Compared to European dedicated servers, your prices are rather on the upper end (~150€ with 100MBit/s link, 175€ with 1GBit/s). In Germany, you can get a similarly, slightly higher clocked Haswell Xeon rather than Sandy Bridge with twice as much RAM and two disks for between 1/3 and 1/2 the price (with gigabit uplink and between 100 and 200 MBit/s dedicated bandwidth guaranteed, depending where you go).

However, it may of course be that both hardware and traffic is just a lot more expensive in Thailand.

There seems to be no SLA regarding availability (at least I didn't see one). Usually, you get at least 99% guaranteed with a cheap hoster (which allows for an entire 4 days of downtime per year!), but the better ones will guarantee anywhere from 99.9 to 99.95% (which is like 5 hours or so).

This here sounds good, though the total uplink capacity would be an interesting detail:

Directly connected to CAT-NIX

On the other hand, this line in the small print would be a definite dealbreaker for me:

We reserve the right to change terms and prices without notice.

Without notice, that's... rather unusual.

Hi, I'm head of operations at Thaihosting, and also an avid gamer since the days of the Commodore 64. I just wanted to chime in to answer some of the questions you guys have brought up.

Datacentres, bandwidth and cost

We use 3 different datacenters, but they are all in the Bangkok area. That's where the best infrastructure is available.

We have multiple different bandwidth options, but the standard option is a shared 100 Mbps line offering 40-50 Mbps domestic and minimum 2 Mbps international. The reason why international bandwidth is so low is because of the price charged by all local ISPs for international bandwidth. We aim to offer reasonably priced entry products, which will allow people to target the local market. The Xeon based servers at our main facility have greater levels of international bandwidth, and they are a much better fit for people with a bigger need for international bandwidth.

Of course we can also offer packages with more international bandwidth available, but expect to pay a premium for that.

Thailand is not the ideal hosting hub for targeting the greater South East Asia. If you want to host with us, it should primarily be because you are interested in targeting a growing market of Thai gamers. Thai gamers suffer greatly from lag when attempting to play games hosted outside of Thailand.

It's also true that our prices are higher than those of many European hosting centers. This is due to a number of factors, some of which include:

• Higher hardware cost due to high import taxes
• Few importers and very little competition on hardware because of state supported monopoly
• Generally higher prices on bandwidth — especially international
• Hosting centers are generally smaller than in Europe, and bulk buying therefore doesn't give the same discounts that the biggest providers in Europe can get

SLA and terms

It's true that we don't have an SLA on our website, but it's something that we are prepared to offer, and we do offer it to some of our existing customers. We generally like to tailor the SLA to individual needs, because of how the infrastructure is here. Once we know the needs of the individual customer, it's a lot easier for us to recommend the right solution and offer a suitable SLA. For reference, the servers running at our various facilities — even the cheapest ones — all have an uptime track record of well above 99%. At our main facility, we can offer 99.9% uptime SLAs, but that's only for the Xeon based servers.

The line in our terms that reads "We reserve the right to change terms and prices without notice," was introduced as a precaution during the military takeover of last year. Many businesses (like local radio and TV stations) found themselves suddenly having to abide by new rules put in place by the military over night.

We should point out that the military has imposed no such rule changes on the hosting industry, and we have never ever changed our prices or terms without informing our customers. However, we have recently upgraded all our shared hosting packages to offer more than 10 times as much storage as we offered before — without changing the price, and we are in the process of doing a similar thing to our dedicated server offerings. We actually forgot to tell our web hosting customers about the huge increase in available storage. I hope they don't mind ;-)

I hope this helps clarify some of the questions that you might have about the Thai market. And keep in mind, that we are always open to a talk about what is and isn't possible in Thailand. I'm open to a chat here, but you are also welcome to contact me through the live chat on our website.

Thank you for the update.

I almost expected that the reason for the relatively high cost was that bandwidth (and hardware) is simply that much more expensive in Thailand. In 10 years it will probably be the opposite! Please don't get me wrong, by the way -- I didn't intend to say that your plans are too expensive (I sometimes don't use the best possible wording, so maybe it came across wrong). Obviously, running costs can be very different in a different geographic area.

All in all, with the military stuff and such, it sounds like you are not having an easy time. A possible "everything can change over night without notice" situation (even if it has not happened for you, and even if it is not your fault) is something that may very easily scare away a lot of customers (who normally expect no changes at all, and being informed at least two weeks in advance otherwise).

But yes, as you point out, for someone who wants to specifically target the Thai market, this sounds like an ideal opportunity. I wish you best luck.

But yes, as you point out, for someone who wants to specifically target the Thai market, this sounds like an ideal opportunity. I wish you best luck.

Thank you very much!