Contact person’s phone number, email, and physical address.
Website URL.
Hosting information (such as FTP login information).
For a commercial ICP license application, you’ll require even more documentation:
Scan of the company’s Chinese business license.
Scan of ID card or passport of contact person (must be Chinese national).
Scan of photo ID of the business owner (can be a foreign national).
Signed ICP application forms—information must include:
Official company name.
Company registered address.
Type of company.
Contact person’s ID card or passport number.
Contact person’s mobile number, office line korea phone number number and email address.
Website information, i.e. domain name, homepage, website name, type of website, and type of content.
Note: certain businesses (e.g. news sites, publishing, education, healthcare, medicines, culture, and broadcasting) will need to include further documentation.
It’s worth remembering that the specific documents may vary depending on the province where you apply.
All forms must be completed in Chinese only.
ICP Application Costs
If you are a Chinese national, the application process we list below is free for you. And if you need a commercial license, you must also own a Chinese business entity.
However, if you are NOT Chinese or you do not have a Chinese business entity, that’s where things get tricky. One way of getting an ICP license is to use a “proxy”, which is a business and/or person who can apply for it on your behalf.
Of course, this requires trust because, from your point-of-view, what if the company disappears? What if they require exorbitant renewal fees one year from now? And what happens when the co-operation ends?
Conversely, your business partners may also have concerns about the potential risks of working with you. From their perspective, what if you add illegal content to your website?
This is a bit of a grey area overall, but we’ve seen it work.
Alibaba’s Aliyun service advertises personal ICP “consulting” services for 5,100 to 8,200 USD. They will, presumably, apply for the ICP on your behalf, although they will call it “consulting” just to be safe.
For our clients, we previously charged 700 USD/year for personal ICP applications and 2,200 USD/year for commercial applications. We never sold it as a standalone service because of the potential trust issues. Instead, we sold this as part of an overall marketing solution. The risk was low for us because we were in control of the websites and content.
China Hosting Options for Small Businesses
We’ve tried several different hosting options within China, and the one we keep going back to is “west.cn.” This should give you a decent idea of what it costs to get good-value hosting for a basic website.
The Yunfeng B plan costs 288 Yuan/year and provides the following:
2G of file storage space.
40G of monthly traffic.
500MB database space.
Server supports MySQL, PHP, ASP, Windows, GZip, etc. See the link for a full list.
It’s not expensive at all, but the small storage limit is unusual compared to cheap US hosting plans.
Domain Name Registration
Should you get a .com domain, .cn, or something else?
You don’t really need a .cn domain name, but it can be helpful.
For businesses that already have a .com for their main website, we recommend gettin