If you are in the business of delivering online services to a global audience, any day that enables you to make big improvements in your ability to reach 750 million more customers is a good day indeed. At NS1 we are super excited to announce that such a day has arrived. Yes, that’s a pretty bold statement – here’s why we are making it:
There are over 750 million internet users in China. Delivering online services to this audience presents unique challenges which encompass cultural, regulatory, and technical aspects. While NS1 can’t help you with the first two, we can make a big difference concerning the third. We just announced the launch of Managed DNS for China, a new service designed to improve the speed, manageability, and reliability of online services in China.
Traffic traversing between China and the global internet is controlled by what’s referred to as the Great Firewall of China, a system of filters and content inspection deployed via Chinese ISPs to control what content is available to users. Traffic transiting the Great Firewall experiences congestion as it traverses this “choke point”, causing severe packet loss, additional latency, poor throughput, and other degradation. The net result is if you want to deliver quality online services to the China market, you need to host those services inside China.
Because every online interaction starts with a DNS lookup, it is also important to serve DNS answers from within China to avoid the slowdowns and dropped packets characteristic of traffic crossing the Great Firewall. So we did that. Managed DNS for China is hosted entirely within China and the results are excellent. Users are consistently getting sub 50ms responses to DNS queries.
However, there is more to solving the technical hurdles of providing a great user experience in China.
ISPs in China are not well interconnected, so gaining broad reach into this market means it is not enough just to host your content in China in order to avoid the Great Firewall. It means your content must be in multiple points of presence with direct connectivity to the major ISPs, hosted on several local CDNs. To optimally connect users to your content, the DNS service has to be fast and intelligent. It needs to reliably route your users to the best point of presence (POP) using proximity to the user, what ISP they are connected to, and real-time user latency to the POP. That is where NS1 Managed DNS for China makes a big impact. We’re the only DNS provider hosted in China providing advanced DNS traffic management. Our China service includes the full suite of NS1 capabilities – filter chain, monitoring, integrations, and API.
Last but not least is DNS management. Managed DNS for China is fully integrated with our global Managed DNS. All your zones and records (China and Global) are managed from your account on the NS1 portal. It’s a simple point-and-click affair to delegate the zones you want to the China network. Updates you make are propagated in seconds to the China nodes.
We hope you will agree that this is an exciting development that promises to make a real difference in improving the quality of online services delivered in China.
We have more information if you want to explore further or if you are just curious to find out more. Check out the links below or contact us if you have additional questions.
Managed DNS for China information
Managed DNS for China data sheet
Managed DNS for China White Paper