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Understanding China related solutions
Hi guys,
I have a small moodle for one of my company that we use as a support to teach clients in China. I host it on one of my VPS and so far my students claim it's working, but slow.
I would like to understand how I can improve the speed and reliability of this project.
So far what I understand is the following:
The internet is separated there, mean everything from outside China go to a node and this node will filter the entered data, which make the connection pretty slow to enter, once entered it is redistributed to the chinese client. Am I wrong ?
To optimize this, some company use proxy that has acreditations from the authority in china and can directly connect to other node, but this is only for accredited seller and I guess under certain conditions AND for certain clients.
To optimize that, somme reseller connect to a node, which gonna use China telecom or Other telecom and distribute it from this node, but this is "grey" and is working only until "something" or "someone" is flagged. those are "Chinese optimised ips" am I wrong ? ( I expect to be wrong on this one)
Is there other solutions ?
So my understanding is the best I can do for this moodle is to buy a cloud/vp server INSIDE china and set it there, this way ONLY my RDP is slow but the site itself is beefy.
By the way, 4 core 8GB memory, 32GB ssd seem enough for that project ? Or too much, or too few ? advices welcome. We are talking about a growing project of only 4 students now, so my bugdet is tight on this one.
TY in advance for your care.
Q
Comments
CDN or alibabacloud
The "china optimised" networks and VPS aren't necessarily a gray area. There's probably some accreditation or process involved with the chinese authorities or at least the ISPs/resellers of the chinese peering, but they are real businesses and just the nature of the industry. Provided your content doesn't offend some chinese censors, you should be fine.
They are commonly used for other country wishing to have faster access to chinese networks or vice versa, for personal VPN or even businesses e-commerce, etc. In your RDP situation, like you mentioned your RDP would be slow, and perhaps sometimes too slow or have too much packet loss to be usable at all.
So you can use a "china optimised" service, but just be careful to read the reviews, as often these vendors try to cut costs and cheap out, resulting in some or all chinese connections having degraded performance. And be prepared to pay much higher bandwidth costs than your typical NA/EU vendor.
try not to deploy anything inside china, cdn are fine but do not actually put data on any of the chinese servers (hk, tw are fine) (reason: they will shutdown/ban your server with random reason)
few sol:
1. find servers around china, some of them have optimized route, result <100ms
2. just buy anything around LAX, and use cloudflare, not the best speed, but after selecting IP, you can still get a great result
In simple terms, you can only achieve fast access to China by purchasing overseas routes from the 3 major Chinese telecom operators: China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile.
There are many providers have their routes, such as AWS and Azure.
Also some small providers like @hostdare China optimized CN2 GIA KVM has direct peer with China Telecom.
just buy a china optimized vps as cdn.
moodle is a web application, right ? If you want to host a website on server in Mainland china, you need an ICP license.
Got it.
All that is pretty clear for me.
My understanding is that you all agree storing data in CN would be faster but is unreliable. Then most of you advise me alternative way to make those data as much accessible as possible to chinese soil.
So i do have a VPS in SG, tho it's a windows VPS. (don't be too hard on me, it's my workstation). So my understanding is that I can try to host it here, optimize it and hope for the best.
Relatively to @suut comment, I am familliar with Alibabacloud but CDN I am not even sure what that mean. I tried tencent cloud also yesterday for free tier DNS as it is said to have double request that alibaba (ali got 500k and Tencent 1M) but i was not even able to find the free tier, and honestly speaking i got pissed of and gave up. I should try ali back now.
By the way, jfytk, no china sensitive content here. Even no banned social media link or anything like that. (I lived 10 years inside China and I am used to that) it's simple languages courses.
O and guys, I do have my 2 vps under cloudflare free tier. My moodle is.. don't suffocate... hosted on a shared hosting platform that I am actually to ashamed to name (was kinda give to me for free) (weeeiiiird one tho)
Alibaba Cloud Hong Kong or Tencent Cloud Hong Kong should be able to solve your problem.
Noted on that. Thanks
If all the audience is in China, deploy inside China.
Pay monthly or even hourly.
When it's shutdown, just buy a new one.
Use AWS Lightsail SGP/JP, cheap and the speed and latency are both good enough for this purpose.
I like China and the Chinese, but as long as they play their ugly internet game (which I actually understand to some degree) they way they do it I'll simply stay away from chinese websites and in particular from chinese providers and completely ignore users from China (i.e. I don't care a rat's ass about being well reachable for them), sorry.
Dear chinese authorities, as I said, I do understand to quite some degree that you firewall China off the internet, but please at least do it in a less crappy way!
If your content is legal, there's no harm hosting it inside China. They won't shut down something that's legal for no reason. You will need ICP license as others stated, but this option will provide the best speed.
The other option is CN2/CUVIP (AS9929) connected VPS. China Mobile also has their own version of this "optimized" connection, I forgot the name (CMI2??). Depending on the location and bandwidth, this can also get expensive, especially in HK/JP/SG. West coast US generally is cheapest for CN2 connections, but the connection can also be saturated as more people tend to use those connections for bandwidth heavy stuff. You do not need ICP license for this option, but if the content you host is not legal to China, it's just a matter of time the IP/domain will be blocked.
Try to avoid providers that do not have CN2/CUVIP connections even in HK or JP, as during rush hours the packet loss rate will be very high and the connection will be barely unusable. Many of the traffic would even be routed to the US first before going to China.
Noted and that and thank you very much for the clear, detailed and informative answer.
I think i am pretty much informed for the project now. Next step for me is cost calculation/value and I am good to go !
Overall much appreciated your care 🙏
In fact, the Chinese internet environment is quite complex, and bandwidth costs are also high. Therefore, you can try deploying servers in Japan Osaka, South Korea, for example, AWS have high connectivity. Or any other service provider optimized for China.
You can look for provider that offer Hong kong location with China Direct Route will be able to resolve your issue.
The GFW itself isn't really the major reason that accessing Chinese internet is slow and high latency, it's more a few other factors
Internet service in China is actually very cheap and largely relies on FTTH! But this is only for consumers. If you're a business wanting to host servers you'll be paying $10-$20/mbit, and if you want to not have shitty connectivity you'll need to buy access to all three ISPs at once, so multiply this by 3x.
Lastly, and probably most importantly, very few people in China actually care about accessing western entertainment. This doesn't really have much to do with the firewall, although you can argue it's a chicken and egg problem. Given the only other country in the world that speaks Chinese is Taiwan (funnily enough Taiwan has one of the best China links through CHT), what's there to see for a Chinese person on an overseas website?
But I hope you can see that as long as the idea of anti-globalism remains, none of the above will ever change. A business wanting to access the Chinese market will almost certainly want to host inside the country because expanding to the Chinese market itself is such a regulatory and marketing hurdle that the extra expense of hosting inside China is almost an afterthought.
@ehhthing To add to this discussion, while the censorship policies in China are indeed driven by Xi Jinping, the technical execution is largely managed by one of his close associates, who is known to have a strong affinity for French culture, if I recall correctly. This individual tends to go beyond the baseline censorship requirements and proactively enforces stricter controls than what is mandated by Xi's directives.
On the topic of the technical aspects of censorship in China, I'd be interested in discussing the hardware-based censorship mechanisms in more detail. I experienced a situation with an iPhone 11 (yes, I admit, I'm using that device), where certain sensitive apps, like proxies, VPNs, or news apps, would disappear after each update. This happened even though the phone was fully configured for use in the U.S. My assumption is that the hardware itself might carry some form of identification that triggers these censorship measures during updates."
You can consider Hong Kong, because Hong Kong is connected to China very quickly, and the law is more relaxed