Website Hosting Japan (WH Japan) provides website hosting to individuals, businesses, and schools in Japan. It aims to offer the best English-language support, and, in fact, its whole website is in English (and there’s no Japanese version).
Features and Ease of Use
WH Japan sells shared hosting plans, domain name registration, and website design services. Its hosting plans include these core features:
- 99% uptime guarantee
- Manual backups available
- Domain registration available
- SSL certificates available
- Up to 1,000 MB disk space
- Up to 50 GB bandwidth per month
You can manage all aspects of your hosting using the popular cPanel control panel that includes the Fantastico one-click installer for popular programs. There is also a website builder with more than 300 designs, plus shopping cart software for e-store owners.
At the other end of the expertise spectrum, developers get the usual PHP (up to version 5), Perl, CGI, and MySQL databases plus FTP access.
Although WH Japan takes backups for its own disaster recovery purposes, you will have to perform your own backups and pay to restore them.
Pricing and Support
This provider’s monthly fees are high by international standards, but not necessarily by Japanese standards. For English speakers in Japan, the price point may be acceptable.
You can sign up on one-month, one-year, or two-year terms, with a discount for committing to one of the longer terms. But beware that you’ll also have to factor in the extra costs for a domain name and SSL certificate. The 16-day money-back guarantee allows you little more than two weeks to back out if you change your mind, and this excludes any promotional purchases.
Customer service can be summoned only via email or MSN Messenger, which is rather restrictive, and I was unable to contact the company. If you have to resort to self-support, there is a decent enough frequently asked questions page and a first-time help page.
