Where's the best place to host a .cn version of a website?

November 5, 2008 8:55 AM

Where's the best place for us to host the .cn version of our website?

We'll be opening up a distribution branch in China soon, so we'll be getting (parts of) our example.com site translated and setting up a small (10 page) example.cn site.

What's the best/easiest way of us hosting example.cn. It'll only be a basic site, but we'll need PHP and MySQL. I guess the choices are

1) Host it on our (US-based) dedicated server
2) Host it on a US/European virtual server that would (somehow) be better for the purpose than our dedicated server
3) Host it on a Chinese server

If we went with 1) how bad would speed and accesibility be through the Great Firewall? The content is 100% innocuous, so as a dedicated server with similarly innocuous sites on, would be pretty much fine for accessibility?

If we went with 3) how easy would it be to get set up (and move in the case of difficulties etc)? Any specific recommendations for Chinese hosting companies would be much appreciated.

Note: from a webdev point of view nobody involved would speak any chinese.

posted by Hartster to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

It looks like option (3) would require you to get an ICP license from the Chinese government, which in turn would require you to be an established Chinese company. (Official regulations are probably somewhere here, but I don't speak Chinese, so don't take my word for it.) If your company has a branch physically located in China, this is probably something for them to deal with.

As far as options (1) vs. (2): if you can get the Chinese site hosted on a server in (say) Japan, that might give you marginally better latency, but other than that I can't see how a separate non-Chinese server would be beneficial in any way.
posted by teraflop at 2:36 PM on November 5, 2008

I think that you should go with whichever of 1 or 2 is better for you in terms of cost of maintenance (as in, what would you choose if China wasn't part of the equation) and then contract with a CDN that has Chinese or at least Asian mirrors. Customers get the speed of local servers for much of the content, and you don't have to deal with whatever legal hurdles there might be. My workplace does something of this sort for our significant Australian readers. The added benefit is that since they themselves buy in larger quantities and can focus their specialties, often CDN prices for bandwidth are far below those of hosting providers.

Some searching shows ChinaCache as an explicitly Chinese option, but I'm betting that any of the moderate players in the market (Akamai, Level3, Limelight, Panther, etc) will have an Asian presence.
posted by Plutor at 6:45 AM on November 6, 2008