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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

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

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rifung 9y ago
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.
- xir78 9y ago
  Yeah that’s a different firewall :)
wyred 9y ago
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.
- Darthy 9y ago
  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?
Monotoko 9y ago
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.
dis-sys 9y ago
what actually made you to believe that GCE is accessible in China? are you assuming GFW is a fantasy?
edaemon 9y ago
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.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rifung 9y ago

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.

xir78 9y ago
Yeah that’s a different firewall :)

wyred 9y ago

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.

Darthy 9y ago
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?

Monotoko 9y ago

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.

dis-sys 9y ago

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

edaemon 9y ago

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.