of this huge group and provide basic guidance if you're going to use the company service/products.

Alibaba brief introduction

The company alibaba is created by MaYun(Jack Ma) in 1999. Being one of the first Chinese internet groups, the alibaba is aimed to simplify all traditional business by online communication. During the past 15 years development, the company grows up as a huge business empire with lots of global support centers. Alibaba developped a series of products and reputable public relationship to support its leadership among all Chinese and even international business companies.

On alibaba main site service, it provides both Chinese and English versions. While the Chinese version is dedicated for China mainland enterprises, the english version site is open for all oversea groups. For easier management and avoid confusion, the alibaba group separated the two versions on different domains since 2013. Chinese version alibaba is set on 1688.com and English version service is kept on alibaba.com.

The alibaba leadership is unbeatable from any side view at the moment. For China companies, if you don't have a page on alibaba, it means you loose lots of business opportunities because most people search what they need via alibaba engine. Basically, if you run a business especially manufacturing business in China, registering on alibaba store is a must for better promotion. For international users, alibaba is also the primary place for Chinese products research. From their own reports, there're over 1 million business registration on their global site.

To understand its leadership statue in China, we can learn from the following services which is operated by alibaba group.

Net.cn

net.cnThe largest web hosting and domain provider in China started in 1996. Being the very first hosting company in China, net.cn has the most powerful tech base and service plans. Net.cn was merged into alibaba group in 2009 by 540 millions CNY. Net.cn manages over half web hosting market in China and it's well known to every Chinese webmaster. Not only for it's powerful tech base but also for it's close working to different governmental departments. Web hosting under net.cn is simple and safe. Lots of world top 500 groups work closely with net.cn to support their Chinese service.

Since then, alibaba fully optimized their network structure and more benefits generated to store owners. Since then, users can design/optimize their online stores easily by drag/drop site builder. The net.cn team is now working in alibaba IT department with 24*7 support.

Aliyun.com

Aliyun  Aliyun is dedicated for cloud computing service. It's setup closely after alibaba acquired net.cn, thus aliyun got sufficient resource to power its cloud service. Because of this, since from its born, their service is more advanced than most competitors in China. The tech model is more like Amazon cloud AWS. Aliyun does not only operate in China but also work on multiple international data centers. Based its powerful hardware and software structures, aliyun is recognized the most reliable and secure cloud service with seamless connection to different platforms. Unlike any other cloud service, aliyun utilize their own operation system – cloud OS. It's developped based linux and HTML5 technologies and guaranteed for any time and anywhere service.

Taobao.com

For many Chinese people, whenever they want to shopping online, taobao would be their primary site for its resourceful and low cost products listing. Especially from its early years, taobao is the only tunnel for online shopping. Based this platform, lots of personal sellers developped their successful business (zero fee to join in!) From their latest festival promotion, a single day transaction is over 35 billions. No other store sites have made such success on the planet. Although there're more and more competitors joining in to share the big cake, the taobao leadership is still not changed.

Alipay

AlipayBeyond all alibaba service, alipay would be the most widely used service by both enterprise and personal users. Alipay provides secure and reliable online payment service and works with most banks in China. While online shopping is fantastic, not everybody be able to pay via credit card or deal with the complex bank transfer. Alipay simplified the entire process by single click.

People can use alipay for almost all online payment affairs like shopping, phone recharging and other daily expenses. Why we can do that? Because it's integrated by most online services. You can use alipay not only for payment sending but also for receiving. For most Chinese people, alipay is perfect alternative of paypal and brings much more features with easy operation. Because of this, the alipay gateway service is dominating the Chinese online payment business. The main online shopping service and gateway service are both handled by alibaba, so how huge it is in your imagination?

Not to mention its acquisition of Chinese yahoo in 2005, alibaba is already leading in IT and ecommerce provider in China just count by above statistics. If you need website hosting, check out alibaba; if you need to promote your online business, check out alibaba; if you want better shopping experience, check out alibaba; if you're still searching for the best business partner in China, check out alibaba!

WebhostingHub Super Bowl Promo

webhostinghub super bowl promo

While the national super bowl tournament is being supported all over the states, web hosting anticipation is super star among all sponsors. From February 1st-10th, shared web hosting leader webhostinghub will be offering their Nitro plan at super discounted price of $5.99/mo comparing to it's usual $8.99/mo price rate.

