Strikingly is an online platform for building websites and a graduate from the Y Combinator seed accelerator. Strikingly allows users - with little or no development experience - to create mobile optimized websites within minutes. The company takes a mobile-first approach, allowing users to create websites that are enhanced for viewing across all devices including desktops, tablets, and smartphones.

As an international website building platform, obtaining an ICP license for China is very important to our users. The actual process of obtaining an ICP license though is quite complex. With Alibaba Cloud’s built-in and easy-to-follow ICP application process, it has helped with our user experience a lot. Also, we switched from another CDN provider to Alibaba Cloud because the previous CDN network was a bit spotty and can be slow sometimes in some areas. Alibaba Cloud CDN has solved this problem for us.

Strikingly is an international product. To enter the China market, we decided to port and build a fully localized product in China and Alibaba Cloud is one of the top providers for us to choose from. We eventually chose it because it provides the best solution to the problems we were trying to solve. Alibaba Cloud is a leading cloud provider in China and has the biggest potential to become a global leader, so we have the confidence that we can have more integration with Alibaba Cloud in China and globally in the future.

There were two things that impressed me the most. One thing is the smooth ICP application process Alibaba Cloud provides. Our users all use this process to apply for ICP for their own domains, and they all think the process is easy for them. The other thing is the CDN service. We needed a local CDN service to speed up our assets and user sites, and we tried all major CDN providers in China. According to my benchmark result, Alibaba Cloud wins on the number of edge servers, average response time, average download speed in all major ISPs and provinces. It also has developer-friendly API for us to automate our solution.

I can see Alibaba Cloud is very eager to improve itself, which is extremely important in the tech world, and it is moving quite fast. With more and better services provided from Alibaba Cloud, more and more startups can just focus on the product and leverage the latest technologies more easily than ever.