RockCloud vs Cloudflare: which one serves China users
Cloudflare runs an excellent global network — it was simply not built for mainland China users. There is no CN2 return path, a meaningful share of its edge IPs are unreachable from mainland networks, and China-facing acceleration is Enterprise-only through a local partner. RockCloud takes the opposite approach: bidirectional CN2 GIA, filing-free onboarding, one CNAME that never touches your nameservers, terabit mitigation on the acceleration path, and Chinese-speaking engineers on call 24/7.
Start a free 24-hour trialKey differences at a glance
| Dimension | RockCloud | Cloudflare |
|---|---|---|
| Mainland China latency | Edge around China plus bidirectional CN2 GIA — near-domestic latency | No CN2 route; mainland requests detour offshore and spike at peak hours |
| Edge reachability | Edge selected for mainland reachability, probed continuously, bad nodes withdrawn | Many edge IPs unreachable or heavily lossy from mainland networks — intermittent access |
| Onboarding | One CNAME; DNS stays with your current provider, live in five minutes, instant rollback | Nameservers move to Cloudflare for the whole zone; CNAME setup starts at Business |
| Multi-domain management | Templated policies pushed in bulk — dozens of domains configured once | Rules are per zone: caching, redirects, WAF and rate limits repeated domain by domain |
| Mitigation and billing | 7T+ scrubbing, up to 3 Tbps per IP, protection and acceleration on one bill | Granular WAF, rate-limit quotas and advanced controls gated by plan; complex needs land on Enterprise |
| Barrier for China workloads | Filing-free onboarding — add the domain, change DNS, live the same day | China Network is Enterprise-only, provisioned via a local partner and requires an ICP filing |
| Support | Direct 24/7 Chinese-speaking engineers who stay with you through an attack | English tickets queued against offshore time zones; dedicated support is Enterprise-only |
Four differences that break China-facing workloads
If your users are entirely offshore, none of this matters. The moment part of your audience sits in mainland China, all four become daily incidents.
China latency is a routing problem, not a PoP-count problem
Cloudflare has an enormous edge footprint, but the bottleneck for mainland visitors was never PoP count — it is what route the last leg into China takes. Ordinary international transit queues and drops packets at evening peak, turning a request that should land in 40 ms into three or four hundred. That is where blank first screens, API timeouts and retried payment callbacks begin. We put the edge in Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Singapore and connect back over bidirectional CN2 GIA, so mainland users get near-domestic latency instead of coverage on a map.
Intermittent hurts conversion more than slow does
The painful failure mode is not slowness, it is irreproducibility. A significant share of Cloudflare edge IPs are unreachable or heavily lossy from mainland networks, and the same hostname resolves to different nodes by carrier, province and time of day. You get tickets that say "it loads for me but not for him" — support cannot reproduce them and synthetic monitoring may never catch them, so you pay in conversion rate and trust. Our edge pool is selected for mainland reachability, probed continuously, and any degraded node is pulled from scheduling before users report it.
Onboarding should not cost you your whole DNS zone
The standard Cloudflare path is delegating your nameservers, which hands over the entire zone: mail MX, internal subdomains and other vendors CNAMEs all move into one panel and inherit one point of failure, and rolling back means waiting out another NS propagation cycle. The non-invasive CNAME setup only unlocks at Business and above. We need exactly one CNAME — your DNS stays where it is, you point only the hostnames that need acceleration and protection at us, and rollback is a single record edit.
The capabilities you want sit in the top tier — and multiply per domain
China Network is Enterprise-only, provisioned through a local partner and gated behind an ICP filing. Granular WAF, rate-limit quotas and CNAME setup are likewise split across plans, so any non-trivial requirement pushes you toward a quote-only contract. Configuration cost is the hidden half: rules are scoped per zone, so caching, redirects, WAF and rate limiting are configured domain by domain — twenty properties means twenty passes, and every policy change means twenty more. We deliver CN2 acceleration and terabit mitigation as one charge on one path, with policy templates pushed across domains in bulk.
Why customers move over from Cloudflare
The reasons migrating customers cite most often — nearly all of them start with "our users are in China".
- Mainland users kept reporting pages that would not load or spun forever, and the root cause turned out to be an edge IP unreachable from China — something with no operable switch on the Cloudflare side.
