Recently, I’ve been involved with getting a new JETAA chapter started here in Japan as their webmaster. For those that don’t know, JETAA stands for Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme Alumni Association.
I was introduced to the guy trying to start the chapter a couple of weeks ago and after meeting with him and another JET alum, we worked out what we would need to get started on the chapter’s website. We settled on four domains, three of which would redirect permanently to the main one www.jetaa-tokyo.org. I was able to register all four at what would seem to be Japan’s most well known domain registrar.
With the domain names out of the way, we needed to find hosting. Web hosting in Japan can tend to be a bit on the expensive side if you come from the US or maybe UK where good hosting can be had for $10 or less a month. Eventually we settled on a bilingual host (also hard to come by here) called Tsuakeru.net which was recommended by some of the expat community in Tokyo.
They seem to be pretty solid, but I have to admit that like my title says, I’ve been spoiled by great web hosting [from the US]. Before we made an account at Tsukaeru, I had offered to use my own shared hosting with Dreamhost as a temporary solution. The Dreamhost custom control panel is straightforward with everything laid out in an easy to understand manner. You can park/redirect domains straight from the control panel, meaning there’s no need to make a separate hosted folder for each domain and muck around with .htaccess files. They even off SSH with the full range of tools such as tar and wget, which even allowed me to setup Drush!
Tsukaeru.net on the other hand—while fairly solid—has a long ways to go. Tsukaeru uses the Plesk Control Panel, which did take me sometime to get used to and at least to me seems overly complicated; even cPanel is loads easier to work with. They also don’t offer the same conveniences offered by Dreamhost. I had to make different hosted folders for each domain I wanted to redirect and use a .htaccess file to do a 301 permanent redirect. Database creation is a pain requiring long database names/usernames/and host addresses. SFTP and SSH also required the same long host name and only offered very basic tools such as copy and move, meaning I have to login with an FTP client to transfer files and wait as a new connection is made for every-single-file. Talk about slow.
Hopefully one of these days Tsukaeru will add the full range of commands that makes SSH so useful; of course by that time we may have already out grown our shared hosting and moved on to a VPS either with them or with another company.
