We are building a website which will have a large proportion of its audience in mainland China. Another large proportion of the site's audience will be outside China. We estimate the split to be approx 60% China, 40% overseas, so we cannot ignore the needs of either group. We want the site to perform well for both groups.
In China, the so-called 'Great Firewall' (GFW) that is used to block sites also introduces a lot of network latency. This leads to poor site performance if users in China access a server outside China. So, we plan to run servers inside China as well as servers outside China, and serve users based on their location.
Furthermore, some large corporations with hosting operations (e.g. Google) have upset the authorities here, and access to their offerings is restricted.
We want to choose a hosting provider on which to build a site infrastructure that 'spans' the GFW. Our provider a) will have operations both inside and outside of mainland China and b) will not have, and is unlikely to have in the near future, restrictions placed upon access to its products.
Our research points to our options being Ali Cloud (run by China's Alibaba), Microsoft Azure, and Amazon AWS, but we're open to suggestions.
