General Discussion

Scale to China

Todd Hoff

Nov 26, 2007 — 1 min read

Hello all,

does anyone have experience in scaling a european website to china?

The main problem in china is the internet connectivity to websites outside china, that means latency and packetloss (and perhaps filtering) make things difficult.

The options I see are:

1. Host you application in china, but where? I haven't got a answer from any chinese ISP I contacted. On the other hand I don't really want to host in china.

2. Build your own CDN. Wikipedia shows how it goes. Get a bunch of machines (but where? see point 1) put squid on them, implement intelligent cache invalidation and you're set. But where can I get machines in china? Where do I need them in china? There are soe big isps with limited peering capability, so I'd need servers in every network.

3. Get professional CDN services. Akamai, ChinaCache, CDNetworks, etc etc.. They all provide services in china. The problem is: they are all very expensive.

4. Amazon EC2/S3 ? Is it worth thinking about this way? I am not sure, because they only have US and Ireland based datacenters. So we are stuck to the connectivity problem..

My favourite way:

Rent a bunch of linux servers in 4-5 big cities in china in different networks and build my own CDN.

What do you think?

Regards
Bjoern

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