Access and hosting10 min readFacts checked on November 1, 2026

Hong Kong or mainland hosting: which should you choose for China?

Hong Kong is the sensible next step for most foreign companies, and it isn't a free pass.

Hugo Debrabandere, Founder, Index in Chinachecked against 21 sources

Access and hosting

Where should a foreign company host first? Hong Kong, after a test

The short answer

Test your current site from China first. If it's too slow, choose Hong Kong: it needs no MIIT filing or Chinese entity, and it led the foreign locations in 2019 tests. Choose the mainland once Chinese revenue justifies an entity and an ICP. Hong Kong shortens the distance, but results depend on the route.

Alibaba Cloud's undated FAQ says a domain resolving to a server in Hong Kong needs no MIIT ICP filing, then asks for a public security filing.
In 2019 tests published in March 2020, one Hong Kong server averaged about 3 hours of daily slowdown into the mainland, against 4 to 8 for the next best senders.
We found no independent rerun of those tests, and they measured throughput, not page loads.
On November 1, 2026, a public ping table showed 313 ms between one Hong Kong server and one in Shanghai, far above the 20 to 42 ms vendors quote.
Baidu advised against overseas servers for Chinese-language sites in October 2017, without saying whether Hong Kong counts.

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Perplexity

Search for Hong Kong hosting and you’ll mostly find sellers of Hong Kong servers. Their numbers look great, and few of them are independently tested.

This guide sticks to what can be sourced and says where the evidence runs out. It’s part of our guide to putting your website in China, and it picks up where website hosting in China leaves off.

Which should you choose?

For most foreign companies, test your current site from China first. If it’s too slow, move to Hong Kong. Go to the mainland when Chinese demand is proven and paying.

	Hong Kong	Mainland China
ICP	Not needed ¹	Required ³
Chinese entity	Not needed ¹⁴	Needed, or a local partner ³
Time to launch	No ICP to wait for ¹⁴	Entity first, then a review AWS China puts at 3 to 20 working days ¹⁵
Speed for mainland users	Led the foreign locations in 2019 tests, but varies by route ²¹¹	Usually faster, on agency and vendor accounts ⁶¹⁰
Risk of blocking	Still possible ³	Hosted under Chinese rules, with shutdown risk if unfiled ⁷
Best for	China matters and speed needs work	Established Chinese business

Verdict

Hong Kong is the right next step if your test shows a problem. Mainland hosting is a business decision, worth making once revenue pays for the entity and the upkeep.

Do you need an ICP for Hong Kong hosting?

No. Alibaba Cloud states that when a domain resolves to a server outside the mainland, such as in Hong Kong, an MIIT ICP filing isn’t required.¹

Our ICP license guide explains why the requirement follows the server.

There’s one detail most guides leave out.

Our PSB filing guide sets out what each source says.

How much faster is Hong Kong?

Hong Kong led the foreign locations in the best public study we found, but that study is old. Current figures disagree so widely that only your own test will settle it.

The study

The strongest evidence is a peer-reviewed paper published in March 2020, with tests run in 2019. Researchers measured transnational internet performance across 29 countries and regions, and found serious slowdowns into mainland China.²

A slowdown here means a 20-minute window where throughput stayed under 1 Mbps more than half the time.²

Sender	Average daily slowdown into the mainland
Hong Kong	About 3 hours
India, Japan and Korea, the next best	4 to 8 hours

Fig. 1Daily slowdown hours toward the mainland, by sender

Hong Kong

4 to 8

India, Japan and Korea

Zhu et al., published March 2020, 2019 tests

Seen from the other side, most mainland receivers averaged 5 to 17 hours a day across all senders.² The slowdown affected 79% of the pairs measured, and it followed a daily pattern.²

The authors called Hong Kong an ideal proxy for mainland nodes, and judged its links to the mainland unlikely to be the bottleneck.²

Three limits apply:

Age. The tests are from 2019, and we found no independent rerun.
Sample. The Hong Kong figure comes from one server.²
Measure. It tracks time below 1 Mbps, not how fast a real page loads.

Today’s numbers

Vendors quote low latency. WonderNetwork, which publishes ping results between servers worldwide, shows something very different.

