Route Party Buy the route, not the specs

Ordinary International Transit

No optimisation, but cheap

International backbone multi-hop
2.4Peak hour
3.0Speed
4.3Value

An ordinary international egress with no optimisation for mainland visitors. Most cheap European and American VPS plans land here: inexpensive, generous bandwidth, and peak-hour behaviour depends on whichever backbone you happen to be routed over that evening — something you cannot know in advance, and that nobody tells you before you pay.

Think of it as:Like a national road with no motorway

Who it suits

Learning, simple sites, downloads, backups — anything where latency does not matter.

How to verify it

Always run a peak-hour mtr (20:00–23:00) against the test IP before paying, and look at packet loss and the return-path nodes. "International routing", a "1 Gbps port" and "unlimited traffic" say nothing about optimisation.

Peak-hour testing guide →

Questions

Are European boxes too far for mainland users?

Physically, yes: latency usually lands between 180 and 260 ms. But cheap plans are rarely bought to win a first-paint contest — downloads, backups and practice boxes barely care about latency. For low latency, pick Hong Kong or Japan.

Why do you not just call these 163?

163 is the name of China Telecom's own backbone, and it is only safe to write after tracing the return path. We did not trace every one of these vendors, so we write "ordinary international transit" instead. Dressing up the unknown as the known is the easiest mistake this kind of content makes.

Vendors on this route

Tencent Cloud Lighthouse

¥45per month, entry plan (¥459/yr)checked 2026-10-30The entry plan: 2 vCPU, 2 GB, a 40 GB SSD, 3 Mbps and a 200 GB monthly traffic bundle, at ¥459 a year (85% of the monthly rate). Bandwidth and traffic come bundled; overage follows the vendor's own rules.

Domestic Hosting · Ordinary International Transit

Tencent's Lighthouse. The official FAQ lists the regions: five mainland cities, Hong Kong, and overseas nodes in Singapore, Silicon Valley, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Seoul and more. Bandwidth and traffic come bundled, which is enough for a small site. Mainland locations require ICP filing.

The shortlist also lists 29 more operators on this route, without a page of their own. See the full shortlist →

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