Hosting a Website in China
China is a potential market, before getting in, you should follow the correct road. You cannot use the same strategy as you do in Europe and USA. The following three steps will help you. To host your website in China will be the best way to reach your potential customers no matter through website, mobile or social media. Hosting your web in Hongkong, Macau or Taiwan, you will still have to meet the challenges, the difficult great firewall, speed running slowly and less opportunity being indexed by Chinese search engines. Even a small wrong way will lead your website to fall in a pitfall.
Hosting a Website in China -Three Steps
Step 1. Buy a Domain Name from China Provider
If a foreign company wants to buy a Chinese domain name, it has to have a legal entity in China. If you do not want to invest and register a new company in China, it will be impossible to go on even if you would purchase one domain under your name. Any foreign individuals cannot buy a Chinese domain. The server providers only accept the legally registered company to rent. You will need to confirm your identity to the entity from whom you will buy the Chinese domain name. Another critical requirement is you can only purchase your domain from China providers to obtain China domain certificate, Godaddy is not acceptable. Usually you need a Chinese company as your agent to help you obtain an ICP license. How to choose a domain name is shown in the below video tutorial.
Step 2. Buy or Rent a Server
The easy way to is to work with a local Chinese company or agency to help you to buy your Chinese domain name first. Please understand you do not have the right to rent a Chinese server yourself if you decide to use a Chinese agent, or if you are not ready to register a Chinese company physically in China. So you will probably use their servers of your agent. Then you will share the server with your agent and other clients. In one word, if you do not decide to register a Chinese company, you would not be able to buy or rent a sever based in mainland China. If you think to try to rent a server in HK, Taiwan and Macau, it would become impossible to approve your ICP license for your next step.
Step 3. Apply for the ICP License
You might have never heard about the ICP LICENSE. ICP license is the abbreviation for Internet Content Provider; ICP registration is a permit issued by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). In order to have your website a better performance, you have to consider a migration to a server in China. The readers can often find the ICP license numbers on the bottom of the front webpage. Many websites have suffered to being unable to open. ICP license takes an average span of 20 business days after submission of documents to a hosting provider. There are two ICP licenses: ICP license for commercial websites (operational): this license allows your prospects to do online shopping. ICP license for non-commercial websites (informational): this license does not include direct sales.
Factors to Influence your Server Performance
Server location Close to your target market
From the perspective of the users, they can quickly open the web page or resources he wants to browse. From the perspective of search engines, it hopes to provide users with the information closest to their location, so as to improve the user experience of search results. So the server closest to the location of the customers should be preferentially selected.
Features -CPU, memory, Hard disk space
The server provider will not only limit the bandwidth, but also limit the server resources consumed by every user based in the shared server. That is why the other features, CPU, memory, hard disk space and bandwidth are all important. Therefore, we should choose the appropriate server based on your visits volume to the website.
Be careful with CDN setup
If most content of your website is static, you can consider using CDN to improve the speed. But some disadvantages should also be taken into consideration. Because the CDN server of each node is used to cache web pages, the update time does not run quickly, and your new content cannot be quickly obtained by search engines either. Moreover, the stability of CDN nodes is poor, which often causes page access timeout.
Server stability
The website operates 24 hours a day. If the server fails, the users will not be able to access the website, thus missing some potential customers. In addition, the stability of the server will also affect the web performance in the search engines. If a website cannot be accessed for a long time or makes frequent errors, it will also cause the search engine to clear the pages that cannot be accessed during its multiple visits or updates, or even reduce the overall weight of the website.
Server Bandwidth
Another important consideration is the available bandwidth. If a server sharing 100MB bandwidth is used and there is no guarantee of the minimum bandwidth, when other servers in the same room occupy too much bandwidth, your website might have server access timeout or network failure. If the search engine spiders would happen crawl to your web pages at this time, it would not capture any content information. That would leave a negative impression to the spiders.
Number of Websites
If a virtual space is purchased, the space provider will generally limit the number of connections accessed. One space will be controlled to the number about 150. In our business practice, we should select the space according to the actual situation of the website. For example, if the peak volume of visitors showing at the same time is more than 150, you should choose one with less connections, otherwise, there would run timeout or much delay, which will also affect the friendliness of the search engine.
Hosting a Website in China -Free Tutorials
[wpcourse course="6"]
Third Party Service to help you host a website in China
As you can see, it is time-consuming and confusing to host a website in China. If you are planning the digital marketing to China and need more consultancy, do not hesitate to contact me. If you do not want to do it by yourself and you are looking for a Chinese third party to do it for you, I will be glad to help you pave the way to the amazing China market. Do not hesitate to contact MrSheng.work. seo.shengli@yahoo.com WeChat 18918151538