While on the surface it seem that business practices in China is increasingly capitalistic, business driven, there is an under current that if you do business in China you do it their way. This is especially so in matters dear to the central ideology which, least we forgot, is still communism.

For the longest time we tried to explained that in order to host a website in China, one need to register the site with the authority and obtain an ICP number. Many think it was unthinkable or we are joking until their site got shutdown. Then they think we are to blame.

Recently, China decided to step up their policing of the Internet and ordered the shut down of datacenter and inspected individual server. Without notice. Can you imagine something like this happen in the datacenter where you host your server?

Well, it can happen in China. In fact this is not the first time we encountered such cases in our operation history.

We had client with racks of  servers serving hotel operation across China affected for more than a day! We appreciate that they understanding that things like this happens in China.

SLA? Sure the datacenter can give you a SLA. But when the government official come knocking, whose side do you think they will stand? No one says “no” to the government. No one. (Until Google maybe)

If even Google is not spared, be assured that your server hosted in China has the possibility of being monitored if need be.

There will be customers who do not understand and decided to pull out thinking we are bullshitting them.  We had long since decided our approach to China. Worry less about losing customer and helping sincere customers to host in this minefield environment.

So this post is a compilation and putting down my thoughts on this topic. I must say after a few years in the hosting business in China, we are still learning and trying to understand the network and environment better.

China is perhaps quite unique in the sense that it has a really huge internet population and there are huge demand for reaching content outside and inside of China.

According to CNNIC, the international bandwidth is 640,287 Mbit/s (Dec 31, 2008). Wikipedia has a list that shows the number of users in China is greater than the EU. I have not found data about EU international bandwidth but I suspect that with most EU countries having their own international bandwidth, the total is probably more that China.

Therefore is doesn’t matter if you are connected to a huge pipe at either end. If you are coming in or going out, there is a narrow congested pipe in the middle.

The US has the advantage that the Internet start there and they whole world is connecting there. But there will probably come a time that the world want to connect to China and India (which from the Wikipedia data is just 7% of population but already the top 4).

An area we have yet look into is private transit and bandwidth, so if you have any insight into that I would love to learn more about it. We are also venture more into this area as well and hope to bring some exciting products that meets the requirement of customers in China.

Internally, the China Internet network is also unique and interesting as well. Other than the US and maybe India coming up, there isn’t another country that need to network so many people and cities.
My guess is that at the present moment, the network in China is not as well developed as in the US. No hard data here but I think it is easily a good guess.

Then there is the also problem that the two major network providers don’t like talking to each other. Well things has gotten better over the last few few years. It used to be that going to sites on the other provider is even slower than going to the US.

Guess all these are what makes things really interesting for us. An interesting, challenging and growing environment that is China.

If you have information or experience, perhaps share with us in the comments.

Like many regulations in China, there are often difficult to interpret areas and enforcement is often non-standard across different administrative locations. When in doubt, many people either adopt a do it until questioned approach or not to do anything at all.

In the case of encryption, this has prevented the widespread use of SSL in websites. Even among e-commerce or social websites, SSL is hardly used to protect the transit of personal data and sensitive information.

In fact, you will hardly see any web hosting company even mentioning or providing SSL certificate.

This article has an interesting comment:

If you encrypt data in China, you have to provide the Chinese government the ability to access the keys. By this regulation, the Chinese should be able to get access to [Secure Sockets Layer]-encrypted traffic, too.” The result is that businesses tend not to use encryption in China …

If you are using any kind of encryption in your servers in China or even VPN, you are well advised to seek opinion from a qualified laywer.

More information:

• China IT Law

In the article it was stated,

“Companies that offer Web site hosting services were told to close unregistered sites by 6 p.m. local time yesterday, according to the Piper Jaffray report. The circular sent to so- called Internet service providers ordering the closures also mandated that all new Web sites must get government approval before opening, the report said.”

This isn’t exactly new news, the requirement to register website (beian or 备案) had been there for a couple of years already. From time to time,  due to pressure from higher up or as a show of force, events like this happen, often unnoticed or unreported until an article like this decided to give it a spin.

Considering a shared hosting server can host in the range 100+ sites, this could amount, in aggregate, to a couple hundreds of server. Not a lot in absolute sense for China as a whole. But it is enough to cripple any company that have overlooked the requirement.

And this had been the sole reason why we had been holding back shared hosting. Although there is a demand, the extra administrative effort to comply to this requirement held us back. A black sheep could result in the server being shutdown affecting other legitimate customers, creating many angry customers. Not something we like to have to deal with.

So what exactly does the regulation says? There are many hearsay floating around as to what is required but in fact the documents are available online (in Chinese, of course). When I have the time, I will make a translation of it.

Registration is rather simple but you will need a local contact person and local address. If your website has nothing out of line, you can get a registration number approved in a week or so. (The approval time can varies, keep Murphy’s Law in mind and get it done early if you are planning a website with an unmovable launch date.)

We are not lawyers but if you have any question on hosting in China, we can share our experience with you. Drop us a note.