ICP filing (网站备案): what it is, and when your site actually needs it
Overview & Key Takeaways
Filing is an administrative step a site takes before a mainland server serves it to the public. It costs nothing. Whether you need it depends on one thing only: where the site is served from.
The confusion is almost always the same one: people ask whether their site needs filing, and go looking for an answer about ownership. The answer is not about ownership. It is about where the site is served from.
What 网站备案 actually is
It is an administrative record. A site that will be served to the public from a server inside mainland China registers itself with the provincial telecommunications administration before it goes live, and receives a filing number that typically sits in the site's footer.
Two things follow, and both surprise people:
- The filing itself is free. The authority does not charge for it. What
people pay for is an agent who fills the paperwork, or a hosting provider that bundles the service — neither of which is the filing.
- It is not a domain registration. A domain can be registered anywhere and
still need — or not need — filing, because filing attaches to the serving location, not to the name.
The one question that decides it
Will the site be served from a server inside mainland China?
If yes, filing applies, whoever owns the site and whatever the domain is. If the site is served from outside mainland China, mainland filing does not apply to it, and the site does not carry a filing number.
That is why "does a personal site need filing?" has no single answer. The same person, with the same domain, gets a different answer depending on where they host it.
What "served from" means, precisely
It means the machine that returns the page to the visitor. For a site on a mainland provider's shared hosting, that is unambiguous. For a site on an edge network, the picture is different: requests are answered by whichever node is nearest, and if none of those nodes is inside mainland China, the page is not served from there.
This is the distinction that matters for platforms rather than servers, and it is why a platform's deployment model is worth checking before assuming either answer. zeso deploys to an offshore edge network, so mainland filing does not apply to a site served from it — and, to be explicit, we do not file on your behalf. If you need filing, you need a mainland host that provides it.
The two deployments, side by side
The choice is not "filing or no filing" — it is where the site is served, and filing follows from that.
| Served from mainland China | Served from outside | |
|---|---|---|
| ICP filing applies | yes | no |
| Who files | the mainland hosting provider, during onboarding | nobody — there is nothing to file |
| Can you file it yourself | no; there is no direct submission channel | — |
| Published before filing | unreachable from mainland China | no gap |
| Reachable from mainland China | yes, once filed | depends on the route; not the same as local |
| What decides the speed | proximity to the mainland node | proximity to an offshore edge node |
That last row is the trade, and it is worth naming rather than burying: an offshore deployment buys the absence of filing and pays for it in the latency a mainland reader sees. Which of those matters more is a question about who your readers are, and the page on what an edge network actually changes is where that comparison is made properly.
When you do need it — and what to do
You need it when the site is served from inside mainland China. In practice that means choosing a mainland hosting provider, because they are the party that files on a customer's behalf as part of onboarding.
The order is: decide where the site is served → if that is inside mainland China, follow that provider's filing process before going live.
Doing it in the other order is what causes the trouble. A site published first and filed afterwards spends the gap unreachable from inside mainland China, which is usually exactly the audience it was built for.
The public safety filing is a different thing
There is a second registration, handled through the public security bureau's own national platform. It is separate from the telecommunications filing, it has its own process, and it is sometimes required in addition. Treat them as two steps, not as two names for one step — conflating them is a common way to arrive at the wrong checklist.
What this page is not
It is not a filing guide, and deliberately so: the process, the materials and the review times belong to the authorities who publish them, and a private page that restated them would be out of date the moment a form changed. What this page can do is answer the question that comes first — does this apply to me? — because that one does not change.
If you are deciding between a mainland host and an offshore one, the hosting pages below take the next step.
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