Singapore Web Hosting Blog

first of all, chinese new year is only one day ahead. i would like to take this opportunity to

Wish You All A year of Good Health, Peace and Prosperity!
Gong Xi Fa Cai!

looking back, we’ve been doing businesses online with fun and profit for 4 years.

5 or 6 years ago, i could not imagine i would run a few online businesses successfully 5 years later. at that time, the only Internet related thing i used effectively was email. when time flies, i’ve learnt a lot and done several e-commerce sites.

and before i knew it, i started answering questions, teaching people how to start online business, some people even call me “expert”.

i’ve seen many people that want to bring business online but never start taking any action. here are the top 3 reasons they told me that keep them from starting online business. in my mind, none of these shoud stop you.

1)i’m not an expert of anything.

people assume they must be an expert in order to start. no, you do not have to be. i know little about Internet 5 years ago. but then again, who knew much about Internet 5 years ago? if you did, what about 10 years ago? did you know the term “Internet” 20 years ago?

some people think i’m expert in SEO and online business but i knew nothing in this industry 5 years ago. my point is, you can become expert of any topic as long as you want to learn. and you do not have to be expert before you start.

you can learn while your doing it.

also, everyone knows something that others do not know. many people would like to learn the knowledge from you. think about your day job, your interests, your life experience. i’m 100% you have some knowledge that you can share with others.

2)is making money online real?

people have heard of scary stories. dotcom burst, online scams, making money quick nonsense… many people have impression that most of online businesses are in grey area: adult, spam, scam…

it’s true that there’re tons of rubbish online.

on the other hand, tens of thousnads of people are running honest online businesses selling all kinds of products and services successfully. i’m not referring to the big boys like ebay, amazon. i mean small businesses run by everage joe.

yes it is real. i’m living example

3)i’ve tried many times with no success

it’s not for everyone, that’s for sure. but chances are, you tried wrong path.

starting and running online business is like running offline business. it takes time, work, money, effort, commitment. but compared with real world businesses, it requires less resources significantly.

but you cannot join a downline club and hope you will be rich in next few months. you cannot jump from great opportunity to another great opportunity. most of these opportunities you find in emails are just nonsense, by the way.

you need to spend time to build your business from ground up.

once again, happy chinese new year.

and see ya online !

1st post in the new year of 2006.

beginning of new year is always a good time to draw up strategic plan for the future. well, i have yet a really solid plan that’s ready to be carried out, just some idea and research that i wanna share with my readers.

1st thing im think of is providing web hosting service for china market.

everyone is talking about china, a booming market for all most all kinds of products and services. singapore has special interests in china market somehow, the most well known project between singapore and china, the suzhou industrial park, is not a very pleasant story though. another interesting story recently is that NTUC is giving up its supermarket joint venture in china. they can’t inject more cash to survive there.

on the other hand, we have heard of many successful stories as well.

in fact, as everyone knows that china is a huge market and therefore promising opportunity, everyone also knows that doing business in china is not easy at all. everything is so much different there. like any business anywhere, we may, or may not make it.

however the most important thing is, we may not be able to afford the price of losing the chance. simple cruel fact.

exploring china web hosting service is a rather natural expansion plan for us. singapore/singtel has very good connection to china hence is a perfect bridge between china and rest of the world. and we can speak the same language.

but after research, there are things that we have to consider further.

how to get payment there? really few people there use credit card. even less people use cheque. bank transfer is also a daunting task to figure out. unlike singapore where we only have seaveral banks and can transfer funds between banks easily via online banking, there’re tons of banks that you cannot do inter-bank transfer online. you have to go to bank counter and deposit cash.

another interesting thing is, china webmasters, web developers seem like much more prefer Windows platform and ASP scripting. we all know that *nix server and PHP scripting is dominating more market share worldwide, for good reasons. looks like it’s another story in china.

china government post sometimes rather strict policies to foreign companies to enter into china in certain market or industry. telecom is one of them. not sure if web hosting service is. i heard that now in china all web sites hosted locally (on servers within china) have to get approval and a license from authority. a plus for us? as our clients do not have to apply for license. or bad sign as there might be legal issues? not clear, as many other things when china is concerned.