Does Gatsby Work in China? Gatsby Cloud Is Gone — ICP, Visitor Data & the Compliant In-Country Layer

This guide once explained how to make Gatsby Cloud load quickly in mainland China. It can’t be that guide anymore, because Gatsby Cloud is no longer a product. Netlify acquired Gatsby and sunset the hosting service, giving existing customers an end-of-service date and a path to migrate their sites onto Netlify’s own platform. What came through the change intact is Gatsby itself — the open-source framework — which still builds and deploys, now on a general host rather than a dedicated one. So the useful question today is not how do I speed up Gatsby Cloud but where does my Gatsby site run now, and what does it take to serve it, lawfully, to people in mainland China? That is a compliance question before it is a performance one — and the rest of this page follows that order.

A Gatsby site in China at a glance

First, the correction: Gatsby Cloud is gone

It is worth being exact about what changed, because the name still appears in a great many old tutorials — this one included. Netlify’s announcement is unambiguous: following its acquisition of Gatsby, it is retiring the Gatsby Cloud product and moving customers onto Netlify Cloud. Gatsby’s own product page for Cloud now redirects straight to that notice, which is about as plain a signal as a vendor gives that something is finished. The framework, to be clear, is not going anywhere — Netlify says the change does “not impact Gatsby JS” — but the managed hosting you may remember as Gatsby Cloud is not something you can deploy to today. If you are here because a Gatsby site needs to work in China, the first step is simply to know where that site is hosted now; every compliance question below hangs off that one answer.

Gate one: the filing your new host can’t hold

Serving mainland China was never one problem. It is two, and they fail independently: a page can be genuinely fast and still have no permission to be served there, and it can be fully licensed and still crawl across the border. The second gate is the one teams tend to discover late. A public website shown to people in mainland China needs an ICP filing (备案), and under State Council Order No. 292 and MIIT Order No. 33 that filing attaches to a hosting resource physically inside the mainland and to a mainland legal entity. A Gatsby site on Netlify — or on any worldwide platform — has nothing in-country for the filing to attach to. Netlify is candid about the shape of its network: in its own words it is “a global platform” that ships “to worldwide edge locations,” none of them in mainland China. That makes it a strong global origin and, by the very same fact, not an in-country China presence.

Here is the part that catches people. The one move that finally makes a Gatsby page quick inside the mainland — delivering it from in-country — is the very move that brings it under the filing. Speed and the filing are not two separate errands; they are a single door approached from two sides. Which is why any arrangement that stays offshore to sidestep the filing is also, unavoidably, the arrangement that keeps the slow, filtered border crossing it was trying to escape.

Gate two: visitor data at the border

The filing is about where the site is served from. The second compliance question is about what crosses the border once it is being served. A mainland visitor’s real IP address is personal information under China’s Personal Information Protection Law, and so are the request logs that travel with it. Serving those visitors from an offshore host means their personal data leaves the mainland on every request — a cross-border transfer PIPL governs through Chapter III, Articles 38–43: notice, separate consent, and one permitted transfer mechanism (a CAC security assessment, the CAC standard contract, or certification). For a critical information infrastructure operator or a large-volume handler, Article 40 — read with Cybersecurity Law Article 39 (formerly Article 37) — adds a duty to keep that data inside China.

A compliant design does the opposite of the naive one. It terminates mainland visitors at an in-country entry and sends a single, fixed in-country address on to your Gatsby origin, instead of carrying each visitor’s own IP out of the country. Your origin seeing one in-country address rather than every real client IP is the design working as intended, not a defect to engineer around.

None of this is a verdict on your particular site. It is a risk map — which gate applies, and how heavily, depends on whether you serve the public in China, on your entity, and on the personal data your site handles, and it is worth settling with counsel rather than assumed.

Where 21YunBox fits — a compliant overlay, not a migration

You keep Gatsby, and you keep whatever host you migrated to — Netlify or anything else — as your origin and source of truth. Netlify stays the global platform it is good at being; 21YunBox adds the one piece a worldwide edge structurally cannot: ICP-filed delivery from inside the mainland, placed in front of your existing origin, with no rebuild and no second codebase. Our China team works out which obligations apply to your entity and your data, handles the ICP filing against in-country infrastructure, and stands up the compliant in-country entry that serves your mainland audience while your Gatsby build keeps shipping exactly as it does today. It is an overlay, not a move — the technical half and the regulatory half brought into line with each other, which is the clause most worth checking in any China proposal you receive, from us or anyone else.

Get a compliance assessment →

Related reading:

• What is the China ICP license, and how do you get one?
• Cross-border data transfers under PIPL