The Fastest Hosting Solutions for China

Whats the issue with centralised hosting?

A limitation of physics you cannot beat with centralised hosting is the amount of time it takes for the signal to travel from your users in China to a web server on the other side of the planet. You can use accelerators and network optimisation services to remove bottlenecks but ultimately the distance and scale will have absolute limits.

Even with a CDN there will remain some portion of your page requests that must be relayed to the origin server for rendering, processing, or saving of users data. Some CDN services offered by Akamai or Cloudflare will establish the HTTP handshake at the edge and have an optimised protocol for making the requests back to your origin server which does reduce the TTFB significantly but the overall request-response time is still high.

By adding a CDN to your website it will further boost the speed of your website loading time after the initial HTML has loaded because the other resource that make up your page are able to be served directly from the CDN, including images, fonts and stylesheets.

What about a multi-site setup with USA and Hong Kong hosting?

When talking about web hosting solutions for China, its often recommended to setup a second website or mirror hosting in Hong Kong if you can't get an ICP. While often recommended by some, we strongly discourage it in favour of better solutions.

Users in China who are physically located close to Hong Kong will have a relatively fast experience from your Hong Kong web hosting but for the rest of China it will be prone to chronic network congestion issues, generally slow speeds, high latency and high packet loss.

The decentralise and distribute solution

For companies who cannot get an ICP, this is our recommended solution which combines the geographical benefits while eliminating a multitude of issues with the setups described above.

We offer specialised software engineering services to build your website in a way that doesn't need a centralised web server therefore enabling your website to be deployed to hundreds of data centers globally.

By deploying your website to multiple locations around China, users will be automatically routed to the fast one at any given time. Users experiencing network congestion on their south will have their traffic automatically routed to a data center on their north or east. Latency is significantly reduced because users anywhere in China will connect to a data center closest to them; if they are in the south then one along the southern border; if they are on the north then one along the northern border; and so on for east and west. Users in central China will be routed in the direction with the least network congestion and lowest latency.

Eligible for a ICP?

For companies that are eligible for an ICP, we are able to take the above solution one step further by also deploying your website to over 167 data centers throughout mainland China. With over 350 data centers globally your website will be ultra fast from anywhere on earth and be able to instantaneously scale to an unlimited number of active users.

Users in China being served by a data center in their same city will have exponentially faster performance.

How is this different to a CDN?

Our hosting solution actually uses a lot of the same physical infrastructure as the major CDN's and all the same data centers. Ultimately the difference comes down to the software level where we write code that gets deployed to every data center in the network.

Typically a CDN is placed between your users and the website to accelerate traffic and increase capacity by serving static content. We take this one step further with our specialised software engineering services to build your website entirely into the massively distributed infrastructure operated by the major cloud providers including AWS, GCP, Cloudflare, Alibaba, Oracle and Akamai.

With our solution, every request-response cycle is handled entirely in the very same data center that the user was routed to. Theres no need for requests to be relayed down stream to other data centers or to communicate with an external database services.

This doesn't mean you'll have a static content website, quite the opposite, there is exponentially more compute resources available to process hyper dynamic and localised content at a granular per-user basis. This is precisely because our software architecture distributes your website across hundreds or even many thousands of physical servers globally instead of being limited to the resources of one physical web server.

Furthermore, we utilise multiple TCP and HTTP techniques at a low level to boost the performance, and mitigate packet loss. And at a higher level we optimise the loading performance of the page resources and Javascript.

Page Loading Time Comparison

Listed below are test results from multiple cities in mainland China to show a comparison in TTFB and Full Page Loading Time for each of the 5 solutions described in this page. The tests are conducted on a website with no render blocking, no blocked resources, a 10 milliseconds server response time on the root document, and 60 resources with a total payload of 3 megabytes.

Select a city below to show the speed results for users in that location.