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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

Forgive me, but why not just use Google Compute Engine in the Taiwan region? Can US citizens even signup and use Alibaba Cloud? I'm very skeptical about using a Chinese based cloud provider given the current world situation.

Also, back of the napkin math, but GCE is even cheaper.

  Alibaba Cloud ($79.00/mo)
    2 Core CPU
    8GB Memory
    80GB SSD

  Google Compute Engine - Taiwan Region ($69.81/mo)
    n1-standard-2 (2 vCPUs / 7.5 GB Memory)
    80 GB SSD disk

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I have a SaaS product hosted in Singapore. We have complaints from our China clients about it being slow so we had to setup another production environment in China.

It's not about the price, it's about the Great Firewall of China.

Sounds like there is a market for a novel product so that to Chinese people your service is fast as if inside China, but your infrastructure is actually outside. Kind of like a bridge over the Great Firewall, but just for a specific company. How could that be done, and would that be legal in China?

The connection from the mainland to Taiwan is really bad. Also Alibaba has reasonable international connections into and out of China, in the HK region for example I have a ping of 40 and have been running my own VPN for some time.

At my work we tested various services for providing content to our users in China and we found that the most important factor was whether or not the content was hosted inside mainland China. If it has to traverse the Great Firewall it will be slow; if the source is within the border it at least has a chance at acceptable performance.

I believe that if you host it in Taiwan it would still have to go through the Chinese firewall if it were accessed in China.

Yeah that’s a different firewall :)

what actually made you to believe that GCE is accessible in China? are you assuming GFW is a fantasy?

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