[yixiang]

I'm Chinese. It's not that bad.

* I've been hosting my Chinese blog in US vps since 2009 and it works fine.

* I have Gitea hosted in US vps and it works fine too.

* GoDaddy has Alipay (sort of China's PayPal) up for a long time.

* ICP Licenses are easy to get (at least for Chinese) and typically take less a month. I've done it for my company's websites and my clients' websites.

* ICP licenses are required only if you want to host your website in China. Hosting in China is ridiculously expensive and many Chinese go out of their way to host elsewhere. For 9$ a month you get 1 cpu, 1G ram and 1MBit bandwidth, which translates to 128kb/s.

To make your website load, and load fast in China:

* Remove Google fonts, Google cdn, resources from FB, twitter, etc. this should fix 95% of your problem.

* Avoid well-known host providers (AWS, Vultr, Linode) if you can, they tend to get banned.

* Get a host with CN2. I heard hosting in Hong Kong is fast too. It's only necessary if you really want your site to be lightning fast. As a Chinese, if I'm visiting your website and your website is in English, then I probably expect it to be slow, so...

[yixiang]

CN2 is basically a fast lane to China that you can buy from one of China's biggest internet providers (China Telecom). It has two flavors, CN2GT[0] and CN2GIA[1], CN2GIA is said to be faster.

Some vps providers buy these fast lanes, make their vps fast to access in China, and sell them to hungry Chinese users. The most popular one is Bandwagon[2].

[0] https://www.ctamericas.com/products-services/internet/global...

[1] https://www.ctamericas.com/products-services/internet/global...

[2] https://bandwagonhost.com/cart.php

[continuations]

> Hosting in China is ridiculously expensive and many Chinese go out of their way to host elsewhere

If I host in Europe or US would the speed of traffic going into China be very slow?

If I get a 1Gbps server in EU most likely I can serve 1Gbps to USA. Will I be able to serve 1Gbps to China from that EU server?

> For 9$ a month you get 1 cpu, 1G ram and 1MBit bandwidth

That is insanely expensive. How can startups in China handle that kind of hosting cost? Where do they host their websites?

> Get a host with CN2

What's CN2? Where can I find their website?

[oefrha]

Having used Alibaba Cloud for the past few years, and having been in China for the past month, I would say:

> If I host in Europe or US would the speed of traffic going into China be very slow? ... Will I be able to serve 1Gbps to China from that EU server?

Not sure about 1Gbps, but I've seen my 200Mbps band basically saturated. It's rather spotty though -- definitely not 200Mbps all the time. Latency is a very big problem here, so make sure you do TCP tuning right; without TCP tuning you might see awful speeds.

> That is insanely expensive. How can startups in China handle that kind of hosting cost? Where do they host their websites?

The insanely expensive part is bandwidth. For instance with Alibaba Cloud, a 1 vCPU, 1G RAM, 20G SSD instance with pay-as-you-go network billing is like $6/mo so it's not that bad, and there are promotions year round so if you're committed for say one year at a time you can usually get it for maybe half the list price, but outbound bandwidth is a whopping $0.123/GB (which is actually not that different from AWS/GCP's Asia pricing).

I don't know about startups but I suppose it's fine if you host static assets through a CDN and only use the expensive bandwidth from compute for truly dynamic content.

[continuations]

> so make sure you do TCP tuning right; without TCP tuning you might see awful speeds.

Any suggestions on how to tune TCP for this situation?

> I suppose it's fine if you host static assets through a CDN and only use the expensive bandwidth from compute for truly dynamic content.

Wouldn't the bandwidth cost of CDN be even higher than that of Alibaba Cloud?

[oefrha]

> Any suggestions on how to tune TCP for this situation?

Roughly speaking, TCP throughput is window size / latency, and the default window size on Linux is usually pretty small, so for high latency connections (US to CN roundtrip is usually several hundred ms) the throughput would be bad. Increasing TCP buffer sizes goes a long way. In addition to buffer sizes, finer tuning is possible via other options/parameters; just find a guide online, there are plenty.

> Wouldn't the bandwidth cost of CDN be even higher than that of Alibaba Cloud?

Hmm, shouldn't CDNs for static assets be cheaper than bandwidth associated with compute instances in general? For instance, Alibaba Cloud's CDN offering starts at $0.04/GB (in Mainland China) for the first 50TB, and gradually decreases from there.[1]

[1] https://www.alibabacloud.com/product/cdn/pricing

[yixiang]

> If I host in Europe or US would the speed of traffic going into China be very slow?

I'm not sure, but I guess it should be nowhere near 1Gbps. You'll have to test it to find out.

> How can startups in China handle that kind of hosting cost?

It's mainly bandwidth that's expensive, but there is cheap cdn/cloud storage for static files, like videos. Then you can also pay by traffic, which is around $0.12/Gb.

[cranej]

CN2 stands for ”ChinaNet Next Carrying Network“

[intellix]

How do you manage to work during the night? External internet gets throttled so much that trying to load pages like Gitlab take minutes and a simple `git pull` can take 5 minutes. All VPNs stop working and even obscure sites like payment providers and Slack seem to only run at around 5kbps. I'm guessing it's not normal for people to work outside of 9-6?

[yixiang]

I honestly don't notice a big difference, plus my self-hosted VPN still works as fast. So I guess a reliable VPN is the answer.

[intellix]

Perhaps my issue is that my VPN is hosted in a common place like DigitalOcean. Maybe a lesser known host is the trick?

[fungi]

> Get a host with CN2. I heard hosting in Hong Kong is fast too.

Tested Alibaba Cloud in honkers from Shenzhen and Guangzhou late last year for a couple weeks as a Shadow Socks host. Worked really well, <10milsec ping.

That said, its not day to day that i've had probs with Honker <~> Mainland traffic. It's the seemingly random network performance degradation that bites.

[haxpor]

Thanks, I live in China too. I want to know is it easy to update ip address associated with ICP license? I seek an option to transfer from more expensive to cheaper vps solution and want to maintain icp license I already got.

[yixiang]

As far as I know, you can't do that, since your ICP license is tied to a host provider (like Aliyun), if you host your site somewhere else, you risk having your license revoked.

[laurent123456]

Do GitHub releases (downloadable files hosted on GitHub) work well in China in general?

[solstice]

Anecdotal: they work, but slowly. So for large files I use a vpn

[fireattack]

What is CN2