There is a huge demand of oversea servers in China for all kinds of purposes, such as for hosting personal blogs, e-commerce websites targeting foreign buyers and file servers etc. As a well-known international hosting service provider, We HostSailor have also started to work on making Chinese users know more about us.
After boarding one of the most popular forum dedicated to global VPS services and supplier in China – the hostloc, we have initiated serval rounds of T-floor campaigns to let the members of this Chinese VPS forum to know about us, the VPS services provided in our Data Centers in Romania and the Netherlands, as well as the quality of our support services.
In the campaigns, we have offered some of our VPS servers free of charge for a month to some lucky winners in the T-floor activities. What we’ve got in return are some very first hand feedback from them. We would like share with the world what the Chinese users have said about our XEN VPS and KVM VPS from a few technical aspects.
First of all, we can’t avoid talking about the connection speed or latency issue our Chinese testers have reported to us.
The connection speed and latencies from China to an oversea server varies from city to city and different from one network provider to another among China Telecom (CT), China Mobile (CM) and China Unicom(CU). We must admit our VPS servers in Europe have no obvious advantage, vs the servers located in the west coast of the US most Chinese users are used to. However, as soon as we identified the issue of slow connection and large latency from China to our servers, we worked closely with one of our DCs in the Netherlands to have the routing to China greatly improved.
Routing from China to DBC, Netherlands. Routing map source
We have offered our KVM VPS located at the route improved dutch DC to some users on hostloc. This KVM VPS has gained lots of interests by Chinese users because the latency has gone down to roughly 200ms from CT/CM/CU network with seldom packet loss.
At the same time, we have started to reach China Telecom for its global service providing China Telecom Next Convergent Network (CN2) GIA/GT services, seeking for the possibility to have our DCs in Europe connected to the CN2 network, to further improve Chinese users’ experience. In addition, we have been working on the possibility to provide hosting services in the US.
CN2 GIA Coverage. Image Source
Second major opinion about our KVM VPS and XEN VPS from our testers is mostly their appreciation to what softwares we have offered.
Indeed, we provide a large collection of popular OS templates (CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu) on XEN VPS and KVM VPS. User can easily reinstall the system with a different template, normally within 10 minutes.
Comparing with OpenVZ VPS, the advantage of XEN VPS and KVM VPS allow users to do something to the system, such as upgrading the Linux kernel to enable some function they like to have. For example, the BBR (“Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time”) is the tool specially requested by our Chinese testers, because it’s such an important tool for Chinese users to speed up their connection speed which has been largely constrained by the limitation of bandwidth from China to abroad.
Before and after TCP BBR is enabled. Image Source
For this request, our support team prepared the TCP BBR enabled templates for CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu for users who do not want to get their hands dirty to enable TCP BBR themselves.
However, there are a group of users who want to have more flexibility and prefer to DIY, for example, enable an enhanced BBR (BBR PLUS) for even better outcome. We have tested the commonly used scripts for installing BBR PLUS works perfectly on our KVM VPS with CentOS 7. We have also provided a comprehensive guide to enable it on our XEN VPS in both English and Chinese, making use of the script.
As said by one of the testers, we have a ISO repository on KVM VPS. Using the VNC console we have on KVM VPS, one can fully monitor and control the installation process of the chosen ISO.
A typical VNC view: monitor and control the installation of CentOS