- Getting China-facing acceleration meant an Enterprise quote an order of magnitude above their current spend, plus a local partner engagement and an ICP filing, stretching go-live into months.
- With dozens of domains, every new cache or WAF rule had to be repeated dozens of times in the dashboard — engineering time spent clicking, and gaps left wherever a domain was missed.
- They were unwilling to delegate the whole zone: mail records, internal subdomains and other vendors entries all lived in their existing DNS, making a full migration disruptive and rollback slow.
- Attacks landed during China evening peak, tickets had to be written in English and queued against an offshore time zone, and the service was already down before the first reply arrived.
Migrating takes four steps
No application changes, no DNS provider change, gradual rollout and instant rollback.
Keep your DNS, add one CNAME
Nameservers stay put. Your zone stays with your current provider and you point only the hostnames that need acceleration and protection at us.
Probe from inside China
Cut a low-traffic subdomain over first and measure latency, packet loss and first-paint from China Telecom, Unicom and Mobile across multiple provinces against your live Cloudflare numbers.
Cut over and push rules in bulk
Once the data holds up, repoint the apex hostname — effective within five minutes — and roll caching, redirect, WAF and rate-limit templates across every domain in one pass.
Lock down the origin
Rotate the origin IP and allow only our fetch ranges, so historical DNS records can no longer be used to bypass the CDN and hit the origin directly.
RockCloud vs Cloudflare FAQ
The root cause is the missing CN2 return path: mainland requests detour offshore, and peak-hour queuing and loss multiply latency several times over. Cache and compression tuning cannot fix routing. There are two real options — Cloudflare Enterprise with China Network, which needs a local partner engagement and an ICP filing at meaningful cost and lead time, or a network that already carries bidirectional CN2 GIA. Our edge sits around China, onboarding is filing-free, and a free 24-hour trial lets you compare on your own traffic.
If your audience is offshore, your content is largely static and you have never been targeted, the free plan is fine. Once mainland users are in scope it is not: there is no CN2 and no control over which edge serves them, so slowness and intermittent access have no remedy. The free plan also requires full nameserver delegation, caps page rules tightly, and keeps granular rate limiting and managed WAF rulesets on higher tiers — meaning what it does cover is usually not what actually breaks you.
Very likely. A significant share of Cloudflare edge IPs are unreachable or heavily lossy from mainland networks, and scheduling assigns visitors to different nodes by carrier, region and time of day — so it works for one user and not another, then recovers on its own. Confirm it with multi-point probes from several provinces and carriers: does the resolved IP shift over time, and does loss cluster on specific nodes? There is no operable fix on the Cloudflare side; the cure is an edge selected for mainland reachability and actively probed so degraded nodes are withdrawn.
No. We need one CNAME. Your nameservers and DNS provider stay exactly as they are, and you point only the hostnames that need us — www or api, for example — at the CNAME we issue. Mail MX, internal subdomains and other vendors records are untouched. The blast radius stays small, changes take five minutes, and rolling back is one record edit rather than another round of global NS propagation.
Cloudflare publishes list pricing only for Pro and Business; Enterprise is quote-only through sales on an annual contract, typically an order of magnitude above Business. China Network then sits inside Enterprise and still requires a local partner and an ICP filing. Whether it is worth it depends on how much of your offshore stack depends on Cloudflare specific features. If the actual requirement is "mainland users can reach us, fast, under attack", a network that ships CN2 and terabit scrubbing by default costs far less and goes live far sooner.
It does, but the genuinely useful controls are tiered: rate-limit quotas, managed WAF rulesets and bot management all scale with the plan, and what you can express on Free or Pro is limited. Two things differ here. Mitigation and acceleration run on the same path — 7T+ of scrubbing capacity and up to 3 Tbps per IP, with no separate protection product to buy. And during an attack you get Chinese-speaking engineers on the line tuning policy with you, instead of trial-and-error in a dashboard while waiting on a reply from another time zone.
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Compare on real traffic, not on spec sheets
Start a free 24-hour trial, point one subdomain at us, and measure latency, packet loss and first-paint from multiple Chinese provinces and carriers against your live Cloudflare numbers.