
Ask HN: How to enter the Chinese web market? - firemanx
I&#x27;m consulting for a small bootstrapped startup right now that is trying to build a web-based business that serves customers in mainland China.  The business model itself is a non-mobile, niche market, but requires access to a few U.S. based web resources which we don&#x27;t control (none are Facebook or Google related).  Has anyone in the community had experience building a product for Chinese consumers like this?  Our biggest hurdle appears to be constructing something that can access these U.S. based partner sites with any speed - how do you get around this beyond requiring every consumer have their own VPN?<p>Any other suggestions for a small company trying to make a model like this work?
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zhte415
Yes, I work in China facing these challenges constantly. Non-locally-hosted
doesn't make sense. Locally host everything. The issue isn't only
availability, it is speed. Host in China. You'll probably need an ICP License
for this (actually, for anything online), so make sure your customer gets you
one (as they're legally accountable for what they agree to host in China, as
they should be, and are, the 'legal person'). Alibaba have VPS solutions very
similar to Linode or DO. Get your customer to agree and pay for this, as you
are legally not able to.

You mention accessing US sites: Is this front end or back end? Locally hosted
servers face the same restrictions accessing outside the mainland as home
connections do unless specifically negotiated.

Do have mobile, at least as a responsive level. I have no idea who your
customer is, but it sounds like they're in China and are not-so-tech. That
means they will likely check-up via whatever's convenient, and that would
probably be via mobile.

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auganov
How niche is it? Can they pay with credit cards (which most people in china
and can't)? You'll need a local entity if you want to do payments through
Alipay etc. Which can be done with a WFOE if you have aprox. 100k in
registered capital.

If you're confident that it'll be successful AND your strategy is fairly
stable and you just want you product in China then go for it. But if you ever
want to go mainstream there, want to take Chinese investment or anything of
that sort that requires you to abide by their regulations just forget about
it.

As far as the technical side goes, yea, just proxy their connections if you
cannot cache it locally. And you want to use shadowsocks or something else
that doesn't get hit by the GFW rate limiting super fast. But you'll still
want to have 5 or so exit nodes that you can rotate (or bind togather) in case
the throughput goes radically down. And yes if you're a popular product it
probably can get you banned in China.

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Mockplus
Hi, I am working as a business development executive for a startup software
company which develops UX prototyping tool for mobile and web apps in China.
Actually, companies like us generally visit the international sites through
VPN. It is really inconvenient and we often lost connection very much. The
speed is also quite slow. We are suffering from that so much.

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rahimnathwani
Serve the assets from your own server(s). Proxy or cache the third party
stuff. If you can't do this (e.g. if you're relying on third parties for
OAuth) then consider removing those dependencies, or at least have graceful
fall-back if clients fail to load any third party stuff. (You can test this
with uMatrix, by blocking all third party connections.)

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chatmasta
Create a redundant setup across multiple popular cloud providers (ec2, gce,
azure, digitalocean). Replicate each node type in your architecture at each
cloud. At any given time, there is a high chance that at least one datacenter
will be available. Setup monitoring infrastructure to route to whichever
datacenter is performing the best for a given node type at a given time.

