Does a hosted Discourse site work well for users in China?
We are located in BC Canada and creating a discussion program for people here and two cities in China – Xiamen and Qingdao so we need to make sure that they will have good access.
I have searched the forums and found some instances of China users not able to get access or things are very slow. These were older threads and I’m hoping someone can confirm a hosted Discourse forum that’s usable to users in China.
If you need to ensure access from inside the China GFW, you will want to host your forum using a cloud provider with regions located inside mainland China.
Thanks for replying. I’m asking if a Discourse cloud hosted package can be reliably accessed from China? I’m hoping some other Discourse cloud users can confirm this.
Regarding our hosted service, we can host you in dozens of different countries, but we do not have infrastructure behind the Chinese firewall and there is no plan for such in the immediate future. For a site with user-generated content – and forums are specifically called out in the regulations – the licensing requirements are significant.
Using our hosting from China, the experience varies rather a lot, depending on the city the users are connecting from and which Internet service provider they use. Our CDNs include endpoints near the mainland – like Hong Kong – so for some visitors performance is great. For most it’s… not great.
