Is It Better to Manage a Domain Domestically or Overseas?

Author: Renfei (Neil Ren), please cite the source when reposting. This article is a personal opinion; you may disagree with the content, for reference only. I believe many domestic webmasters are struggling with whether to put their domain domestically or overseas. I recently also searched some articles on Google; here’s a summary. First let me state my view: I think overseas is better. Advantages of domestic: 1. Chinese management panel, Chinese customer service, fast response 2. Domain transfer-out requires ID and application letter, relatively safe (there are also cases of passing with forged documents) Advantages of overseas: 1. Absolute freedom, very convenient transfer, no ID review needed 2. Relevant Chinese departments cannot directly manage it There’s such an event: around 4 PM on January 5, the first “tragedy” of Chinese internet in 2010 played out. The well-known domestic SNS community 51.com, the vertical IT tech news site it168.com, and the well-known blog hosting service Blogbus (blogbus.com) all simultaneously became inaccessible. By querying the whois information of these three sites, it was found that all three domains were in the clientHold state. clientHold is the simplest means for a registrar to disable a domain; once the domain is locked, users worldwide cannot access the already-locked site. After verification, the domain registrar Xinnet, which provided registration services for the three sites, said the reason the three sites were held was that it received a notice from the Beijing Communications Administration, stating the above sites contained obscene and pornographic illegal information, and required them to be locked first. So, as long as the Chinese communications administration believes your site is illegal, it can notify the domestic domain service provider to lock the domain, and the domain becomes completely unusable. But what about an overseas domain registrar? Chinese relevant departments have no right to decide on international domains; they can only notify the server provider to stop service, but the domain remains usable — we can transfer to Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, or the US, and the downtime is very short. Domain locked — hehe, how many days to unlock depends on the efficiency of the Chinese relevant departments. Let’s also look at where the domains of well-known domestic enterprises are: Baidu: MARKMONITOR (overseas) Alibaba: MARKMONITOR (overseas) Sohu: NETWORK SOLUTIONS (overseas) Sina: NETWORK SOLUTIONS (overseas) Tencent’s is domestic. My domain is registered at Meicheng Internet because I’m an agent for Meicheng; registered for 9 years, and 60 days later I’ll also transfer to GoDaddy in the US to manage. Overseas isn’t all good — the foreign moon is the same as China’s. At GoDaddy there’s absolute freedom, you can PUSH freely, but it’s also easy to lose, so you need a very strong password and the habit of checking email every day. GoDaddy’s changes have a 15-day appeal period; if it wasn’t you operating, appealing within 15 days can reverse the operation. Moreover, overseas, the language barrier and reversed time zones make efficiency very low — whatever the matter, it’ll probably take several days to resolve. There are pros and cons, but from the long-term perspective of website operation, I still choose an overseas service provider to manage my domain. Oh, almost forgot — there’s another big problem domestically: small agents. I’m also an agent for Meicheng Internet; if the agent doesn’t cooperate, although there are solutions, it’s still very troublesome.