Source	Route	Round trip
Server.HK, January 2026 ⁴	Hong Kong to Shanghai	20 to 40 ms
Server.HK, July 2026 ⁵	Hong Kong to Shanghai, CN2 GIA plan	28 to 42 ms
Chinafy, February 2026 ¹⁰	Hong Kong to major mainland cities	20 to 40 ms, no source given
WonderNetwork, Nov 1, 2026 ¹¹	Hong Kong to Shanghai	313 ms
WonderNetwork, Nov 1, 2026 ¹³	Hong Kong to Shenzhen	347 ms
WonderNetwork, Nov 1, 2026 ¹²	Shanghai to Singapore	205 ms
WonderNetwork, Nov 1, 2026 ¹²	Shanghai to London	166 ms
WonderNetwork, Nov 1, 2026 ¹²	Shanghai to Shenzhen	27 ms

These aren’t like-for-like. Server.HK and Chinafy sell to this market, and WonderNetwork’s figures cover one pair of servers each, on routes it doesn’t name. So they prove neither figure wrong.

They do show the point that matters: a server in Hong Kong can be slower than one in London, depending on how it connects. Hong Kong gives you a good chance, not a guaranteed result.

Does Hong Kong avoid the Great Firewall?

Partly. Chinafy describes Hong Kong as having separate legal and internet infrastructure, with no mainland-style filtering, while traffic to the mainland still crosses international gateways.¹⁰

So sites hosted outside the mainland may still load slowly or be intermittently blocked for mainland users.³

Filtering may not be the main cause of slow speeds, either. In the study, more than 70% of bottlenecks sat deep inside China, and only 34.45% of cases matched a firewall hop.²

That second test was short and covered only one type of firewall device.² The authors suggested weak network capacity, then named policy or carrier economics as likely causes, and called this analysis best effort.²

Moving the server also leaves your page as it is. Chinafy says proximity helps server response but does nothing for third-party resources.¹⁰ See what the Great Firewall means for your website and how to speed up your site in China.

Problem	Does Hong Kong help?
Distance to the server	Yes, if the route is good
ICP filing	Yes, none needed ¹
Blocked Google services	No ¹⁰
Heavy pages	No
Being blocked	No guarantee ³

Does Hong Kong hosting help on Baidu?

Nobody has shown that it does. Baidu’s own texts are old, and they never mention Hong Kong.

Source	What it says
Baidu notice, October 2017 ¹⁸	Chinese-language sites with servers abroad will have display problems in search, with no cause given
Baidu server tips, October 2017 ¹⁹	Overseas servers aren’t recommended for Chinese sites, and stability matters
SEO Sherpa, May 2026 ⁶	Baidu tends to favor mainland servers, but foreign-hosted sites can rank if accessible and fast

Baidu doesn’t define “abroad” in either text, so we can’t say which side of the line Hong Kong falls on. Our guides on ranking without an ICP and whether Baidu indexes foreign sites go further.

Treat Hong Kong as a speed and stability measure, then check what Baidu has indexed.

Free check

Is your website visible on Baidu?

Enter your website. We check Baidu, access from China and how your site is set up, then email you the report.

What about Singapore, or staying where you are?

Singapore suits companies whose main market is Southeast Asia. For the mainland, Server.HK quotes 60 to 150 ms from Singapore to Shanghai.⁵

That’s a vendor comparing against its own product. The study points the same way: it names India, Japan and Korea as the next best senders after Hong Kong, not Singapore.² Yet the ping table above has Singapore ahead of Hong Kong, so test both if you’re undecided.

Your current European or US host is still a valid place to start. You already pay for it, and it needs no ICP.⁹ If tests show that your pages load acceptably from China, you may not need to move at all.

Option	Choose it when
Stay on your current host	Tests from China are acceptable
Hong Kong	China matters and speed needs work
Singapore	Southeast Asia comes first
Mainland	You have revenue, an entity and an ICP

How to choose a Hong Kong host

Don’t choose on the sales page. The route into the mainland matters more than the city, so check these points before you commit.

