[Petex]

So was hoping some friendly geoexpat techies could advise on an issue I'm trying to troubleshoot:

Our company has ASP software that's running on servers in the US. Some of our clients are factories in China. When they access our software via the web, their transaction time is something like 5 times longer than from the US. I thought it was because of the distance, but rendering pages on our software on the web from HK isn't much slower than in US. So seems like a China issue. I suspect it's

1) Many of the factories are sharing a singular internet connection for all their factory office employees. Thus 40 people sharing one DSL connection slows things down.

2) China filtering of content slows traffic down going in and out of China?

I was wondering if hosting the servers in HK would help, but if my first 2 hunches are accurate, it shouldn't make a big difference. Plus, my company would prefer not to maintain machines in HK. They would prefer perhaps hosting a proxy server here.

So, A) does anyone have experience with reasons why web pages render more slowly in China ? or B) does anyone know what steps can be taken to improve performance to Chinese users? or C) does anyone know of a local hosting company I could discuss the problem with?

Any help would be MUCH appreciated!
-Pete

[KnowItAll]

>> They would prefer perhaps hosting a proxy server here.

Send a PM to hk.com .. they do a fair bit of proxy hosting for china based companies (if I recall correctly) as the connectivity in HK is presumably faster and the bandwidth they have out of HK is also presumably faster.

Also, a traceroute from the china location to the US website might reveal the bottlenecks.

[hk.com]

yes, we even provide this to customers in Singapore, HK, China etc... mostly to access web applications in the USA.

We can also do the reverse, if someone is in a site (in HK or CN) that is not accessible or responsive from USA/ overseas we can make it accessible also (at least until you fix your problems).

[Morten]

Hi,
My company experiences extremely poor Internet connectivity to our headquarters in Europe (and Europe in general). The IT department have problems managing our servers placed in China becaure of slow transfers.

Do you think that a proxy server placed in Hong Kong could be the solution to our problems?

I have been told that it is illegal for companies based in China to connect to the rest of the world through proxies in HK (because of it surpasses the Great Firewall) unless they establish a legal company there. Do you know anything about this?

Any advice is appreciated!
/Morten

[hk.com]

not sure about the law. But using VPNs and anything similar would by pass the greatchina wall. I am sure that your current remote terminal program achieves and does the same thing.

Right now we are providing HTTP proxies.

To manage your servers in China it would be trickier, we would have to forward all your traffic at IP level as I guess you are using VNC, PC-Anywhere type of programs right?
We could probably do that for you.