The company was formed on the 4th January 2015 from my laptop while spending some time in Kampot over the new year holidays. Together with Cambo.Host who provided some essential hardware and networking expertise, I spent a few months configuring, testing, and physically moving servers around Cambodia until we were ready to move everything over to the Phnom Penh server around April.

By June we had ironed out some bugs and were ready to go – Cambodia’s first dedicated web hosting provider was now online to stay.

The network that HostAsean.com uses is provided by SINET, and the server sits in their data centre in central Phnom Penh. Connected to a 100mbps international link and up to 1gbps domestic connection to give extra speed for all your Cambodia based website visitors. In this case, the domestic network also seems to cover part of Thailand and Vietnam as a bonus. Customers connected to ISPs peered to this connection in Cambodia also enjoy very low latency to their website and email servers – typically only 2-3ms.

HostAsean’s web servers run cPanel for easy account management and are optimised for WordPress and regular business email use. The platform is configured with firewalls and extra security settings, that alongside the recommended WordPress security plugins, help to minimise any chance of your WordPress site being compromised.

Later expansion plans include server hubs in other ASEAN countries, with potential locations being Thailand, Myanmar, Indonesia, Laos and Vietnam. Almost everyone can benefit from hosting more locally. Especially in countries where the infrastructure is not as fast as the more common Asian web hosting server hubs like Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

I offer personally managed website hosting plans for my website design and development clients. With this you can be assured that everything from your WordPress dashboard to your web hosting cPanel and email account settings are in good hands.

So if you’re looking for web hosting in Cambodia you’re in luck. I’d happy to help you get set up with a new website or move your existing one, just pick out a web hosting package or get in touch.

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A customer has one main obstacle, and that is the availability of credit cards and other forms of online payments that are well supported internationally, as useful as mobile phone payments and similar money transfer services are, they aren’t supported by international payment gateways and can’t be used to buy online without custom development. Credit cards are easy, if your market uses credit cards (such as for travel, tourism and hospitality, or digital purchases) then it can be a nice addition.

Receiving payments is another matter, a local bank has just recently (early 2014) started offering a merchant gateway and the tools to interface with it, but also requires some customisation. The simplest solution is something like PayPal or other like WorldPay or Google Checkout or Eway.com.au since there is common support in ready made plugins. You can’t yet withdraw PayPal into a Cambodian bank account, so requires use of an international account somewhere (such as if you’re an expat, your home country or a neighbouring country),  some of the other options can withdraw to a Cambodian account but can be more costly. You can also process payments manually with a local bank, just as if you were taking the details over the phone.

The other main obstacle to online payments is delivery logistics, in that without a regular postal service it is difficult to ship any physical retail goods to a customer in Cambodia, and to do so would require operating a private delivery service. Along with common availability and stock complications, operating an online retail business with physical products has a lot of difficulties in Cambodia.

If your product is suited (digital products are great) and your market already buys online, then it is worth exploring, especially if you have the option to withdraw to an overseas account, and pay a subscription to a payment gateway.

Read my new post about my e-commerce website design experiences in the developing Cambodian market.

The post Emerging Ecommerce in Cambodia appeared first on Joe Ogden.

Domain names are registered at a domain registrar, such as GoDaddy, NameCheap, etc. Typically they cost US$10-20 per year for registration of a .com, .asia, or similar domain extension like .net, .org, etc. These are easy to register and you benefit from registering for 5-10 years at once.

This is only to register the domain, to do anything with it you need website or email hosting…

If email is a priority, my recommendation is to sign up to Google Apps, unfortunately it is no longer free (back in Jan 2013) but US$5/user month or $50/user a year is a small price to pay for no headaches. Many people have trouble with regular “all in one” web and email hosting, and if you add up all the hours spend on tech support and potentially missed emails. Having your email on Google Apps also means you have a lot more flexibility with your website hosting, it is easy to change when your email is not dependent on it.

Clients that have had constant email problems have found the solution in Google Apps, the problems just went away.

Most web hosting providers are resellers, they simply set you up an account on their rented server and have little to no control over the actual hardware, this keeps costs down but control is limited. Email is typically very important for small to medium companies and they often have issues, it is well worth the cost to put it in the hands of a specialist provider rather than used bundled with your web hosting.

For website hosting, most sites just need some basic PHP/MySQL cPanel hosting for a WordPress install, this is cheap, easily obtained, and tends to be reliable. As mentioned above, when your email is hosted centrally on Google Apps, it’s easy to shop around for the fastest one for where you need access and change your host.

You might also benefit from a CDN for your website, for about US$10 a month you can mirror the site in Europe and the US for faster international speeds, while having your main website hosting servers in Cambodia to get faster speeds for you and your customers in Southeast Asia.

Edit 28/06/2015 – I am establishing HostAsean.com – a website & email hosting company in Cambodia. Check the blog for promos and coupon codes.

The post Domain Names, Website & Email Hosting Explained appeared first on Joe Ogden.

Use cloud based storage instead.

Even for large artwork and photograph files, frequently 100-200mb or more in size (that can take an hour or more to synchronise), it is still a solid solution that average internet speeds in Cambodia can cope with – assuming they are pretty much always connected. Dropbox for example, when used like a normal folder, responds to changes almost as quickly as a local server (and in some cases more reliably, for example power outages) in normal everyday use.

More and more people are using cloud based storage for business use, both on an individual and enterprise level, but it fits really well for small-medium businesses as a physical server replacement due to the ease of setup and no maintenance.

I have tried a fair few of the cloud storage services out there both on a free and paid for level, and set up and maintained them for others. I’ve tried Dropbox, Dropbox Teams (Business version), Google Drive, Copy.com, Box.com, and looked into many others. Out of the lot.. Dropbox and Copy get used every day, with an emphasis on Dropbox. Copy.com is good to get a lot of space but I have found the synchronisation and reliability isn’t as good as Dropbox and that is a pretty key feature.

If you have a clunky server sitting in the corner it is easy to migrate to a cloud service, or get the best of both worlds and set up the server to also synchronise to the cloud.

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