New Post has been published on compevo communications
New Post has been published on https://compevo.com/blog/why-sites-hosted-outside-of-chinahong-kong-will-never-succeed-based-on-accessibility-alone/
Why sites hosted outside of China/Hong Kong will never succeed based on accessibility alone.
We’ve seen this many times and will add one more vector that some are not aware of and this is also in general for overseas users and websites but especially pertaining to the internet in China. One thing about China whether you are talking about China Unicom, Telecom, Mobile etc… the experience, speed and international connection will be different in all areas of China. This is a big risk in a sense, we’ve had clients say “from our office in Guangzhou our USA website loads fine”, but how about other areas and cities of China?
We’ve had clients come to us puzzled saying they receive reports that their site hosted outside of China is loading slow or not at all. This does not mean it is blocked by the GFW by default, in most cases it is simply a routing and bandwidth issue and this varies by Province and City.
Now imagine the same issue for us here in North America, imagine if eBay was always loading slow or not at all ? You wouldn’t use it even if you had a good impression. The feedback from China on not being able to load a site properly is that they perceive it to be an issue with the company since all of the other sites they use in China load fine ,they don’t realize this. If your site doesn’t load fast in China your chances of attaining clients from China are virtually 0 as they would just move on to another site that does load properly. Just like many Chinese companies do not realize their site hosted in China may not load well for the rest of the world. It’s a huge issue that costs business that even some in IT are not aware of until they travel in China.
The Google Factor That Is Often Overlooked We always advise to try to keep everything loading from your own server and not third parties. A good example of this is that a site may not load properly just because of issues connecting to Google. A good example is using Google Font APIs, this has caused sites not to load until the connection times out (often several minutes).
The solution is to download the CSS code to your own server.
And most importantly if you have an audience inside and outside of China, it is worth hosting directly inside China. When not possible due to ICP or other issues, we recommend Hong Kong. It is the only location directly connected by land to Mainland China and the ping can be as low as 10ms to Shenzhen, China. But beware to choose a provider with “direct peering and routing into China” as many companies in Hong Kong actually do not have direct connectivity to China and end up routing through the USA (which defeats the purpose of Hong Kong). When hosting in Hong Kong on a server that has a direct route to China, this can solve virtually all of the issues.
The above is simply a must if you are targeting users in China.
The Creative Solution
A quick and easy solution we’ve implemented many times is simply to move the DNS to Hong Kong and user a caching proxy as a sort of CDN and this essentially gives most users in China the same experience as if your site were hosted in China. The beauty of this solution is that no real migration aside from DNS is necessary, your backend data and site can still remain in the USA or where it is really hosted, and you could still use alternate hosts or direct IP access for direct access to the real backend server.