Anyone know of any companies that have this currently?

Japan hosting companis might have different way of thinking
and their bw is quite expensive.
also, language is a problem, not all of them have en interface

well i know i`ve seen kanji on cpanel, and i am currently in japan so i understand the language problem. There is nothing like being illiterate for a while to show you the importance of reading.

Anyway, i know the problems and i have found some sites that Im looking into, was just wondering if anyone had any here.

Originally posted by Shin
well i know i`ve seen kanji on cpanel, and i am currently in japan so i understand the language problem. There is nothing like being illiterate for a while to show you the importance of reading.

Anyway, i know the problems and i have found some sites that Im looking into, was just wondering if anyone had any here.

I have been trying to find a suitable Japanese Reseller programe
for a long time and Japanese is no problem for me :stickout:

Can you share your experience with me?

;)

mushi mushi, watashiwa Mad Elektra San ;)

Originally posted by Mad_Elektra
mushi mushi, watashiwa Mad Elektra San ;)

hey, nice pronunciation

but when you are referring your own name,

you should not use the word "san"

BTW: do you know the answer to the title of the thread?

Not "mushi, mushi", it's "moshi moshi"

Anyhow, I live in Japan, and let me tell you that while it is a broadband heaven (i.e. FTTH 100Mbps for under $60), the server market is VERY overpriced. There are many data centers but they are prices at about 1999 US prices IMHO.

As for me, I do all my hosting outside Japan (in the US.) Shin, could you explain a bit better why you need this, then perhaps I can offer advice.

dewa,

Originally posted by Carlos
Not "mushi, mushi", it's "moshi moshi"

Anyhow, I live in Japan, and let me tell you that while it is a broadband heaven (i.e. FTTH 100Mbps for under $60), the server market is VERY overpriced. There are many data centers but they are prices at about 1999 US prices IMHO.

As for me, I do all my hosting outside Japan (in the US.) Shin, could you explain a bit better why you need this, then perhaps I can offer advice.

dewa,

Dewa san, doumo
:stickout:

Japan has a very well developed FTTH connection
but the price is really really high.
However, I do know some hosting company offer good price
it;s a pity that they don't have many reseller plans

"Dewa" means "later/until later" -- not my name. :)

FTTH connection is high? For less than $60 to $70 you can get FTTH at 100Mbps. Show me the company in the US that is offering such a deal? Only South Korea has so much home bandwidth for so little.

Anyways, back to the topic.
One of the more heavly advertised hosting companies is Isle. Visit them at:
http://home.isle.ne.jp/
Your browser will need to be able to display Japanese, since I don't think they have an English page. To make it easier on you, see http://private.isle.jp/ for their private servers.

For example, their "Value" plan at http://private.isle.jp/price/plan/plan_m_value.html
It costs 24,900 a month (yen). You get a Pent4, 512MBRAM, 80GB, Webmin, and RH9. Notice the sign-up fee of 62,800 yen!!!

If you want virtual hosting, then look here:
http://home.isle.ne.jp/service/shared/plan/index.html
The Ultra plan is 1GB H at 13,545 yen a month!

I'm not endorsing Isle, but simply using them as an example of the high prices in Japan for hosting and server related services. (Can you say "market opportunity!?") Now, I used Google (you know what that is right?) and searched for "rental server" (katakana) and came up many links, here are a few....

http://www.fsv.jp/
http://sakura.ne.jp/
http://www.shiftweb.net/
http://www.datafly.net/
http://rssk.net/
http://www.rapidsite.jp/ (has VPS)
http://www.delahost.jp/service/vps/ (has VPS)

If you are looking to help out a client that is located in Japan, but lack the experience, you might want to contact the president of purestatic.com, an American, who is currently living in Tokyo. (He's setting up their Japanese branch now.) I think he would be more qualified to answer your questions.

Cheers,

Originally posted by Shin
Anyone know of any companies that have this currently?

Why not do a search online or try Japanese directory.

Originally posted by Carlos
"Dewa" means "later/until later" -- not my name. :)

FTTH connection is high? For less than $60 to $70 you can get FTTH at 100Mbps. Show me the company in the US that is offering such a deal? Only South Korea has so much home bandwidth for so little.

Anyways, back to the topic.
One of the more heavly advertised hosting companies is Isle. Visit them at:
http://home.isle.ne.jp/
Your browser will need to be able to display Japanese, since I don't think they have an English page. To make it easier on you, see http://private.isle.jp/ for their private servers.

