Henan Guochao E-Commerce Co., Ltd. (Guochao, or Gchao, for short) was founded in 2004. Its headquarters are in Hong Kong, but it uses servers located in several worldwide data centers. According to its website, customers are located in more than 100 countries around the world, which is somewhat surprising since the company website is only available in Chinese.
Features and Ease of Use
Guochao only sells dedicated servers and cloud servers, therefore you won’t find the usual range of shared hosting packages or optional add-ons. However, you can look forward to these features:
- Guaranteed 99.9% server uptime
- Additional backups available for purchase
- Choice of multiple worldwide server locations
- Choice of HDD or SSD storage
The first thing I noticed when I visited Guochao’s website is the vast number of options. Not only can you choose from a multitude of server locations, but also you can choose from tens (if not hundreds) of different server configurations. This sheer number of options is offered at the expense of user-friendliness, in my opinion.
Guochao uses servers located in:
- The Americas: the U.S., Mexico, Panama, Bahamas, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Greenland, and Guatemala
- Asia: China, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Brunei, Afghanistan, and Bhutan
- South America: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guinea, and Paraguay
- Europe: Luxembourg, Russia, Estonia, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Albania, Andorra, and Armenia
- Oceania: American Samoa, Australia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, and Palau
Although the provider doesn’t explicitly state it, I believe it’s safe to assume that they don’t own all these data centers or servers. Instead, they are likely reselling resources from other companies.
Pricing and Support
With the aforementioned amount of choice, it won’t surprise you to learn that there is a price point to suit every budget. You can start with an affordable server, then purchase a larger server when you’re ready to scale. Since this is a server rental company, domain names or SSL certificates would have to be bought separately at extra cost.
Guochao’s website footer mentions a refund policy, but the link is broken, so I can’t say for sure if there is such a thing. In any case, such a refund policy would be a little unusual for a provider of enterprise-level servers rather than simple shared hosting services.
If you speak Chinese, you can contact this company’s 24/7 support team via telephone or email. Unfortunately, I received no reply to my exploratory email written in English. For self-support, there is a limited help center, but I had to let my browser translate the Chinese articles into English:
