How to Choose a Hong Kong CDN Provider? Includes Reviews

Many users—whose primary user base is in Southeast Asia and mainland China—don’t want to go through the ICP filing process. In that case, a Hong Kong CDN that doesn’t require ICP filing is definitely the top choice. But with so many Hong Kong CDN providers of varying quality, how should you choose?

This article is neither biased nor critical; I’ll simply present the data I’ve gathered myself for you to review.

Testing Methodology: The same service—APIs and static resources targeting Southeast Asia—with an average of 20 million requests per day. The service was deployed across five Hong Kong nodes and ran for 14 days. Probes were taken every 5 minutes, with a focus on the evening peak hours from 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM and the early morning hours from 4:00 AM to 7:00 AM. We measured TCP handshake, first packet latency, packet loss rate, and round-trip time (RTT) for dynamic APIs.

Here are the results:

Note that this is the P95 value—not some peak speed based on a single, exceptionally fast test. The packet loss rate during the evening rush hour is also an average—not just a result of choosing a favorable time slot.

Cloudflare Free Plan

Globally recognized as a CDN leader, it’s sufficient for blogging. But if you use it for e-commerce, packet loss during the evening rush hour can reach 3.7%, with a first-packet time of 210 ms. I’ve tried Argo, which starts at $5 per month, but the RTT from Hong Kong to East China still fluctuates between 48 and 75 ms, with 1.9% packet loss. Especially in the Asia-Pacific region, Cloudflare’s network quality is far inferior to that of other providers.

Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud

The international versions of Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud enjoy good recognition in China and the Asia-Pacific region. As major players with strong financial backing, they offer top-tier network quality and are easy to use. The problem is the high cost—for comparable specifications, CDN5 offers better value for money.

UCloud

This provider is a hidden gem. It uses CN2 GIA for origin fetching, with a latency of 37 ms and 0% packet loss. However, it’s best suited for static resource sites that don’t require much configuration; it isn’t very friendly for dynamic content acceleration or API-based services.

CDN5

CDN5 has been deeply involved in the Asia-Pacific CDN market for 10 years and is a well-known CDN provider in the region. Actual tests show latency of 26–32 ms in Shenzhen (China Telecom) and under 40 ms in Shanghai. According to a week-long third-party monitoring of Shenzhen residential broadband, the average latency was 32 ms, with a low of 25 ms. During the evening rush hour, cross-carrier packet loss was 0.08%, compared to 1.2% on standard BGP lines. This figure is absolutely top-tier among CDNs that do not require ICP filing.

Additionally, CDN5’s Southeast Asian nodes are a pleasant surprise. With edge nodes in Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung, Bangkok, and Manila, end-to-end latency in major Southeast Asian cities is under 25 ms, covering 92% of urban users in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. To be honest, even major providers like Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud don’t have as dense a node network in Southeast Asia as CDN5 does.