Chinese Domain Registration and Hosting in China
If you are targeting the mainland Chinese market, it is crucial that your Chinese website is hosted within China. There are several good reasons for this.
The Golden Shield Project, known worldwide as the Great Firewall of China, is a government strategy aimed at controlling and filtering Internet content for Chinese Internet users. There isn’t a clearly defined list of criteria as to why some websites are blocked. However, access to websites deemed inappropriate will be blocked indefinitely for users within Mainland China. In addition, if the entire server your website is hosted on is blocked by the firewall, your website will also be blocked indefinitely.
However, hosting a website in China will allow for stable and quicker access times for Chinese users, leading to better user experience. It is also a key part of an overall search engine optimisation strategy as local search engines (Baidu especially) give websites hosted in China with Chinese domain names priority over other websites. Read about Baidu here.
Similarly, registering a Chinese (.cn) or (.com.cn) domain name will add to the credibility of your website by localising the name and also make your website easier to remember for Chinese users. Although a Chinese domain name is not as important as hosting, we do recommend it.
** In the future, there will be international domain names available for international websites in many languages. There will even be the opportunity to register a domain name in Chinese characters! China Webmasters has a brief introduction of this future service.
Metafocus can help with all aspects of Chinese hosting and domain registration for your Chinese website. Contact us to find out more.