Webhostinghub Nitro plan is an upgrade of their all in one unlimited shared web hosting for more server resources. If your website grows up and not satisfied of shared server performance, the Nitro plan is an alternative choice before you have to use a VPS server. For more details of webhostinghub nitro and other upgrade plans, please check out this detailed explanation.

How to access the super promo?

There's not a dedicated page yet for webhotinghub nitro plan. In order to claim the super promo, please click through this exclusive promotional link and the promo will be auto activated. Nowhere else on their official website advertised this promo at the moment.

Click this super bowl promotional link for Nitro plan http://www.webhostinghub.com

More about WebhostingHub Hosting Plans

WebhostingHub has been shared hosting leader for super reliable performance and rich feature service. Unlike any other unlimited hosting websites who solely compete on price, webhostinghub focus more on service quality with profitable price rate. They win business by words of mouth for long term and healthy growth. Till today, webhostinghub has been a successful and award winning brand in hosting business. Their team leaders have partnered with various web projects as golden hosting sponsor. There's a bunch of successful website stories with webhostinghub service and lots of happy clients all over the world.

Being a sister site of InMotionHosting, webhostinghub is dedicated for shared web hosting service with as many features as possible to power a successful website. Because of this, their support team can fully optimize the server environment for better loading.

More about Super Bowl

The Super Bowl is the annual championship game of the National Football League (NFL), the highest level of professional American football in the United States, culminating a season that begins in the late summer of the previous calendar year. The stadium got its name from the fact that the game played there was part of the Tournament of Roses and that it was shaped like a bowl.

Since 1960s, the tournament has made multiple successful business brands. In hosting industry, godaddy is the very first and most outstanding one with great success. As the biggest sponsor of the tournament, godaddy is heavily advertised throughout the entire event and attracted huge traffic to their domain service. Since then, godaddy grew up the biggest domain registrar with fast growth till today.

Further resource of super bowl

Black Friday 2013 Hosting Promo

Thanksgiving is coming for 2013! As always, web hosting industry brings people huge promo to help with big saving on black friday. Many reputable hosting companies have or being prepared their promotional plans. From those who have revealed their promos, discount rates are vary from 50% to 90%. We'll introduce several popular hosting providers plus their discount plans.

arvixe black friday promoArvixe – 50% OFF

Arvixe provides 50% discount for all hosting plans on black friday. You no longer need to search the best arvixe coupon in order to claim this offer. Their people have advertise the code on home page – "Black Friday". Just enter this code during check out then half price is instantly activated! No matter if you prefered their windows or linux, shared or vps, just go ahead and enjoy half price.

Note: After using this coupon, you can not apply any other promo code for further discount.

ipage black friday promoiPage – 88% OFF

iPage is sending out the biggest promo among all hosting providers. The $.99/mo price is absolutely the best from the industry. The spotlight is people don't get any service downgrade so you can still make full use of all available advantages such as free domain name, unlimited disk space & bandwidth etc. In order to celebrate this great festival, the endurance group has completely revised the ipage home page which has been their for years.

Access ipage to view changes & promo www.ipage.com

fatcow black friday promoFatcow – 86% OFF

The ipage sister site fatcow is offering 86% discount which results in $15/yr hosting. By checking all its historical promo news, we can not find a better one than its current discount. Their official site is also revised a bit to follow the festival atomosphere. The cute cow is more fat there as you can see.

Check out fatcow thanksgiving promo at www.fatcow.com

webhostinghub black friday promoWebhostingHub – 80% OFF

The best webhostinghub promo is offered again – $1.95/mo for the first 3 months. It's probably not so nice comparing to all other promo news, however it's already the biggest one in their history. If you have leant it's unbeatable advantages such as blading fast servers and super helpful support, then you will understand how good the price is.

Claim webhostinghub special price at www.webhostinghub.com

Other providers like hostgator, siteground, ixwebhosting etc have not yet revealed their promos yet but there's no doubt at all as they have been doing this all the time. Just refresh their home page and new design will be displayed some time later. Happy Black Friday!