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Comment by xfalcox | Hacker News Reader

How does stuff hosted in this region work regarding the China Firewall?

There is no GFW in Hong Kong, so you enjoy unfettered Internet access.

For traffic inbound to China from HK, traditionally it's been slightly faster but that may just be proximity rather than any preferential treatment by the GFW.

Can confirm. We have datacenter space in Hong Kong with a fiber connection to he.net and it is indistinguishable from all of our other sites, globally.

End user Internet usage in Hong Kong is also indistinguishable from California. Although, to be fair, I stay at (relatively) expensive, western hotels and my Internet experience inside of mainland China is also indistinguishable from California.

Hong Kong, along with neighboring Macau are designated SARs(special administrative regions) of China. There is not Great Firewall. All the same services Google, Gmail, FB etc that work elsewhere work are unfiltered. See:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/special-administrative-...

You'll still have to go over the firewall, you'll just be closer to it. It will be nice to see if the new region decreases the latency between the cn-north-1 or cn-northwest-1 regions and AWS global regions over DX connections. Right now, the majority of private leased connections in/out of China surface in HK, so ap-southeast-1 has been our region of choice for the global side of DX connections.

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