I recently had a client who told me that his Chinese customers could not access his website. He asked me if it was because the site is hosted in the USA.

The answer is basically, no.
Whether or not a site is block by the Great Firewall of China (GFW) has nothing to do with the country of hosting and everything to do with the IP address.
As best as I can ascertain, it goes something like this.

The party censorship pigs will block any site which they deem to contain material detrimental (even tangentially) to the Chinese Communist Party. The way they do this is by blocking at the IP address level.
A crude tool indeed.

As we know, most websites in the world are hosted on Shared Hosting Accounts so if an IP address gets red flagged it could potentially impact hundreds of other sites hosted on the same server, using the same IP address.

To check whether your site is blocked in China you can use any of these three ping services:
http://www.watchmouse.com/en/ping.php
http://www.just-ping.com/index.php
http://www.websitepulse.com/help/tes...hina-test.html

Assuming that there is nothing in the nature of your website content itself that is
going to raise a concern, the solution is simply to get a dedicated IP address for your hosting account. It might cost an extra $30 a year or so. Small potatoes.
That should sidestep any fallout from "bad neighbors" on your server.

If THAT doesn't work, the only other solution I can think of is to try a CDN caching service with nodes inside the PRC such as:
http://www.chinacache.com/
http://www.cdnetworks.com/

It should be noted that this will also give performance benefits.
Anecdotally it sounds like the GFW does impact performance on accessing foreign websites from within the PRC.

Hosting on a server within China is realistically NOT an option unless you are willing to
a) wade through an ocean of red tape AND
b) wait several weeks AND
c) find a local Chinese partner (probably).

Any website hosted within the PRC MUST have an Internet Content Provider License (ICP License) from the Chinese Authorities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license
Good luck with getting one of those.



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Originally Posted by vultren

I want to get ON that list actually... save some bandwidth!! Does India do anything like this? If so, I'd pay for that... save some spam!!

Spam from India? Nooo... Never heard of such thing.

Thank you TWD, very interesting and informative, especially for Webmasters and Clients! And I want to thank you again for taking your time with the content and the links you provided!

If I remember rightly back a few years ago, Google was the first search engine allowed into China, however China would be monitoring what would be showing up on Google for the Chinese people, which I figured was still in place.

Apparently I have a dedicated IP address because I checked myself on the links you provided, but a dedicated IP address could be a problem for some people.

Originally Posted by Giselle

Thank you TWD, very interesting and informative, especially for Webmasters and Clients! And I want to thank you again for taking your time with the content and the links you provided!

If I remember rightly back a few years ago, Google was the first search engine allowed into China, however China would be monitoring what would be showing up on Google for the Chinese people, which I figured was still in place.

Apparently I have a dedicated IP address because I checked myself on the links you provided, but a dedicated IP address could be a problem for some people.

Just to clarify, I'm not saying that you absolutely NEED to be on a dedicated IP address to be accessible in China. Most people on shared IP addresses may well be fine.

It's just that if you are on a shared IP address then you run the risk of being blocked in China because somebody else on the same IP may have incurred the wrath of the Chinese "Thought Police".

To create an analogy.
It's a bit like living in a shared house and one of the members is caught selling drugs. So the police decide to charge everyone in the house whether they were involved or not.
If you lived in a neighboring single apartment you would not be charged.

Originally Posted by Giselle

If I remember rightly back a few years ago, Google was the first search engine allowed into China, however China would be monitoring what would be showing up on Google for the Chinese people, which I figured was still in place.

If you visit China and do a Google Image search for "Tiananmen Square"
you won't find the famous iconic image of the Lone Protester vs Tanks anywhere.
http://blog.cleveland.com/world_impa...1989-June5.jpg

Big Brother is watching

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq8zF...eature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDKVE...eature=related


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Thank you for supplying the links, this footage I haven't seen before. That was one brave soul, I expected to see the gentleman shot from someone inside the tank.

I am optimistic for the Chinese people, it takes time for changes to occur, unfortunately a lot lives were lost.

More info just fyi re the Great Firewall

The firewall system blocks website content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through and consists of standard firewall and proxy servers at the Internet gateways of China's ISPs. The banning of websites is mostly uncoordinated and ad-hoc, with some web sites being blocked from one city and the same web sites being allowed from other cities and vice versa.

see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interne...ublic_of_China

I did read the article link you supplied, the information wasn't a surprise for me.

Here's my opinion and what I have observed over the years with the computer and the internet. When the internet was opened to the public in some countries, the consensus back when, we were all coming together from different countries to talk to each other, share and learn from each other, the different cultures, ideas, etc.

Since that period of time, the internet has exploded with online colleges, small and large businesses, etc., plus more and more countries now have online access.

Before the computer world, we had the exchange students, families moving out of their country into another country, and now could see how the rest of the world lives, only to communicate back to their other relatives and friends. But the computer world really has been the biggest communication of all for what goes on worldwide.

That's why I am optimistic, but change can take awhile, it's changing old ideas along with some other factors (I could be blunt, but we will leave it at that), but change also has to come from within.

Originally Posted by ddoscloudcom

You should definitely update your domain/network and see what happens.
Either that's the domain blocked or the subnetwork, which is easily resolved by moving to a new host.

You didnt read the post, did you.

QUESTION

What do they mean when it says Packets Lost (100%)?

I have done a test or two with some of the above websites, and found them fun to play with. But, what does it mean when you get that message

Originally Posted by chrishirst

0% of packets were responded to.

Sorry, I need more information please.

Originally Posted by TRANZIT JIM

QUESTION

What do they mean when it says Packets Lost (100%)?

I have done a test or two with some of the above websites, and found them fun to play with. But, what does it mean when you get that message

It means your are loosing all data being transfered from point A to point B.

If you are using Windows, go to cmd and type ipconfig /all.
If you are using Linux open a terminal and type ifconfig -a.

The output may help to see where the problem might be, if it is a local network issue.

Also have you tried running traceroute?

Also try using a proxy service to reach your destination.

First thing I'd do would be to fire up traceroute and see where on their journey the packets are being dropped. Start whoising IPs to see who they belong to. Try pinging nearby IPs as well.

Some routers are set to ignore/drop pings. See if you can access other services hosted on the destination network.

Trying pinging from elsewhere. Also try and find a looking glass hosted on the destination network.

The problem with shared hosting is that your neighbours can affect you. That's not to say that using a VPS or dedicated hosting avoids that problem. A previous user of your IP could've spammed etc, and gotten your IP on blacklists. Any respectable provider will work with you and the blacklist people to get the IP removed from the blacklist.

It's a pity that China has blocked lots of good websites. It's very inconvenient for Internet users to read and find information online when now everything is open on the Internet. This is a headache. But China still has a long way to go.

It doesn't surprise me.
China has blocked many websites because of their ideology.

I think nothing can be done in this case.

Why do you expect from such a totalitarian state?!

You can't do anything with blocking the website over there.