With over 550 million (and growing) Chinese residents regularly accessing the Internet, it is a fresh new market that any foreign company or business would love to tap into. However, actually getting your website viewed in China is way more difficult than simply getting a .CN TLD and translating your website contents into Mandarin.

The thing is that internet users based in China have to go through what most people refer to as The Great Firewall of China, which is basically the Chinese government’s national firewall, which is very restrictive and will block majority of outside traffic. Thankfully, there are processes that you can go through in order to make your website viewable in China, and Prestige can help you along the way.

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First Things First: Getting a .CN Domain

Prestige allows you to use any of your own domain for their hosting service, and also lets you buy one through their partnerships with various online registrars. Make sure you get a .CN domain. While China doesn’t block most domain names, you stand a better chance of being visible on the country if you are using a .cn domain.

Prestige’s Servers Are Fast

The thing about the great firewall of china is that they lead to all sorts of slowdown on the user’s end. Add the fact that many of the Chinese surfers that want to access foreign sites use VPNs, and you’ve got enough slowdown to turn off most impatient users. Benchmarks have pointed to anywhere from 6 to 10 seconds of additional loadtime for U.S.-based servers.

With Prestige, we don’t oversell our servers’ capacities so it will not be bogged down on our end, ensuring that lag from your end is minimized. It’s not going to make your site load instantly in China, but every little bit helps.

Our Company is based in a Country that is On Good Terms with China

It’s not a secret that the Chinese government has a less than sterling relationship with the U.S., and there is some hostility between the two when it comes to IT (all you need to do is do a research on the allegedly federally-subsidised hacking groups from both sides), so the great wall of china is naturally sensitive towards companies that are based on the U.S. While Prestige does have servers in the U.S., the company is a legitimate U.K. business, so most of our servers aren’t on China’s list of IPs to watch out for.

Last But Not the Least: Controversial Content

The Chinese government is extremely strict when it comes to two kinds of controversial content: adult and political. So if you’re planning to build an online presence in China, make sure your site doesn’t have either of the two. What passes for political content can be a little bit hard to pinpoint if you’re outside of China, so try to browse around Chinese news sites – if a news item is being reported in there, you can consider it as something that’s allowed by their firewall.

If your site is hosting controversial content, you can still get through by applying for an ICP license (Internet Content Provider), which is a permit issued by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information technology (MIIT). However, that is something that you have to personally do as the owner of the website. More details on how to apply can be found at the MIIT website (miit.gov.cn)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2014 at 6:01 am and is filed under Content Management System, Design and Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.