Thanks for the tips.

I got the same conclusion even with a different circulation of my readers (France, China, US). US based host is still relatively fast and dreamhost have good offer plans.

For sure and interesting discussion, Tom!
Let’s first conclude that the GFW is a fast moving target itself and whatever might be true today, could be - and probably will be - different next week. I have a theory, based on recent observations I made, and if my theory is even partly right, we might be looking at a whole different ball game:
http://www.chinaherald.net/2008/03/olympic-fever-at-chinas-internet.html

For technical reasons your exact location is not that interesting, unless you expect high volumes of traffic. Unless you are massively hosting video’s or running a portal-like service you should look for a cheap offer and a good service outside China.
Hosting in China would be a liability anyway, even when you cannot get blocked. You get kicked off by your hosting firm, because their selfcensorship is often worse than whatever the Chinese censors can come up with.
You should also avoid hosting ventures that have a tradition of also hosting many sites of Chinese dissidents, like Godaddy.com: they are likely to be blocked.
I’m hosting my weblog now in the US with Bluehost.com. In the past I have been moving every two years or so, since most hosting companies get sloppy after a few years of winning awards, but Bluehost has up to now a rather consistent performance.
The costs US$ 6 per month are low and could even be shared, since I’m using only a fraction of the bandwidth I have - although I would not have the time to change into a weblog host myself.
Much of the filter technology is based on banned words and while that list is changing all the time, it makes sense to try to avoid certain words. So, I would write about the “double T-crisis”, pointing at two parts of China with different grades of autonomy. Sometimes I would include a host of possibly banned words, also to test the system. That works sometimes.

Dreamhost has far too many outages recently. I think they are massively overselling.

My thoughts - get your own domain. Do not host in Hong Kong as censorship and prosecution has proven to be, um, unpredictable lately.

A US Host should be fine, like Fons said, “Unless you are massively hosting video’s or running a portal-like service you should look for a cheap offer and a good service outside China.”

Having said that,

Separate hosting from your domain registrar (never use the same provider, it makes it easier to move if necessary)

Check how many other sites are hosted on the same IP (shared hosting), the more, the worse.

Avoid Godaddy and Yahoo hosting, they have had issues with being blocked.

Price is important but quality and service is even more important. Check with some of the hosting companies on your shortlist and test their response time by asking some random questions

There’s a nice alternative for feedburner for Wordpress, http://www.chrisfinke.com/wordpress/plugins/feed-statistics/

I was with Yahoo! hosting a few years back when for some reason the GFW just decided to ban it and it was no longer accessible in China. Blogs are generally pretty easy to migrate but this was an e-commerce website, so it cost us lots of time and heartache and Yahoo! was totally unable to help.

Dreamhost is good but I think they had a massive global outtage recently. Not very reliable?

I am currently with IxWebhosting.com based in Kentucky. Great pricing (especially if you have multiple domains) and not too bad service.

Re: the GFW. Sure, major blog services like Wordpress and Blogspot and Typepad are blocked, but if you are hosting your own domain somewhere safe with Wordpress installed, you should experience no problem. Someone correct me, but I don’t think there is any English-language China blog that has been specifically pinpointed for blocking by the Net Nanny yet. Yes, we may run into keyword traps which may cause specific pages to blank out, but that’s not the same as getting “blocked”.

In the grand scheme of things, English-language China blogs have tiny/negligible traffic, so for now the GFW is only concerned with major news outlets such BBC/CNN/Deutsche Welle and other key portals such as Youtube. English-language China blogs are easily “managed” with keyword traps.

Two hosting services that China-based bloggers have recommended for their reliability and speed in China: Omnis.com and mediatemple.net.

Mediatemple are good, they’re doing some interesting things and I am considering them for a future project. I stick with Dreamost mainly because nothing major has happened to anything I’m involved with, just found them to be a bit slow with more complex things. They have power supply problems in 2006, details here.

Another issue touched on is legal. If I recall correctly in the US website owners are not liable for their website visitors’ comments/links (though they may still need to be removed), there was a legal precedent 2006/2007. More controversial topics are also less likely to be disallowed. On that basis, some Scandanavian countries score most highly.

Pay monthly, as Gemme says buy the domain name somewhere different from the host. Move if things don’t seem as you’d desire.

