Alibaba Cloud — full stack for China compliance

When to choose this#

• Users primarily in mainland China — latency matters
• ICP filing required
• Already in the Aliyun ecosystem
• Data must stay on-shore

Architecture#

Sizing (mid prod)#

Resource	Spec	Monthly (annual)
ECS × 3	ecs.c7.xlarge (4C8G)	¥350 × 3
RDS PG	2C4G HA	¥600
Redis	HA 1G	¥120
SLB	on-demand	~¥120
OSS	100GB + traffic	~¥50
Total		~¥1990/mo

Step 1 — ICP filing#

If you use a China ECS + public domain, ICP filing is mandatory:

1. Aliyun Console → Beian → New filing
2. Upload business license / ID, domain info, formal site name like “Customer Support System”
3. Approval takes 15-30 days

Step 2 — networking#

aliyun vpc CreateVpc --VpcName ai-support --CidrBlock 10.0.0.0/16
aliyun ecs CreateSecurityGroup --SecurityGroupName ai-sg
# Restrict RDS to internal VPC ingress only

Step 3 — deploy#

# On each ECS
curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sh
git clone https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot
# Edit .env, DATABASE_URL → RDS internal endpoint
docker compose -f docker-compose.production.yaml up -d

Step 4 — HTTPS#

• Free DV cert via Aliyun Certificate Service
• Configure on SLB: Listener → HTTPS → select cert
• Force 80 → 443 redirect

Step 5 — monitoring#

• CloudMonitor collects ECS / RDS / Redis metrics automatically
• Alerts: CPU > 80%, memory > 85%, RDS connections > 70%
• Notify via DingTalk or SMS

Gotchas#

• ICP number must appear in site footer (linked to beian.miit.gov.cn)
• Email deliverability — Postmark / SES often spam-filter into China; prefer Aliyun DirectMail or Tencent Mail
• OSS CORS — Chatwoot attachment uploads to OSS need correct CORS config
• RDS charset must be utf8mb4 or Chinese emojis break