How to Run SitecoreAI in China: Hosting, Licensing, and Everything Else

If you run SitecoreAI and you have customers in mainland China, you’ll get asked where to host the China site. It’s the wrong first question. Hosting is the easy part. The hard part is being allowed to operate, and then making the whole site work once you are. This is how we think about it, including when in-country hosting is the right answer and when it isn’t.

Two gates, in order

Every China site has to get through two gates. The order matters.

The first gate is legal. Without it, your site isn’t slow in China — it can’t legally be served at all. The second gate is technical. Sitecore’s content system, your editors’ tools, your forms and your scripts all live outside China, and something has to make each of them work from inside.

Most of the hosting conversation is about the second gate, and only part of it. That’s the problem.

Gate one: can you legally operate?

In mainland China, a website needs a government filing before it can be served. It’s called an ICP filing (备案). Without it, the domain can’t be served from inside China, full stop. No hosting setup gets around it.

To get one you need three things:

1. A Chinese legal entity. The filing is issued to a company registered in China, not to your global parent. If you have a China subsidiary or a WFOE, that’s usually the one.
2. The filing itself. It’s tied to the infrastructure that serves the site, so whoever hosts the site is involved in the paperwork. It takes weeks, not days, and under the Measures for the Administration of Internet Information Services it has to be renewed and kept current.
3. Someone who owns it. Not a one-time project. Domain changes, entity changes and annual reviews all touch it.

This is the part most hosting pages skip. They’ll tell you that you need a “local business license” and stop there. That’s true, but the license is the prerequisite. The filing is the gate. We’ve seen teams stand up in-country infrastructure and only find out at launch that the domain can’t be served.

We set the filing up on your entity and manage the renewals. If you already have one, we work with it.

Gate two: does it actually work?

Here’s the thing about SitecoreAI (and XM Cloud before it): the content system doesn’t run in China and isn’t going to. Your pages, images and editor tools all sit on Sitecore’s global infrastructure. Every option for China is really an answer to one question: how does that content reach a visitor in Shanghai, and on whose road?

There are two honest answers.

In-country hosting. You redeploy your front end to a cloud inside China (Azure China, Alibaba, whoever). Visitors hit a server in-country, and that server reaches back across the border to Sitecore for content on every page load. This is what “sovereign hosting” products for Sitecore do, including Arc by Dataweavers. It’s a real option when your organization has decided the front end must physically sit inside China. The cost is a second deployment target with its own pipeline, releases and cache, and the border crossing still happens, just from the server instead of the browser. The local cache these products add is a CDN for Sitecore’s own media and only that; everything else on the page still goes where it always went. Ask who holds the license for that crossing.

A delivery layer over your existing site. Your site stays exactly where it is: Vercel, Netlify, Azure, wherever. A licensed delivery layer inside China handles the visitor, fetches what’s slow or blocked over a compliant cross-border path, and leaves everything that already works alone. One codebase, one deploy, no China fork. This is our 21YunBox Optimizer, and it’s what we recommend for most global sites.

Neither one is wrong. They fit different companies. What matters is picking on the basis of what your site actually does, not on where the server sits.

What hosting alone doesn’t solve

When a client first asks about China, they ask about hosting and the ICP filing. That’s the part above the waterline. What decides whether the site actually works sits below it, in the application layer, and it’s what a hosting conversation never gets to.

Say you’ve put the front end inside China and the ICP is done. Here’s what’s still broken, because none of it lives in the front end.

Your editors. The Sitecore Portal, where your China content team logs in to publish, isn’t reachable from inside China. The usual advice is a VPN. We don’t recommend that, and we’d be careful about any vendor who puts it in writing. VPN use for business in China sits in a gray area your China staff shouldn’t be carrying. We give editors a managed, licensed connection to the Portal instead. No VPN, no China IT team pulled into it.

Your forms. The form is on the page, but the submission goes somewhere. Sitecore Forms posts to Sitecore. HubSpot and Marketo forms post to HubSpot and Marketo. All outside China. If the visitor’s browser can’t reach that endpoint, the form fails silently, and you don’t find out until someone asks why China leads dried up. The submission has to travel over a path that works.

Your video. YouTube and Vimeo are blocked outright. Wistia, Brightcove and Vidyard are third-party players that may or may not load. A page hosted in China with a YouTube embed is a page with a blank box on it. Either the player gets routed or the video moves to a China-reachable host — the choices are laid out in our guide to video playback in China.

Your third-party scripts. Google Fonts, Google Tag Manager, Google Maps, chat widgets, consent banners, A/B tools. Each one is a call from the visitor’s browser to a server outside China. Some are blocked, some are just slow enough to time out, and the page hangs while it waits. This is what usually breaks a China site in practice, and it’s the thing hosting pages never mention.

Your content APIs and search. A SitecoreAI site isn’t a pile of static pages. Personalization, search, product listings and anything that updates without a redeploy call back to Sitecore’s APIs at runtime. Those calls cross the border. If they’re slow, the page renders late; if they fail, it renders empty. The front end being in China doesn’t move the API it talks to.

Your analytics and tracking. Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, your tag manager, your ad pixels. Each one is a beacon from the visitor’s browser to a server outside China. Blocked beacons mean a China audience you can’t see in your dashboards, which usually gets read as “nobody in China visits us” when the real answer is “we’re not measuring them.”

Your personal data. You’ll be told that personal data “must stay in China.” That’s one option, and the heaviest one. China’s privacy law (PIPL) regulates the cross-border transfer of personal information; it doesn’t ban it. For a marketing site with modest form volumes, nothing is usually required. As volumes grow, there’s a filing route with the regulator (the CAC) that lets you keep sending leads to your global CRM. Forced localization is for when volume, sensitivity or your own risk appetite calls for it. The right answer depends on what data, how much, going where. We help you pick the lighter one that still complies. (If you want to see how far this reaches, we read 763 SaaS tools against China’s own rules — most of a typical stack lands on the wrong side of this line.)

Which approach fits you

Here’s how we’d sort it. Be honest about which column you’re in.

If you’re an Azure shop with a mostly static China site, a Chinese entity, someone who already owns the ICP, and a mandate that the front end sits in-country, in-country hosting is a reasonable choice. Add the delivery layer for the parts it doesn’t cover.

If you’re a global company with one site, one codebase and a China audience, and you’d rather not run a second platform, the Optimizer is the fit. That’s most of the companies we talk to. For a worked example, see how one global enterprise kept Sitecore XM Cloud and Vercel while making its China site fast, compliant and whole.

Where to start

If China’s on your roadmap, don’t start with hosting. Start with two questions: do you have a Chinese entity, and does your site do anything in the browser that matters (forms, video, scripts, search, analytics, personalization)? The answers decide the architecture.

If you’d like a second opinion on where your site stands today, send us the URL and we’ll run the in-China assessment. No cost, no commitment, and you’ll get real numbers either way.

hello@21yunbox.com