Thanks for citing our site in your blog post. We are a web host in Shanghai. First of all, any site hosted overseas may be blocked, especially if it is on a shared server, since the blocking is in most cases based on IP address rather than actual domain name.

Having a dedicated IP will definitely help in keeping the site unblocked from China, but this is not a 100% guarantee as cases of “errors” of the GFW have happened frequently in the past.

Popular hosts are more susceptible to be blocked because of the greater number of domains each server host (sometimes up to a few hundreds on a single IP). One black sheep that does not please Beijing? You’ve got hundreds of legitimate site owners with sites inaccessible from China.

We have six server locations (accross Singapore and the US), with the possibility of moving sites from one to another within 30mn. This way in case a location happened to be blocked, we are able to move all sites to an unblocked one. So it should help minimize any possible downtime to our clients (unless all six locations happen to be blocked at the same time!)

However, I believe that the best way to avoid your blog being blocked from China ultimately is to host it within the GFW (and get an ICP license). Plus the speed is faster, which is great if you expect most of your audience from China.

Cheers,
Pat

I would generally agree with much of the above - though I’m not certain if Pat’s multi-location servers would play much difference, any more than just being able to change IP addresses anyway.

I avoid the issues of shared hosting by running a VPS with multiple IPs. If one site gets blocked (as happened during the recent troubles in the West and the ensuing blogging about it), I simply switch that site onto a different IP.

However, I host quite a few sites, and so this is essential.

For a simple blog, pretty much any shared hosting will do, but I’d agree that registering your own domain separate from your hosting is a good practice - though most good shared hosting packages that come with a domain name technically have it registered through a different registrar anyway, and so you can continue on hosting your domain with them even if you decide to move hosting.

I use Omnis frequently for domain registration, but recommend against using them for hosting. They use proprietary site management software (as opposed to the likes of cPanel or Plesk), and it’s more limiting than useful.

Completely agree that the issue of US-based or China-based is moot for anything shy of a large and heavy site.

I’ve sites on various US-based servers, obviously including a good number on my own hosting, and they consistently run pings at less than 300ms.

Kenneth is absolutely right that no single blogger site has ever gotten blocked (to my knowledge) - so unless you’re the next Wikipedia or unleashing a platform on which massive numbers of Chinese can exchange free thought and celebrity gossip - you’ve little to worry about your physical site being blacklisted.

Keyword trapping is pretty easily avoidable with a bit of foresight and good word choice. And (not to be too selly - as it’s free), WordPress users can put to use a plugin called Censortive I created a while back that changes sensitive words into “untrappable” images. It’s not perfect, but has helped me from having my posts trip the wires.

One thing that should be mentioned about Chinese hosting that I’ve heard time and time again - hosting companies here are notorious for just closing shop, deleting your data and disappearing into the night. If you go with a Chinese hosting company, be sure they are long-standing and reputable (good advice for anything I guess).

You have heard from the China pros: Fons, Ryan, Alex…

My 2-cents: I am not a fan of Dream Host. I switched all service away from them several black-out ago….I have also had several bad experiences with their marketing and service departments. They seem to have grown a little too fast and humility did not accompany success.
Ryan would be a good bet and a nice way to compensate someone doing great good on the China net….

Lon

One more note regarding what Sinohosting said about hosting in China.

Speedwise this may help but I don’t think you want to go down the ICP license road.

Besides the hassle it’s also the best way to put yourself and your content under the scrutiny of the civil servants. See for an experience of that, http://www.chinasnippets.com/2007/07/20/hosting-blog-on-own-domain-is-now-illegal/

[…] journalist & internet/media expert Thomas Crampton has just sent me an email alerting me to a post on his blog discussing this issue in depth. Check out the comments as […]

MediaTemple rocks. They won a vendor selection for hosting I did last year in the U.S. See what Jeffery Zeldman, web standards guru has to say about MediaTemple:
http://www.zeldman.com/mediatemple/

I didn’t choose MediaTemple for my blog as it’s a lot more work than a WordPress.com account–even with the things they’ve done to make running WordPress easier. Plus I don’t have the traffic to warrant it (yet!). I now see there’d be an advantage–getting accessed in China.

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