Today Suixuan and the Forum on the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology were down again for most of the day, and the quality of customer service was also quite worrisome. After submitting a support ticket, the customer service staff who solve technical problems always respond only after the issue has been fixed, so I can hardly find out what exactly went wrong; as for the front-desk customer service on the web interface, they are often totally clueless, and even when I inquire about purchasing services, they respond slowly, with a poor attitude, and still know nothing about anything.
What should one do if the host failure rate is too high? Regrettably, the best way is to upgrade their host service… Of course, it would also be best to switch to another data center. This Beijing data center is said to have particularly frequent failures. If one wants to move to another company’s host, then because this involves domain names, filing, and other procedures, it is extremely troublesome, and I also don’t know whether other domestic hosts are similarly plagued by frequent failures.
Almost all the customer-service staff don’t know what the so-called “education network free IP” means, but there was still a response: one customer-service rep kept saying that we don’t have education network free IP. I asked her whether she actually knew what education network free IP meant, and she still insisted that we don’t have education network free IP. I told her that the data center I am using right now is education network free IP, and that I just want to buy another one. She continued insisting that we don’t have education network free IP, and in the end she hung up the line! A later customer-service rep, instead of going on and on about the education network or not, I directly asked her for website samples from each data center so that I could check the IPs myself (I had also asked the first rep for samples, only I kindly explained a bit more about why I cared about the IP). As a result, she dawdled and then gave me a website from the Henan data center, and then fell silent. It was only the last customer-service rep who was relatively better, directly giving me a table listing several sites from the Henan, Guangdong, and other data centers. I found that at least the Guangdong data center is education network free IP, so I’m considering buying another one.
Because the host I’m using now was bought during last year’s winter vacation, and I’ve more or less gotten my money’s worth out of it already, and since buying a host through a Taobao agent now (one or two hundred yuan cheaper) can’t directly upgrade my original host, I can only sell this one separately and then make the transition over on my own. For now, while the old host has not yet expired, I’ll use both sides at the same time, observe the failure frequency, and choose one to serve as a backup.
Chinese university students have to spend extra large sums of money just to access international websites, and this policy is utterly absurd. Aside from employees of foreign companies, who needs to access foreign websites the most? Surely it is scholars and students. For ordinary life and entertainment needs, there isn’t much chance of having to go to foreign websites, but for students doing academic work and scholarship, not going to the external internet is tantamount to self-enclosure. But perhaps precisely because students need to access the external internet, the policy is all the more unwilling to allow openness, and instead insists on setting up some obstacles. On the other hand, domestic websites must be filed and subjected to regulation, and this policy probably has some kind of “collusive” relationship with “education network free IP.”
Of course, these policies cannot stop students from jumping the Great Firewall. The more you block it, the more I want to know what exactly has been hidden away. Would regulators not know this psychology? Of course they know. But the most sinister problem is that they do not at all fear a small number of curious university students jumping the Firewall; they do not fear that information outside the wall will be obtained by a tiny group of people who do not know the truth. They are merely trying to control the spread of this bad information, so that those pieces of information outside the wall, those dissonant pieces of information, and information about Island # videos, though known to all and sundry (at least within the circle of curious university students), always remain within the category of some kind of secret knowledge, and rarely stir up much of a ripple in actual social discourse. In other words, something that has been “popularized” does not necessarily become something social or collective.
In a previous discussion section, it was mentioned that the rise of microblogs is muddying the boundary between the private sphere and the public sphere, placing many things that were originally private onto public platforms. When Teacher Cang appears on Weibo, she immediately shifts from secret transmitted knowledge to a public figure. Other information from beyond the wall that originally had difficulty arousing public reaction, once posted to Weibo, can also stir up some ripples and echoes—even if those echoes are quickly suppressed, they have still entered the public sphere. If this continues, might the situation change?
Back to the point: I have already purchased a new host. I’ll spend some time debugging it recently, and I may first move yilinhut.net and keshizhe.com, these two unfiled domains, over there (so for the time being they can only be accessed from the international internet through CDN functionality).
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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