Ask how it connects to the mainland. The study lists China Telecom’s tiers, in the table below. Ask what your plan really includes.
Test from mainland locations. Use a trial, and test several cities and carriers at several times of day. The slowdowns follow a daily pattern.² Our guide to testing access from China lists how.
Run a traceroute. A reseller told the researchers that its GIA network includes 59.43.x.x addresses.² That’s a 2019 detail, so use it as a clue only.
Don’t pay for a bigger server to fix this. Servers with enhanced networking showed no significant gain in the study.²
Ask about shared IP addresses. You don’t want to share an address with a site that’s blocked. See can a shared IP get your site blocked?.
Check support and contract terms. You should be able to reach someone in your language, and to leave without penalty.

Route tested in 2019	Average packet loss	Worst node
China Telecom GIA	3%	7%
China Telecom GT	4%	14%
China Telecom Paid-Peer and China Access	5%	15%
Hong Kong test address, on HKT	0.1 to 1%	Not stated

These come from day-long ping tests on a reseller’s test addresses, from five Chinese nodes for the China Telecom tiers.² The authors say GIA uses a separate CN2 gateway, while the other three share one.² A premium label helped only a little, and the Hong Kong link did best.

You may not need a new provider. AWS and Google Cloud both list a Hong Kong region,¹⁶¹⁷ and Alibaba Cloud sells Hong Kong hosting.¹⁴ We found nothing on how these clouds reach the mainland, so test them the same way.

When to move to the mainland

Move when the numbers justify it, not when an agency says so. Three signals are worth watching:

Chinese inquiries or revenue that cover the entity and its upkeep
Pages that stay too slow in China after you’ve fixed everything else
A Chinese entity that you already need for other reasons

Then you need a mainland host and the ICP filing before serving visitors. Alibaba Cloud says a site must hold the filing before it provides services.⁹ Revenue-generating sites also need a commercial license, says China Briefing.³

Alibaba Cloud pitches this path: launch in Hong Kong, then expand from the same account once you have an ICP.¹⁴ Yet its FAQ says the international site doesn’t support ICP filing.⁹ Ask which account you’ll need before you build on that plan.

The bottom line

Stay on your current host if it already works well from China. If it doesn’t, move to Hong Kong, and go to the mainland once revenue pays for it.

Test your own pages, and test the route before you sign. No public benchmark will tell you how your site behaves there.

How Index in China can help

We translate your site into Simplified Chinese with a human reviewer, index it on Chinese search engines and send a monthly report on Chinese traffic.

Hosting and ICPs aren’t part of the offer we list, and we don’t promise rankings or traffic. See what we do or book a 30-minute call.

Book a 30-minute call

Common questions

Do I need a Hong Kong company to host there?

We found no such requirement on the pages we read. AWS lists Hong Kong as a region in a standard account, though you must enable it first,¹⁶ and Google Cloud lists one too.¹⁷ Alibaba Cloud pitches its Hong Kong option to firms with no mainland office.¹⁴ Smaller local hosts set their own terms, so read the contract.

Is Singapore as good as Hong Kong for China?

On vendor figures, no. Server.HK claims 3 to 8% evening packet loss from Singapore into the mainland, against under 0.1% on its Hong Kong CN2 GIA plan,⁵ which is its own product. Treat that as a sales claim and test it. Singapore makes more sense when Southeast Asia is your main market and China comes second.

Can I use Alibaba Cloud in Hong Kong without an ICP?

Yes, for the MIIT filing. Alibaba Cloud says a domain resolving to Hong Kong doesn't need one.¹ Its help pages add that a public security filing must still be completed.¹⁸ They don't say how that works for a foreign company with no Chinese entity, so check that with a local adviser before you launch.

Can I keep my .com domain on Hong Kong hosting?

Yes, as far as the filing goes. Alibaba Cloud ties the ICP question to where your domain resolves, not to the domain's ending.¹ Nothing we read requires a .cn domain for a site hosted in Hong Kong. Our guide to site structure covers the wider choice between domains, subdomains and folders for Chinese pages.

Does a CDN replace Hong Kong hosting?

Not in the mainland without an ICP. Cloudflare's documentation says the licensing rule also covers sites delivered to visitors in China through a CDN.⁷ A CDN with nodes outside the mainland can help, but it doesn't put your pages on mainland servers. Our CDN guide covers what each option actually changes for you.