My best best advices are not listed there<p>- Stop using Google CDNs<p>- Stop using Google fonts<p>- Don't put Google Analytics in the header (or don't use it) otherwise will block/delay the browser load the website.<p>Most of the websites just timeout because of those 3 things and make the website imposible to navigate.<p>If you host your website in a normal VPS, without using Google services you will have a quite nice chance that the website loads pretty fast there in China.<p>edit: formatting
I'm Chinese. It's not that bad.<p>* I've been hosting my Chinese blog in US vps since 2009 and it works fine.<p>* I have Gitea hosted in US vps and it works fine too.<p>* GoDaddy has Alipay (sort of China's PayPal) up for a long time.<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>To make your website load, and load fast in China:<p>* Remove Google fonts, Google cdn, resources from FB, twitter, etc. this should fix 95% of your problem.<p>* Avoid well-known host providers (AWS, Vultr, Linode) if you can, they tend to get banned.<p>* 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...
Ive lived in mainland China most of last 12 years and work in software. The last paragraph is key one for most websites. You have to remove use of all G, FB and related site scripts because these will not run. There are good alternatives anyway so do yourself a favor and replace them with self-hosted or other 3rd party alternatives.<p>There are sites for testing what is blocked in China - you should test all 3rd party scripts you are using to make sure they run ok.
I'm really confused.<p>I have a fairly international website geared towards English language learners, with Google Analytics and AdSense and links to share on Facebook, hosted on Digital Ocean here in NYC...<p>and, without designing for it, China has been my #1 source of traffic and revenue for many years now, simply because they're the #1 largest population of English language learners.<p>It seems to be working fine. I mean, maybe my share of Chinese traffic could be even bigger, but does anyone have any hard numbers showing this is a problem? Or are Chinese users aware of slow loads but just put up with it?
Not that this is a recommended solution, but VPNs work from inside of China.<p>I lived with some Chinese students while I was exchanging and basically they said most people that want out of the Fire wall can just VPN out with no repercussions expected. Not that it’s ideal, but some commenters seem to believe that people in China have no access to the outside world which just isn’t true.<p>Before the internet the USSR could censor effectively, but now it’s pretty hard with encryption being as good as it is.<p>Of course there are people in China that don’t know that VPNs exist, but I think it’s an important nuance to mention that many people are able to have an open online experience.
It’s really interesting how many HN users continuously engage in whataboutism and praise China every time any criticism of China comes up.<p><a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/red-astroturf-chinese-government-makes-millions-of-fake-social-media-posts/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/red-a...</a><p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Water_Army" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Water_Army</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103136" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103136</a>
I traveled to China for about a month and a half a few years ago. Everything was excruciatingly slow. Except for Hacker News. Probably more about the payload size than anything else. :)<p>How many companies work hard to make their services readily available in China? Any notable exceptions?
My 2 cents running your app in China:<p>* make it as decoupled as possible from your core infra. What you spare on infra costs caused by redundancy, you will spend in maintenance time, outage mitigation, etc.<p>* no synchronous call going out of China mainland, otherwise you become dependent of the Great Firewall and that is not something you want<p>* expect lower quality of documentation and support
"Sadly, it’s not so simple. If your app/website servers aren’t hosted from within China, then, for all intents and purposes, it’s blocked. I mean, it will probably technically load, but will be excruciatingly, unusably slow. And sometimes it will just not load at all for hours at a time."<p>Is that really correct? And are there any sort of systematic measurements of that?<p>I seem to remember from my travels in China that accessing my websites hosted in Denmark was ok, certainly not stellar, but better than Australia.<p>(The rest of the advice: Don't use FB and Google - absolutely a good idea.)
I host sqlalchemy.org on Linode, it has a google analytics loader on it, and I've had several complaints that the website cannot be loaded in many regions of China.
Honestly, I wouldn’t make it available in China. I want to give them a reason to take that firewall down. I don’t want to make the prison that their government has turned their country into, a sustainable one.
I really want the opposite, I want Google Cloud to stop billing me for Chinese users I don't have. Apparently the technology to bill me extra for Chinese bandwidth is not available for making firewall rules.
I remain completely disgusted and confused why websites hosted on AWS S3 (in BJ) by fully registered firms with valid ICPs are still banned. I have to use 10x the computing power that I need and I could load additional tools in its place. That and the lack of AWS Amplify being offered really crushes innovation here. (Shanghai based entrepreneur)
if there is anything remotely dynamic in your app go with option 2.<p>i've mainland proxied and cached the hell out of everything i can, warm the caches daily, but once the user starts interacting (eg search) then hitting our servers really bites randomly. usually not so bad for honkers server, but even that route can randomly drop off the face of the planet.
Is there a service where you can test the performance of your web site from within China?<p>Edit: Google knows <a href="https://geekflare.com/test-website-load-time-from-china/" rel="nofollow">https://geekflare.com/test-website-load-time-from-china/</a>
I don't want to live in a world where the next superpower blocks websites as they suit them, suppress freedom of speech and journalism, exploit prisoners, religious segregation camps, employing social dystopian systems and is led by unimpeachable, unchallenged leader who has elected himself with a 1000-0 vote as perpetual president of the country.<p>It is sad to see that the rest of the world has to bend down to serve this repressive state. I've been to China and the people there are the same as us - I despise the party, not the people. The next generation that grows up there will not have the perspective of what it means to live in a free democratic country.
Why bother? There's no internet in China anyway, whatever hacks you are going to use, the result will be completely random at best and your website working or not there is just a matter of luck.<p>Even the big IT companies can't make it work so why would you?