Since the readers of my blog are mainly university teachers and students, I wanted to buy a domestic host. A host on a dedicated Education Network line is hard to find and not really necessary, but at the very least it must be a “free Education Network IP”; otherwise it’s no different from a foreign host.
But based on my experience over this past year communicating with various IDC service providers, whether before-sales consultation or after-sales service, whether front-desk support or back-end technicians, whether IDC customer service or Taobao shop owners—after contacting maybe twenty or thirty people all told—not a single one actually knew what a free Education Network address was. That left me feeling quite helpless.
Some with better service attitudes might humbly ask me, or listen patiently as I explained, or else say that they still didn’t quite understand what was going on but were willing to provide me with sample IP addresses so that I could verify them myself. But there were also many with poorer service awareness, or who were self-righteous and pretended to know things they didn’t know; they would very likely just ignore my request outright, or tell me in no uncertain terms: none! Especially the staff at Huaxia Mingwang—even after I painstakingly explained that the IP I was currently using was precisely a free Education Network IP, and that I merely hoped to switch to another one, or to upgrade—they would only become more impatient, repeatedly stressing that they did not have Education Network hosts, and even cut off my connection, as if I were an idiot.
Although by now I’ve learned from experience not to mention anything about a free Education Network IP at all, and instead just tell them to give me a website so I can test the speed, there are always times when I can’t quite resign myself to it, and I want to casually bring it up—but more often than not, that just brings trouble on myself.
Perhaps it is understandable that they don’t know what a free Education Network IP is, because apparently Baidu doesn’t know either. I searched around, and really couldn’t find any explanatory introduction. So let me briefly explain it here; in the future, whenever I need to explain it again, I’ll just send people to read this article.
We know that China’s network access providers are mainly the two big ones, Telecom and Netcom, but there are also some smaller lines, such as Railcom, Great Wall Broadband, the Education Network, and so on. Among them, the Education Network occupies the most special position, because teachers and students at a broad range of research institutes and universities have no choice but to go online through the Education Network.
Internet access on campus is very cheap—now it seems to be 10 yuan a month, and a few years ago it was only 5 yuan a month, practically free. But the problem is that with just this little money, you’re not allowed to visit foreign websites; if you want to access foreign websites, you have to pay extra, which means over a hundred yuan a month, or more than one yuan per MB of traffic.
Although it’s true that if they want to, college students can still access foreign websites without much difficulty—by spending a bit more money, or using a proxy server, or IPv6, or some “unclean” techniques, they can all get out. But the problem is that, after all, accessing domestic websites is the norm; without some special motivation, people generally won’t go out of their way to activate international networking. As a result, websites that are not in China will lose a large number of Education Network visitors.
That is precisely why I need to buy a domestic host. Given today’s network environment in China, compared with hosts in the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong, domestic hosts really have no great advantage to speak of. For the kind of traffic my personal homepage gets, there is no need for very high bandwidth or speed; ensuring stability is more important. The only truly fatal advantage of a domestic host is that it can be free for the Education Network.
But the so-called “domestic websites” are defined by the Education Network, and they are a whitelist. Some foreign academic databases, as well as Google, although their IPs are abroad, have nonetheless been included among the free Education Network addresses; on the other hand, many domestic IP addresses have not been included. This list is updated every month, with some IPs added and others removed, but if the IDC does not apply proactively, I’m afraid it won’t be included.
An IP not on the free-address list is, to college students, equivalent to a foreign network. Yet a large number of domestic hosts have not been added to this free list. I don’t know the reason for this; perhaps the Education Network demands a great deal of money and the host providers don’t agree? But perhaps it’s simply that the host providers have not paid sufficient attention to this issue. Judging from the fact that all ten customer service agents don’t know about free Education Network IPs, it’s also possible that IDC operators simply ignore this issue from the outset.
Among the fourteen major domestic machine rooms listed on Huaxia Mingwang’s promotional page, the test IPs for Zhengzhou Jing’an machine room, Sichuan Chengdu Telecom machine room, Meishan Telecom machine room, Shanghai Zhenru Telecom machine room, and Sichuan Leshan Telecom machine room are all not yet in the CERNET free IP list. But when Huaxia Mingwang sells hosts, it does not let you choose the IP or the machine room; instead, it almost blindly forces you to choose from an anonymous list like “Telecom 1, Telecom 2, Netcom 1, Dual-line 1…” Fortunately, it provides a speed-testing JS that shows little green bars for you to see. But if I hadn’t used Firefox’s developer tools to inspect the source code behind the little green bars, found the URLs there, and then pinged them to get the IPs, a normal person would still be choosing blind. Fortunately, Huaxia Mingwang has a fairly abundant stock of resources, so if you choose wrongly you can still contact customer service to change it (but then, when you contact customer service, you run into the very problem I mentioned at the beginning: the customer service staff don’t know or understand what I need). But if you want to buy a slightly higher-end host and have additional requirements (such as a dedicated IP, Apache, etc.), there are not many options given, and there is a very real chance that none of them has a free IP at all.
Although Huaxia Mingwang’s hosts are beyond reproach in terms of cost performance, they really are somewhat lacking when it comes to stability and service quality. So I’ve always been keeping an eye on other vendors. Suggestions are welcome. Or maybe someday I should just switch abroad after all…
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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