Choosing the Right Hong Kong Datacenter
Routes into mainland China differ between carriers, and each of our three Hong Kong facilities connects to a different mix of networks. A datacenter that is fast for visitors on one mainland carrier can be slower for another, so the best choice depends on your audience.
Use the published test ranges to ping and traceroute from the provinces and carriers your users rely on, ideally at busy evening hours. Pick the datacenter with the best median results, and keep in mind that you can upgrade within it later.
Making Your Site Fast for Chinese Visitors
Some popular web services are blocked or slow in mainland China, so avoid loading fonts, scripts or maps from them. Host your fonts and libraries on your own server, compress images and enable HTTP/2 to reduce the number of slow round trips.
Test the site from the mainland after every change. A page that loads quickly from Hong Kong can still hang in Beijing if a single external script is unreachable, so review the network waterfall and remove anything that is not essential.
Content Rules and Responsibilities
Hosting in Hong Kong avoids the ICP licence, but your visitors on the mainland still connect through networks subject to Chinese regulation. Content or services that are restricted on the mainland may be unreachable for them regardless of where the server is.
Be clear about what you publish and who your audience is. Our acceptable use policy applies to all servers, and you remain responsible for complying with the laws that apply to your business and your users.
Backups and Monitoring
Keep regular backups of files and databases on a different server or in object storage, using tools such as restic or borg. Encrypt them and keep several days of history so you can recover from both hardware faults and mistakes.
Add simple external monitoring that checks your site from inside and outside China. Alerts for downtime, certificate expiry and slow responses help you spot routing problems early, before customers report them.
