In 2025, a European B2B SaaS platform that serves global enterprise HR teams faced a familiar wall: one of its enterprise customers wanted to extend the platform’s HR modules to employees in Mainland China — and for those employees, the product simply did not open. High browser latency and unstable DNS resolution made the target pages unusable, so the customer’s HR rollout in China could not start.
Over roughly six months, the platform went from “unopenable in China” to fully delivered: a four-week POC on an already-ICP-filed test domain validated the route before anyone signed, a China-based cross-border CDN was selected through a two-vendor bake-off, and a new local domain — registered, filed, and hosted under Chinaready’s entity — carried the production cutover.
Working everywhere except China
The platform runs as one global standardized service: enterprises push customized HR content to their employees and track how those target groups use it. None of that had ever been a problem in Europe, the Americas, or Asia-Pacific.
In Mainland China it was a different story:
- Pages would not open. Employees in China faced long browser delays and unstable DNS — some attempts failed before a connection was even attempted.
- The business was blocked, not just the browser. With employees unable to reach the modules, the customer’s HR department could not launch its China program at all.
For the platform’s product team, this was also unfamiliar territory: they did not know the Chinese internet ecosystem, which vendors to evaluate, or whether their architecture could work in China at all.
One hundred cities of evidence
Before proposing anything, Chinaready measured the actual failure. Using probe points in more than 100 Mainland China cities, we ran DNS and HTTP checks against the platform’s main URLs and API endpoints.
The numbers explained the support tickets:
- In the worst cities, DNS resolution succeeded in under 50% of attempts — the domain itself was unreliable from those vantage points.
- Where DNS did resolve, HTTP connections typically timed out after 9–15 seconds — far beyond any usable page-load budget.
This is what a degraded cross-border path looks like from inside China: not one clean “blocked” verdict, but a layer-cake of DNS instability and connection timeouts. It also framed the fix — the origin service itself was healthy; the delivery path into China was not.
Two ways to say yes
| Option | What it buys | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Full platform deployment in Mainland China | In-country hosting; strongest control | Stand up the platform plus this customer’s customized content, then maintain content updates in China — for one customer |
| Cross-border CDN + compliant local domain | The existing global platform, delivered into China through an accelerated path | Web traffic still crosses the border |
A compliance review settled the direction first: the rollout did not involve collecting Mainland China users’ personal information locally, which kept the cross-border route open.
Then the product team made the call the table implies: maintaining a full in-country deployment for a single customer’s modules was more platform than they were willing to operate. The chosen route was a China-based cross-border CDN vendor, fronted by an ICP-filed local domain.
The pre-contract path
Chinaready ran the vendor work before anyone committed:
- Business compliance analysis — confirming no local collection of Chinese users’ personal information, and what that meant for the architecture choice.
- Option evaluation — walking the product team through full deployment versus acceleration, with the maintenance burden made explicit.
- Vendor shortlist — a curated list of cross-border CDN acceleration vendors.
- Two live demos — requirements confirmed directly with the two strongest candidates.
- A four-week POC — run on Chinaready’s own already-ICP-filed China test domain, with our testers and engineers supporting, so performance was measured on a realistic compliant setup rather than a lab promise.
- Vendor selection — the product team chose the POC vendor on evidence.
- Domain and compliance — Chinaready registered the new China domain and completed its ICP filing; the production site runs under the Chinaready entity with ICP license compliance support — the China Product Hosting arrangement.
- Cutover and acceptance — production domain switchover verified jointly by the Chinaready and product teams.
Results
With the cross-border CDN behind a compliant local domain, the platform delivered to China on the customer’s schedule:
- Pages open at normal speed for employees in Mainland China, and every HR module in the rollout works smoothly.
- The customer’s China HR program launched as planned — the business goal the whole engagement existed for.
- The POC went straight to production. Because validation ran on the real, compliant configuration, nothing from the four-week POC was discarded — the shortest possible path from “proved it works” to “it is live.”
What this case shows
From the product team’s perspective, the value was orientation: they did not know the Chinese vendor landscape or whether their architecture was feasible in China, and they got technical support from both Chinaready and the CDN vendor through evaluation, POC, and cutover — reaching the customer’s goal on schedule at a reasonable cost.
The repeatable part is the sequence. Compliance analysis came first and kept the simpler architecture on the table. The POC ran on a production-equivalent, already-filed domain, so vendor selection was an evidence decision and the POC-to-production path was short. And the hosting arrangement — domain, ICP filing, and license compliance under Chinaready’s entity — removed the one requirement that stops most SaaS teams at the border.
If your product is slow or unreachable from China, start by testing what actually fails — the fix depends on whether you face DNS instability, connection timeouts, or dependency failures. A China Readiness Assessment gives you that read, and China Product Hosting is the route when a compliant local domain and entity are what you are missing.
