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Updates on Chinese domain names registration

March 9th, 2010 admin

Chinese domain names registration is now restricted to local Chinese companies. Foreign registrars which used to resell .cn domains are now prevented to do so, and Chinese registrars do not accept foreign applicants for these domains.

The law that prevented individuals to register .cn has been somewhat waived on February 8th. However, it appears applicants, who must be Chinese citizens, must show up in person with the ID card and photo, to the CNNIC office or their service provider for “authentication” before they are able to register their domains.

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New Windows shared hosting server in Hong Kong later this month

March 3rd, 2010 admin

In order to improve the reliability of our Windows offering in Hong Kong, we will be launching later this month a new server which with an English-based control panel (our current server is Chinese-based). Existing clients will be contacted when new server is ready and migrated for free.

The Management

www.sinohosting.net

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Doing a full backup in CPanel

January 30th, 2010 admin

CPanel, which runs on all our Linux servers, and is used by 97% of our clients, have a built in backup utility which allows users to do a full backup of their sites within a few minutes and save it to their computers. We recommend clients to do backups regularly to be able to restore their sites in case of emergencies. Although most of our servers have a weekly backup system or have a RAID configuration, the reality is backups can fail. By following this quick guide you will be able to backup your site when you want.

The backup process as below:

1-Log into your control panel, with your username and password. Access url would probably be www.yourdomainname.com/cpanel

2-Under the “Files” category, click on “Backups”

3-Choose the first option, Full Backup (”Download or Generate a Full Website Backup)

4-Choose “Home Directory” as Backup Destination. You can also input an email address to be notified when the backup is completed.

5-You finally click on “Generate a Backup”. CPanel will start preparing a full backup of your site.

Once the backup is completed, you can come back to click on the download link. Choose a location on your hard drive and click OK. Depending of the size of your site and your internet speed, it can take some time for the download to complete.

In case of server emergency, you will simply need to provide this backup to our admins and the backup will be restored to the new server within half an hour on average. This would include all the site contents, e-mails etc.

Another way to do the backup would be to download directly the home directory files (second option on point 3 of the above guide) and the databases if any. In this case the site can only be restored manually and not by our admins automatically.

How often should you do a backup? This would depends of whether your site is dynamic or static. The more often your site contents are updated the shorter the period between backups. We recommend at least one backup per month for static sites and one per week for dynamic sites.

Finally, a full backup can be useful when you prepare to do some advanced changes to your site, or have a third party work on it. In case anything goes awry, you will can always have your site restored to its initial form by providing us with the full backup.

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New job openings at SinoHosting

January 27th, 2010 admin

We have new openings at our Shanghai office:

-Linux server admin, full-time, knowledgeable in CentOS server administration and WHM/CPanel

-Helpdesk Support Staff, part-time or intern, for helping in sales but also basic client support.

For details on job description and requirements, please check our China web hosting jobs page.

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Suspension of dot cn registrations

January 11th, 2010 admin

Due to a decision by our registrar, we are temporarily suspending dot cn domain name registration. This is a consequence of the tougher restrictions and registration process that were enabled by the CNNIC last month. We hope that restrictions will be somewhat relaxed after the Chinese New Year holiday or later in the year. Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

The Management

www.sinohosting.net

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Hardware failure on 210.52.223.92

January 8th, 2010 admin

It appears our server with IP 210.52.223.92 (shanghai.sinohosting.net) has a hard drive failure. This causes all sites on that server to be inaccessible. Our techs are working on the issue either to fix the hard drive, or retrieve the data to upload to a new drive. If you are on this server and have a backup of your site, you can send an email to support@sinohosting.net or open a support ticket and we can set you up temporary an account on a new server, which should have your site back online within 30mn. 

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Shared hosting accounts on China servers without ICP licenses to be shut down soon

December 23rd, 2009 admin

We have been informed by our datacenter that, in compliance with the notices received from the Chinese ministry of information technology, they will be activating a software that would automatically shut down websites hosted at their servers without an ICP license.

Although most of our clients on China plans have obtained the license, there are a few ones that did not apply yet or whose application is still pending.  Please open a ticket or email to icp@sinohosting.net to check on your ICP application status, and in case you are unable to apply for the license (if you are based overseas without a Chinese presence for instance), make sure to contact us to migrate your account to our Hong Kong server (no ICP required for Hong Kong servers).

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Hong Kong VPS systems to be available this Friday

December 22nd, 2009 admin

We will be launching our new VPS lines this Friday. Clients on China VPS plans who have been shut down recently for not having an ICP license will be sent new account information for the equivalent Hong Kong VPS plan as soon as their account is set up. If you do have an ICP license please contact us to have your VPS plan set up on our new Guangdong VPS node.

The Management

www.sinohosting.net

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New regulations on dot cn domain names registration: now available only for companies

December 17th, 2009 admin

We have been informed by our dot cn registrar of new regulations issued by the CNNIC (the organization in charge of the management of the dot cn registry). The new regulations do not affect domain names registered prior to this announcement.

In brief, first dot cn domain names (which include .cn, .com.cn , .net.cn, .org.cn, as well as regional extensions such as .sh.cn , .gd.cn, .bj.cn etc.) will now be available for registration only for registered companies (Chinese or foreign). Second, upon registration, the applicant need to file and send through the registrar a paper application, and join to this application a copy of his business license and a copy of his ID (ID card for Chinese nationals and passport for foreigners). The paper application needs to bear the official seal of the applying company.

For more details on these new rules, please check this link on the CNNIC official website.

Considering that the new regulations increase the work load to process a dot cn registration, we have decided to increase the registration price by RMB50, to RMB125/year. They will still be included for free though with our web hosting packages.

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VPS servers to be moved to Guangdong datacenter

December 15th, 2009 admin

Due to the multiple restrictions at Shanghai Telecom datacenter, we will be moving soon our VPS users to a new datacenter in Guangdong province, as well as another Shanghai datacenter with another ISP. If you are a VPS user please make sure to make a full back up of your data as soon as possible, as we will not be able to migrate the data from old server in Shanghai to the new in Guangdong. VPS clients will be sent an email with their new VPS IP address when this is completed.

For any question on this migration, please open a support ticket at our website.

The Management

www.sinohosting.net

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