For example, their "Value" plan at http://private.isle.jp/price/plan/plan_m_value.html
It costs 24,900 a month (yen). You get a Pent4, 512MBRAM, 80GB, Webmin, and RH9. Notice the sign-up fee of 62,800 yen!!!

If you want virtual hosting, then look here:
http://home.isle.ne.jp/service/shared/plan/index.html
The Ultra plan is 1GB H at 13,545 yen a month!

I'm not endorsing Isle, but simply using them as an example of the high prices in Japan for hosting and server related services. (Can you say "market opportunity!?") Now, I used Google (you know what that is right?) and searched for "rental server" (katakana) and came up many links, here are a few....

http://www.fsv.jp/
http://sakura.ne.jp/
http://www.shiftweb.net/
http://www.datafly.net/
http://rssk.net/
http://www.rapidsite.jp/ (has VPS)
http://www.delahost.jp/service/vps/ (has VPS)

If you are looking to help out a client that is located in Japan, but lack the experience, you might want to contact the president of purestatic.com, an American, who is currently living in Tokyo. (He's setting up their Japanese branch now.) I think he would be more qualified to answer your questions.

Cheers,

Thank you very much an extremely helpful post. Thanks for the time and effort to post the info.

My pleasure. So what did you decide on?

i haven't decided yet on what i'm going to do. have a few other things to research and get done. translating my website for one, then looking on how to market it. having someone hand out tissues at the train station doesn't sound like my best bet for hosting...

Going to look into how much it costs for those posters in trains.

Thinking of a lot of things and how I want to go about it. As you posted, there doesn't seem to be a very big reseller market in japan which might be the way to go, but also as you posted server setup costs are pretty high.

Also have to decide who I want to target since I don't really want a lot of difficult technical questions to deal with in japanese. My wife will have to translate for me, so things could get time consuming.

it really seems like a wide open market there, just hard for a gaijin to penetrate into. My wife would likely be able to handle general phone support, but email, tickets, and more complex issues would all need to be read to me for a reply.

$250 a month for that one server you listed isn't too too bad, but I don't remember it listing how much xfer it had and the pc i'm on now doesn't support kanji. The $628 setup is a bit harsh by american standards, but not all that bad by japanese standards. I'm wondering about marketing it as different services, one cheaper hosted in the US, another more expensive but hosted in Japan. Possibly start with just the US based service and see how that goes to start with?

You sound like you know a bit about the industry in japan...is it really as wide open as it looks?

Almost all japanese business sites that i see seem to be very 1999ish. It almost seems like they offer all this bandwidth (100Mbit etc) downloading, but then make up the shortfall in cost by making the datacenters/hosts pay heavy bandwidth charges to offset the cheap bw in homes.

I did some tests from there and could only get around 1.5Mbit downloads from servers stateside. I really think that they claim bw but don't really have it. I think it's throttled really well where it can burst to 100, but maintain much less. I know my home cable will burst to over 10Mbit, but then slow to around 5Mbit if it's larger than a meg or 2 file.

anyway, i'm rambling...

Why not just keep the server in the US, pay someone to manager it, and then do your work, which is handling and marketing to the Japanese customers? That seems to be the bext way to do it IMHO.

Cheers,

Originally posted by Carlos
Anyhow, I live in Japan, and let me tell you that while it is a broadband heaven (i.e. FTTH 100Mbps for under $60), the server market is VERY overpriced. There are many data centers but they are prices at about 1999 US prices IMHO.
Why do you think it's like that? It seems strange that broadband is well priced, but hosting is stuck in the late 90s. You'd think that hosting would be in the same ballpark as broadband, as far as pricing etc. :eek:

Originally posted by Aussie Bob
Why do you think it's like that? It seems strange that broadband is well priced, but hosting is stuck in the late 90s. You'd think that hosting would be in the same ballpark as broadband, as far as pricing etc. :eek:

I think that it's kind of a subsity (sp?). Like we have in the US, home phone calls are pretty cheap, but business calls are expensive. That money is used to keep home phone calls cheaper.

Plus if bandwidth for servers is expensive, it's less likely to have bandwidth intensive websites. Thus, even though you have this fat pipe, it's less likely you'll be downloading a lot of large files and actually use it all.

AussieBob, you would think that but here it is in a nutshell:

Japan was far behind the US in the days of 56K modems. The best you could do was ISDN, which the ATT-like monopoly, NTT was pushing everyone. Connection charges were out of hand, and the best you could get was a 10pm to 8am service plan that was affordable.

