What is the best CDN provider in China

Our long term client MyHairDressers.com had a big launch in China at the end of June 2013. The client's business being based on online video on demand we had to find the best content delivery provider to ensure smooth video playback in mainland China.

If you are outside of China see how it looks here:

If you are inside of mainland China this should be much faster for you (and vice versa otherwise):
Content delivery from inside of China

Prefer traditional Chinese ?, then this one for you (cdn serves content from outside):

Why China is a special case ?

The problem with China and online businesses is that the whole country is ring-fenced by a firewall meaning that if your content originates from outside of mainland China your front users are likely to have problems with the download speed which is especially true for online video or consent can be simply blocked without any notice. This is why businesses are trying to put origin of their content inside of mainland China in which case you are required to obtain an ICP license – something that can be done by Chinese citizens only.

Who is the fastest ?

If you searched for a provider you probably know that the first one to come up is ChinaCache. The first position means a lot but having a web server in Beijing and a few PCs with remote access available in Shanghai we decided to test different major content delivery networks and compare the results. As a test an mp4 12MB file was chosen and linux wget utility used to mesure downloading speed on the server and than video playback tested one of the remotely controlled PC using html4 video tag.

We tested Akamai, Akamai through Rackspace, Edgecast, Internap and ChinaCache. The closest to ChinaCache performance url for which resolved to an edge server located in Beijing was Akamai through Rackspace with a node location in Japan, Tokyo and downloading speed not good enough to video a 350KB/s video without buffering. ChinaCache outperformed everyone else by a great margin by simply having infrastructure inside of mainland China.

MyHairDressers.com has seen a successful launch in Shanghai backed up by a dedicated web server, origin server for video content and content delivery network powered by ChinaCache.