Every foreign company that takes its Chinese audience seriously arrives at the same question: the site is slow or partly broken when opened from China, and the recommended fix is to host in China. That fix is real, and it comes with an administrative precondition that decides whether it is available to you at all.
What the filing is
Websites served from servers inside mainland China require a filing with the authorities, obtained through the hosting provider, and tied to a legal entity registered in China. In practice this means a foreign company without a Chinese entity cannot host inside the mainland in its own name. The filing takes time, it is attached to a specific domain and a specific host, and moving either one generally means redoing it.
What you can do without one
- Host in Hong Kong or Singapore. No filing required, latency far better than from Europe, and the usual first step for a company without a Chinese entity.
- Remove every dependency on services that are unreachable from China — fonts, maps, analytics, embedded video, social widgets. A single blocking request can make a page appear broken even when the server itself responds.
- Keep the site light. Fewer requests and smaller files matter far more on a high-latency route than on a local one.
- Give the Chinese-language content its own clear address and its own hreflang declarations, so search engines can serve the right version.
When mainland hosting becomes worth it
When you have a Chinese entity anyway, when the site is transactional rather than informational, and when visibility in Chinese search is a real commercial channel rather than an ambition. Until then, a fast, dependency-free site served from Hong Kong solves most of the problem for a fraction of the administrative cost.
Filing requirements, categories and procedures are set by the Chinese authorities and change. Confirm the current rules with a licensed hosting provider before planning around them.