GZIDC is a Chinese web hosting company that was founded in 2000. Today, GZIDC is one of the most well-known hosting companies in the south of China and holds a number of government contracts and private sector partnerships with companies like Alibaba. Their main data centers are located in Guangzhou, but they also offer hosting from Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and the United States. Support is available in Chinese only.
Features and Ease of Use
GZIDC doesn’t offer any website builder options or plans with specific functionality for CMSes such as WordPress, Joomla, or Magento. The company also does not give specific estimates about uptime. However, they do claim that their servers always remain online via the use of two main power sources and a backup generator.
Hosting packages vary between the Windows and Linux operating systems and are generally rather light on storage space. However, both types support at least 150 concurrent connections.
Their shared hosting packages feature:
- MySQL databases (Linux-based packages only)
- PHP support with phpMyAdmin control panel (Linux-based packages only)
- Zend Guard for PHP application encoding (Linux-based packages only)
- SQLite database management system (Linux-based packages only)
- MS Access database support (Windows-based packages only)
- ASP support (Windows-based packages only)
GZIDC’s main strength comes from getting mainland Chinese webmasters out from behind the Great Firewall of China by offering both Chinese language interfaces and support in addition to access to servers in the United States and Hong Kong. Chinese merchants looking to sell to an international market but retain cultural and linguistic comfort can do so here.
A focus on e-commerce is evident from the fact that they offer a number of security features, including a firewall and regular data backups, with both their Linux and Windows plans. Unfortunately, no SSL certificates are offered natively, but you can choose to purchase one from five different companies, namely:
- Symantec
- GeoTrust
- Thawte
- RapidSSL
- GlobalSign
Pricing and Support
There are only two basic shared hosting plans available, both of which are obviously designed for small and largely-static Chinese websites. One offers 200MB of storage and 20GB of bandwidth, and the other offers 400MB of storage and 40GB of bandwidth. They also have what they call “Super G Space” plans for those who need more storage, but even then these only go up to 2GB of storage.
However, beginning webmasters will notice that the entry-level price is several times what you will find elsewhere. Coupled with the lack of one-click integrations, it’s obvious that GZIDC’s true market is webmasters running larger websites and e-commerce stores. In a vacuum, pricing and performance for these larger merchants is not the best you’ll find, but still adequate. However, when you consider the ability to get beyond the Great Firewall and have proximity access to customers in the United States, the price can almost be considered a bargain.
You can access Chinese language technical support 24/7 through an online ticket system. You can use this system to request support via email. When I reached out to them, I received a response within a day. It wasn’t the fastest, but it was decent. Their representatives were helpful in our conversations and had no trouble answering my basic questions. They also have a self-service knowledge base that provides answers to technical questions. However, the search functionality is not very good, so it can be challenging to find specific answers even if they are available in the database.