Then an upstart offered ADSL in Tokyo. Soon after, Yahoo Japan (Korean CEO) got Yahoo into Broadband. Their prices were cheap, and after a few years, we see that NTT was forced to pretty much give up on ISDN, and jump on the ADSL bandwagon. Not just them but other large IT/TELCO companies as well, like Panasonic, Sony, KDDI, and so on. Prices continued to go down while "best effort" ADSL speeds went up. However, all of this great Broadband is still using NTTs POTs network.

On the other hand, CableCos in Japan are MUCH weaker than CableCos in the US, so they haven't really mounted "real" competition to ADSL. I use Cable Modem and get 25Mpbs for about $50 a month. If Cable biz was allowed to do M&A in Japan, perhaps with time, they would be able to compete, however most Japanese use TV antennas and Cable has not been so strong.

So, where does the main challenge come from (will come from?) -- the Electric Power industry. The 10 utilities in Japan have a very good nation wide network. On top of this, they are slowly connecting their local service area with Fiber (FTTH.) I work(ed) for an Electric company here, and so far we have the four main cities on our island serviced, which is about 1 to 2 million customers (potential), out of a population fo 3.6 million. With FTTH, you can offer broadband Internet, cable TV, and IP phone all over one wire.

BTW, the Electric companies also worked towards using Power Line Carrier as an alternative network. Since there are more transformers (those barrel-like things on the poles) per distribution line in Japan, it is much more feasilble than in Europe and the US to do PLC, however, I think it won't ever happen.

OK, so that is the situation for residential users.

Now, about the server/data center market. Companies were slow to get their web presence in Japan, and in many ways are still far behind (i.e. Commerce, etc) But this is slowly changing as "old managers who don't know how to use computers retire." Anyhow, I see two types of data centers in Japan. The first are owned by large companies that found that they didn't need all that rack space as the size of computers became small, or their IT sections became more productive, etc. So, they kind of looked for what to do with their internal DC and saw the business of ASP (not the scripting language, but the service.) A good example is a subsidiary of my former company (Electric Co.) They were our IT section at first. Then they were spun off into an IT company. They do IT biz, and also handle service of IT things to the "mother-company" (lots of this cross-breeding of companies in Japan.) Anyhow, I recall my first visit to their shinning new DC. It was so sweet, and there were floors of IBM and SUN servers. I'm talking about the BIG BIG servers! My last visit there saw that most of the floor space was empty because the latest servers they use replace those huge mini-frames of yesteryear. As an IT company they also got into hosting. Because of that, all group companies were using (kind of forced) into using their services. My former project needed a website. Of course we had to use them. We paid $99 for 10MB, and 1 POP account. This was about 4 years ago, and I doubt things have gotten much better. I recall needing PHP intsalled, but at the time, their server people said, "We can't install that because the contract we have with the server vendor, Fujitsu, doesn't include it, and it is a security risk, and ... err.. what is PHP?" That was about 3 years ago!

OK, so the last paragraph prettymuch says that the "old IT/tech" companies have tried to leverage their old internal DCs for new business. But they are "dinosaurs" and in IT, you must be speedy. True, their networks are first rate, and DC are very high quality, but everything is overpriced. I'm sure it has to do with (a) less IT knowledge in Japan (b) everything is overpriced in Japan (c) the amount of service given/required drives up costs.

So, the second type of DC as I see it are the ones that were more recently built. They are focused on what they are doing, and targetting the same market as the DCs in the US.

That said, everywhere I look, even these "young" up-starts are still expensive. I'm not so sure why the cost is so much higher, considering they could (can) get cheap hardware here, and the networks are pretty good. It mught be the factor of (a) labour costs (b) land costs (c) what the market expects to pay (d) demand.

What I mean by (d) is that it seems to me that in the US, and other countries, everyone needs a website, or is thinking of doing some web biz. Japan isn't far behind but I see it as a few steps down. Also remember that most Japanese do mailing or surfing via their mobile phones, which are like 3 generations in front of the phones in the US/Europe ;)

I suppose what Japan needs is a company like EV1Servers. I may be wrong, but I feel that EV1Servers (RackShack) helped to bring down costs in this industry. As costs came down, more players could get in. Japan kind of needs that.

Whew... that is my two yen. I might have simplified some things, but overall, you should have the gist.

Cheers.

Originally posted by Carlos
Not "mushi, mushi", it's "moshi moshi"



OT: moshi moshi is used only in telephone calls. not when you really introduce yourself etc.