Deploy & Verify China Traffic Checklist (2026)

A production-grade checklist for deploying and verifying China traffic performance in 2026. Covers region choice, routing validation, CDN caching, TLS, origin hardening, observability, peak-hour verification, and rollback/failover.

Deploy & Verify China Traffic Checklist (2026)

If you want reliable China performance, you need two things:

  1. a correct deployment design
  2. a verification process that tests reality (multi-carrier, peak hour)

This checklist is meant to be copied into your ops workflow.

1️⃣ Pre-Deploy Decisions (Don’t skip)

✅ A. Define your traffic type

  • Static-heavy (blog, landing pages, product pages with cacheable content)
  • Dynamic-heavy (login, APIs, checkout, realtime)

This decides whether CDN can carry most of your performance load.

✅ B. Pick a region (baseline defaults)

  • Tokyo: safest stability default
  • Hong Kong: best only with premium routing
  • Singapore: cost balance, higher RTT for North China
  • US West: fallback/global architecture, not China-first

If you don’t know, start with: Tokyo + CDN.

✅ C. Decide your routing tier

  • Tier A: premium China-friendly routing (best stability)
  • Tier B: decent mainstream transit (okay for many static-heavy sites)
  • Tier C: cheap transit (avoid for serious China traffic)

If China conversion is revenue-critical: buy Tier A or validate Tier B with peak-hour tests.

2️⃣ Deploy Checklist (Origin)

✅ A. Provision the origin

  • Choose instance size with enough RAM (DB-heavy workloads are RAM-bound)
  • Use SSD storage
  • Ensure time sync (NTP) enabled

✅ B. Network basics

  • Keep architecture simple (avoid unnecessary cross-region chatter)
  • Ensure firewall rules are minimal and correct (only needed ports)

✅ C. TLS and HTTP

  • Enable HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (where applicable)
  • Use modern TLS settings
  • Set correct redirects (http → https)

3️⃣ CDN Checklist (Static acceleration)

✅ A. Cache strategy (must do)

Cache at minimum:

  • images
  • CSS/JS
  • fonts
  • static downloads

If possible:

  • cache HTML for content pages (carefully)

✅ B. Headers (must be correct)

  • Set Cache-Control properly
  • Ensure immutable assets have long TTL
  • Avoid cache-busting mistakes

✅ C. Avoid common CDN misconfig

  • Don’t cache private endpoints
  • Don’t cache authenticated pages
  • Don’t bypass cache for everything

4️⃣ Routing Verification Checklist (CT/CU/CM)

This is where most people fail.

✅ A. Multi-carrier testing (required)

Test from:

  • China Telecom
  • China Unicom
  • China Mobile

✅ B. Peak-hour tests (required)

Run tests during China evening peak hours.

✅ C. Tools

  • MTR (best)
  • traceroute (path)
  • ping (baseline only)

You are verifying stability, not chasing lowest RTT.

5️⃣ Performance Verification Checklist (Real user impact)

✅ A. Measure real page metrics

  • TTFB (origin and cached)
  • LCP for main pages
  • API response times (p50/p95/p99)

✅ B. Cache hit ratio

  • Ensure high hit ratio for static assets
  • Investigate cache misses

✅ C. Packet loss & jitter

Even small loss makes:

  • logins fail
  • APIs feel broken
  • checkouts abandon

6️⃣ Security Checklist (China traffic attracts abuse)

✅ A. Origin hardening

  • close unused ports
  • disable password SSH login, use keys
  • rate limit sensitive endpoints

✅ B. WAF / bot protection (if needed)

If you see scraping or bot traffic:

  • enable WAF
  • enable bot rules
  • add rate limiting

The goal is to protect origin performance.

7️⃣ Observability Checklist (You must be able to see failure)

✅ A. Metrics

Track:

  • CPU, RAM, disk IO
  • network egress
  • error rates
  • latency percentiles (p50/p95/p99)

✅ B. Logs

Ensure you can answer:

  • what endpoint slowed?
  • what carrier path degraded?
  • was there packet loss?

✅ C. Alerting

Alert on:

  • error spikes
  • latency spikes
  • packet loss anomalies
  • origin overload

8️⃣ Rollback & Failover Plan (The professional step)

If China traffic is critical, you need a fallback.

✅ A. Region fallback

  • primary: Tokyo or HK premium
  • fallback: alternative region

✅ B. DNS strategy

  • short TTL for failover
  • CDN handles static continuity

✅ C. Playbook

When performance degrades:

  1. confirm carrier-specific issue
  2. adjust CDN caching if needed
  3. reroute traffic / failover region
  4. postmortem routing

9️⃣ Final “Go/No-Go” Gate (Simple decision)

You should not scale if:

  • peak-hour loss is persistent
  • jitter spikes frequently
  • one carrier is consistently bad
  • cache hit ratio is low for static
  • origin is overloaded under normal traffic

You can scale when:

  • multi-carrier peak-hour performance is stable
  • cache hit ratio is high
  • dynamic endpoints have acceptable p95/p99

🔟 FAQ (8)

1) Do I need Hong Kong for China traffic?

Not always. Tokyo often wins on stability unless HK routing is premium.

2) Is CDN required?

If static-heavy, yes. If dynamic-heavy, still recommended but not sufficient alone.

3) What’s the biggest performance killer?

Packet loss + jitter at peak hour.

4) What’s the biggest config mistake?

Not caching correctly, and testing only off-peak.

5) How do I know if routing is good?

Multi-carrier MTR + traceroute during peak hours across multiple days.

6) Should I deploy multi-region?

Only if China revenue is critical and you can operate failover.

7) Can I “fix” bad routing with more CPU?

No. Routing quality is upstream, not compute.

8) What’s the lowest-regret setup?

Tokyo origin + strong CDN + verified peak-hour testing.

Next Steps (Closed Loop)