The importance of hosting Top Sites in China; Myth or Reality?

[mamamo]

I was under the general impression that in order to build any large scale China web site (similar in scale to Baidu, Sina, netease, etc.)you needed to host your servers locally in China and ideally in multiple metropolitan centers ie. Guangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai etc. etc.

Is this correct? is it possible to build a large scale web site that Chinese users can access at comfortable speeds and host the servers outside China? ie. in USA, Singapore or Hong Kong? Does anyone have any first hand experience on this?

[Christopher C]

Awesome thread & *bookmarked*.

I am moving my operation back to China, and this is exactly what I am very afraid of! I am very afraid that my business will be destroyed simply because of the horrible Internet speed.

Any one in China now has any recommendations/tips on how to increase the speed in visiting foreign sites from China?

I am in Beijing right now and have also accessed broadband from Shenzhen. In both cases (Beijing is worse) I've found that accessing NA sites is horribly slow. I don't fully understand it yet but there seems to be 3 kinds of access:

1) Slow - I can access the site all the time without any interuption but the access as mentioned is like an old dial up.

2) Temprorarily "Blocked" - Certain sites I can access sometimes whereas other times I get zero connection. I'll get a mozilla message of "Document Contains no Data". This includes google, cnn, dmoz (I can access it from Shenzhen but not from Beijing) +.

3) Permanently "Blocked" - Some sites such as .tw extensions are never reachable.

The first and last make sense to me, but #2 has me confused. Are these sites getting screened out because they contain improper news or am I trying to access them at overly busy times?

While I'm not sure this will be helpful, what I've done to get around the slow internet is:
1) Hire site managers based in Toronto & Halifax who I keep in contact with via email.
2) Focused on developing my low broadband sites from here. (I can access these fine and for the most part FTP uploads are tolerable). If you're worried about Chinese being able to access NA sites from here, you might consider redirecting Chinese IPs to a low bandwidth alternative version of your site or pending your thoughts about this thread, to a Chinese mirror.

[guoqi]

I've found that accessing NA sites is horribly slow

If even NA sites are slow, then there is no hope for European sites. When you visit an Europeran site(e.g. Germany site) from China, the route will go to America first, then to Netherlands(Amsterdam), then to Germany. If Ameria is already slow, I can not image the speed for European sites.

The solution I am thinking is that I will use Remote Desktop to one of my server in America, and use that server to browse sites in other countries.

I will be in China next week, I will find out at that time!

[guoqi]

Finally, I am in China now.

I am using ADSl connection here. Now I can 100% confim that you definitely need to have a host in China if you are targeting Chinese visitors.

[bill]

guoqi it would really be helpful if you could give us some numbers for comparison. For example, what is the rated throughput of the connection you're using now? What is fastest speed it can actually achieve. What times are you making these connections? How do these speeds compare to those outside China on an identical connection?

[virago]

The original poster has dropped out of the conversation but obviously there are some still here trying to work this out.

To be honest you have to look at your business strategy first. If you really have a good proposition that caters to the market you are trying to focus on then you must have hosting in that country. By the sounds of it the original poster had a big website which was to focus on the Chinese market, if that is the case then there has to be some hosting in China and at multiple places also.

When you only have 10 seconds to download your website then you have to optimize your pages and hosting to best suit the customers you are dealing with. It doesn't matter if you are Chinese, American or Indian, your download time is crucial to any user.

I am dealing with a foreign company in China who specializes in hosting and dealing for foreign companies in China and this is what they have to say from their website about hosting.

<snip>

In fact, my broadband in Beijing is not that bad. I do have the occasional slowness but generally it's quite fast but not everyone is the same as me.

[edited by: Woz at 8:36 am (utc) on July 25, 2005]
[edit reason] No URLs or Copyright Material please, see Tos#13 [/edit]

[hermes]

I cannot speak Chinese (although have chinese friends that could help with language issues). I would be v.interested in hosting a site in China. On a practical level can anyone suggest options I can explore? How could I go about finding a potential host?

[guoqi]

guoqi it would really be helpful if you could give us some numbers for comparison. For example, what is the rated throughput of the connection you're using now? What is fastest speed it can actually achieve. What times are you making these connections? How do these speeds compare to those outside China on an identical connection?

Sorry for late reply to this thread. I just got my new ADSL today. On my current ISP, I think speed is pretty fast,I can download 200kb per second from Microsoft.com site. Sites on western countries seems to be a little slow but acceptable.

[bill]

Sites on western countries seems to be a little slow but acceptable.

That seems to be the key here. I've hosted Chinese sites outside China for years, and I have never heard complaints about the site's availability or speed. I assume that people in China are used to these issues and because they don't have the experience with broadband in a more stable environment they may not even notice these factors.

If we look at the scale of the site proposed by the original poster then it looks like domestic hosting is more of a necessity. For smaller sites you may be able to get just as much mileage out of a highly optimized site hosted outside China. I'm not yet convinced that the issues Woz brought up earlier are offset simply by the speed issue.

[hermes]

I am getting a bit worried about this issue having spoken to people from China. They say that there is a two-tier internet almost in china - sites hosted in china are incredibly, incredibly fast. Sites hosted outside china are slow. Result - they dont go to sites hosted outside of china. If the site is not there in an instant - they cut it and move on (what we all do) to a site that does load in an instant (which will be hosted in china). The Chinese goverment almost has censored all western websites just through speed issues - it does not need to block them all - just make them all slow and no one will bother. From what I can gather chinese people are not really falling over themselves to look at western websites/media etc. - they dont really care. They have their own super fast walled garden of internet and they are happy with that.

The more I think about this the more I get worried. I am stongly considering going to China to go and check out more about the internet culture.

I think I cannot host in China right now - it is just too much work with the language, legals etc. But I really want the Chinese market. Has anyone got any encouraging stories about having a successful website, aimed at China, hosted outside of China?

[guoqi]

The Chinese goverment almost has censored all western websites just through speed issues - it does not need to block them all - just make them all slow and no one will bother.

I think our government DID not do anything to slow down the speed. Most of ISPs in China does not have direct connections outside The Great Wall.Many of the by pass a ISP call China telecom.

I am using ADSL from China telecom at office now, so I am able to visit some western sites without so much speed problem. When I am at home using another ISP, visiting webmasterworld is a very difficult task.

[hermes]

So, you are saying that the speed for western websites varies according to the ISP used? Which ones are fast for western websites? I will then research how many people have this ISP and what proportion of chinese people can access western websites at a good speed.

[guoqi]

So, you are saying that the speed for western websites varies according to the ISP used? Which ones are fast for western websites?

Yes, that is correct. The fastest one is China Telecom. [chinatelecom.com.cn....] You can find a link to their English version on their homepage.