We previously discussed the pros and cons of hosting China-facing web properties onshore or offshore as well as the benefits of using CDNs based in China. We also introduced a few leading Chinese CDN providers and what entails a partnership with Chinese CDN providers. In this article, we will continue to explore what qualities make a reliable and cost-effective CDN and how to go about choosing the best CDN for your business in China.
Important functionalities and benefits of a reliable CDN
Robust competence
- A CDN must come with a dynamic content packaging of adaptive streaming media in HLS and HDS formats, along with the support of multi-level security mechanisms for content protection.
- Secure origin, cloud-based storage options and external file – all these entirely optimized for the owner's specific technical requirements.
- Supports streaming on demand, adaptive streaming media over HTTP and live broadcasts.
- Customers should be able to upload content via FTP, Aspera, SFTP, SCP and R-Sync.
Scalable and cost-effective
- Cut-throat pricing and CT network management reduces your maintenance CapEx and bandwidth costs.
- Comes with tailored service packages to deliver a scalable and flexible CDN services.
- Comes with Capacity-on-Demand to advance CDN flexibility and performance.
Top-class security
- Data should be securely backed-up and stored with the latest data retention and firewall technology.
- CDN also comes with advanced geographic IP filtering, SSL encryption technologies, token authentication and also Anti-DDOS protection.
Competent customer experience
- Enhanced download speeds and reduced latency improve the end-user satisfaction and QoE, i.e. Quality of Experience.
"Smart" technology
- Content recognition & configuration technology as a matter of course to adapt your content to particular network configurations and customer target devices.
HTTPS-secured acceleration
A CDN provides a trustworthy business-level acceleration service over HTTPS and prevents tampering, leakage, and hijacking.
- HTTPS helps in securing client access; origin fetch requests and node interconnectivity. It's a prerequisite to upload a private key or domain certificate and enable secured acceleration to achieve a secured acceleration. Domain certificates can also be enabled, disabled, viewed and edited. This is end-to-end content delivery acceleration.
- HTTPS – secured acceleration helps with domain name based site acceleration, works and supports switching from HTTP requests to HTTPS.
Efficient and high-performance caching model
CDN supports hierarchical caching and intelligent popularity calculation of the repeatedly requested resources. This allows you to accelerate the user's requested resources precisely.
- Supports balancing of loads among several vCPUs, maximum IOPS (Input and Output Operations per second), efficient memory usage & management
- All the nodes are set up with SSDs to assist high-speed writing and reading in increasing the availability and enormously reducing the response time.
- User-defined rules of expiration for cached resources allow one to apply the rules to a .html file or a /test/… path.
- Gives various parameters for tailoring the header of the HTTP requests.
Which is a better solution? Hosting in China or using a CDN?
Hosting locally and using CDNs can both help in growing and improving your business by enhancing the speed of your website in China. Both solutions go hand in hand. Both of them complement each other. There are three scenarios that can help you make a better call, depending on the amount of traffic that your website gets:
- If your website gets too much traffic, it is recommended that you get both CDN and web servers close to your users. This implies that if your target audience is from Mainland China, you must contact local hosting as well as CDNs at the same time.
- If your website gets a medium amount of traffic, you should have the same configuration as mentioned above. Still, it is also essential that you keep the cost of this venture into consideration. If your company's set business objectives to go with the cost of managing this kind of setup, then just go for it.
- A CDN may not be crucial if your website gets low traffic. Hence, only hosting in China will be sufficient.
Whatever the case, it's necessary to remember that both CDN and a web server within Mainland China need an ICP license. Hence, the first thing to do is to check if you're eligible for one.
Conclusion
China is potentially the largest and fastest growing online market across the globe. Not being able to work with a suitable CDN provider can restrict access to your content and can even cause your website to get blocked completely by the GFoC.
If you're choosing a CDN for expanding your business and reach in China, you must consider the geographical locations of the CDN's PoPs.
When you partner with GoClick China, you will enjoy the comfort and benefits of a "one-stop solution". We offer an affordable and more comfortable way of subscribing to and using several China-based and Near-China CDNs that supports you to take advantage of the power of top-tier, multiple CDN providers in one service.
Our China-based CDNs are one of our most valuable services. This is because most issues can ONLY be resolved inside the Great firewall with only China-based CDNs. We actually perform our own tests with some of the CDN setups.
We are continuously changing the way that platforms interact with the website request independently.
To learn more about succeeding in China, check out our other articles.
If you want to learn more about testing in China, check out our solutions.
