I had been using Huaxia Mingwang’s shared hosting all along, and it had been almost two years. The cheapest plan was only a little over one hundred yuan a year. After a year, I upgraded to a somewhat better one, buying it through an agent for a little over two hundred yuan a year, and I ended up purchasing three years at once. Huaxia Mingwang’s hosting had plenty of problems, but basically they were still tolerable. Most of the time the site wouldn’t go down outright, though there were plenty of minor glitches. In short, I just kept enduring and enduring until now. But a couple of days ago there was a failure that lasted a full day; after service was restored, I was told that the originally chosen Beijing data center had been switched to the Jian’an data center. But this Jian’an data center is not the “free educational-network IP”; it never has been. At that point I had lost the whole point of buying a domestic host. After I appealed, I was told I could switch to the Dongguan data center, but I had used that data center before, and in Beijing the connection speed over China Netcom was very slow.
But I wasn’t in a panic, because the downtime that lasted an entire day was enough for me to look around, hesitate, and decide to switch to another hosting provider. This time I found the Aliyun server, which is equivalent to a VPS, and seems even a bit more advanced—perhaps even a little better than an ordinary server—because cloud storage doesn’t keep data on one fixed hard drive, but distributes multiple copies; if one place fails, it can switch automatically, offering higher security and availability. The price is also very reasonable. Huaxia Mingwang’s cheapest VPS was listed at nearly 3,000 yuan a year, and it could only use the Jian’an data center; as for Jian’an’s own VPS, the cheapest one was also 999 yuan. The cheapest Aliyun plan is 690 yuan a year (without a data disk; I bought one for 790 yuan a year). You can choose the configuration as you like and upgrade as needed. Of course, for my little blog, it should already be more than enough.
As a computer novice, operating Linux remotely put me under a fair bit of pressure, so I installed a virtual-hosting program myself and just use it like a shared host. There’s no longer Huaxia Mingwang’s keyword filtering or anything like that, so it’s much freer to use. Of course, the filing procedure still has to be followed properly…
After two days of trial use, it feels much faster, and extremely stable. I’ve heard that besides access lines for China Telecom and China Netcom, there’s also an educational-network line, though I don’t know how fast access is for comrades at school~
Of course, the Huaxia Mingwang shared host I bought through the end of 2014 is now abandoned. And after all, the new VPS still has plenty of capacity to spare, so even if I set up other sites, I won’t need Huaxia Mingwang again. I wonder where else I can put it to some good use; if any classmate needs it, I can consider transferring it~
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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