I am writing to share my experience with Alibaba Cloud ( Aliyun ).
Anti-DDOS :
Their Aniti-DDOS plan is not the same as other popular global service provider ,i.e. Cloudflare, Incapsula, Akamai … Their plan is counted based on the amount of traffic to be handle, i.e. if you buy a plan with 3 times of 100Gbps defense. If an attack has over 100Gbps bandwidth, they will put your IP to black hole or you ask them to use your second quota or after your 300Gbps attack traffic is over. Traffic to your IP will be forward to black hole again until you buy a new plan from them. This is not flexible and you cannot tell how much antiddos traffic you need . My suggestion is to go with cloudflare who has local present in China too. For oversea, you may have much more choice.
International bandwidth:
China is lack of international bandwidth, i.e if you host in China Alibaba cloud and you customer is out of china, they will have difficulty ( network is jam ) to access the resource in your China Alibaba cloud. Moreover, the Great Wall of China is also a hidden barrier ( as China government never admits that they have such great wall ) which will block your traffic to/ from oversea with/without any reasons. My suggest is to subscribe to an CDN which can partial passthrough the wall. I have worked with Akamai, CDNetworks and ChinaCache. They are working well most of the time in this area.
China local bandwdith:
Due to historical reason, China is so big. The two main ISP, China Telecom (CT) and China Unicom (CU) occupy most of the market but they don’t have good inter-connection, i.e. if you are using CT but your customers are using CU. Your customers may not has a stable connection to your service. Therefore, whenever you choose a cloud service provider, you have to ask them if they have both CT and CU connection which all both CT and CU customers to reach you. I believe most of the Alibaba cloud nodes do have that but if you are using some locations out of Beijing and Shanghai, you are better to ask clearly about that.
In general, Alibaba Cloud is learning from AWS. In beginning, their interface are over 90% similar. And those service name are similar too, i.e. EC2 , RDS … so if you are AWS user, you don’t have problem in using Alibaba cloud with some general service.
P.S. For hosting website in China, you need to have ICP registration. If you are from other countries, you may not be able to go through the registration process. Some CDN, i.e. Chinacace, CDNetworks do have some services to help you on that.