In our digital era, when we can’t imagine our life offline, web hosting industry has experienced rapid development. Since the Chinese domestic economy keeps growing, many businesses go to China for promoting and selling their services.

There’s a great number of various hosting platforms around the world, such as bluehost. Nevertheless, your choice will be quite limited if you decided to run your business in China. With the introduction and development of the cloud computing concept, it created both new challenges and opportunities to the hosting industry. In this post, we’ll answer the question: “Why you need/don’t need to host in China? and How to find the best hosting?” We’ll also look at the most popular hosting platforms according to such criteria as user scale, service capacity, product stability, product price and other aspects.

What are the reasons for choosing a web hosting provider in mainland China?

First and foremost, this will provide your visitors with the highest uptime as well as the fastest responding time. The expected time for Chinese visitors will be between 20 and 30ms but no higher than 80ms. If we compare the Chinese hostings with the servers placed at west coast cities, we’ll see that the responding time may range from 200ms to 300ms.

As you can see, this provides a great advantage to the servers on the territory of China. Nevertheless, there are some pitfalls too. The main issue is that you’ll have to get the ICP license if you want your website to be hosted within mainland China. On the other hand, this shouldn’t be too difficult as long as your website doesn’t have any illegal material, such as anti-government stuff, porn and so on.

If for some reasons you can’t get the ICP license, you’ll have to find another location to place your website. However, in this case, you’d better expect the responding time may reach to 300–400ms at night.

Factors to Consider When Choosing a Web Hosting

Basically, there are several ways you can follow. As we’ve already mentioned, you may choose a hosting in China or offshore.

Hosting outside mainland China

If hosting in China is not the most suitable solution for you, you may find a server outside the mainland China. If we consider the nearest places to China, there will be Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. This will be the best choice for outside hosting as they provide the fastest speed for web visitors from mainland China.

Hosting in Europe and USA

This option takes the second place as websites, which are hosted in the USA and Europe, are usually a little slower. Nevertheless, they have their strong sides, such as excellent customer support, advanced technology, and great service.

Hosting in China

The greatest benefit China hosting has — fast speed. If you host your application’s infrastructure outside mainland China, this will definitely affect both the performance and the loading speed (not for the better, of course). The same things relate to the websites. Hosting outside China may lead to terrible loading speed and usability.

However, by hosting in China, you’ll be able to avoid these challenges. To help you make a choice, we made a list of the most popular China hosting providers. Notice that some of the websites are in Chinese, so be ready to ask Google Translate for some help.

Alibada Cloud

Alibada Cloud has a great number of data center locations in China. Among them are the following cities:

• Hangzhou
• Shanghai
• Qingdao
• Beijing
• Zhangjiakou
• Shenzhen
• Hong Kong

This company got an achievement of the biggest cloud service provider in China as well as the third-largest all over the world. This hosting provider is known for an outstanding performance in terms of the speed transaction, protection against DDoS, and data-classification technology.

Now.cn

Another web hosting company that got in our list is Now.cn. This firm provides Internet apps based on cloud computing. Among other services are the following: server hosting, domain name registration, cloud hosting and so on. By the way, Now.cn belongs to the first batch of registers accredited by ICANN.

GZIDC

Among the services GZIDC provides are the following:

• Cloud services;
• Web hosting;
• Host rental;
• and so on.

One of the strong sides of GZIDC is an immediate availability in terms of cloud services. These servers are well secured and stable with an online speed of 99.9 percent. This hosting firm is considered as one of the biggest third-party data hub in Southern China with an extensive experience in data center operations.

DNSPOD

DNSPOD was established in far 2006 and now it’s said to be one of the greatest third-party providers of domain name service. Its web host answers more than 26 billion requests daily.

A lot of web developers are satisfied with the company’s premium service. Besides the hosting service, DNSPOD provides other services including SEO management, URL forwarding, sharing of domain names and so on.

Bizcn

This company has served about 600, 000 users around the globe and created a partnership with 6,000 local entities in China. All of these helped this company get a robust business foundation. One of the premium services of this company is the Baidu Cloud Service.

CNDNS

This company provides the following services: domain name registration, e-mail/Internet marketing, trade name or business registration.

This is one of the biggest hosting providers that is located in Shanghai with six other service centers, which are located across China including Canton, Beijing, Hong Kong and so on.

CNDNS will be a great choice for individual site owners as well as small-to-middle-sized companies.

West.cn

This is another popular Internet server provider. This company is also known as the company that got the “People’s Republic of China Value-added Telecommunications Business License.”

Among the services this hosting firm provides are the following: server hosting, cloud hosting, VPS, virtual host, enterprise mailbox, server rental and so on. They have over one hundred thousand users registration and management of more than five hundred thousand domains through the Western digital host platform.

ChinaNetCloud

This company calls its service as a world-class type of Internet Service Management. ChinaNetCloud employs the Total System Operations that manage apps, cloud, OS, and Web including public cloud and private systems. Put simply, it’s a decent choice, when it comes to web hostings.

The Bottom Line

In this post, we considered the main options for choosing a hosting server for your business. As you can see, there are several solutions you can choose from.

If you got an ICP licence, the best solution will be to find a hosting service in China. This will allow your website to work with the highest speed, shortest responding time and better usability. Hopefully, you’ll find useful a list of hosting providers, which we prepared for you.

On the other hand, if your business doesn’t have a business entity in China or you couldn’t get a license, it’ll be better for you to use servers hosted outside mainland China. However, you need to be ready for certain limitations, such as lower responding time.

Choosing a web hosting for your business is highly important and responsible. Remember, if you need any help, feel free to write us and we’ll do our best to find the right solution for you.

By the way, if you’re interested in entering the China market, take a look at our guide on how to develop a web or mobile app for China!