How to unblock your website in China.

Recently a few posts popped up about websites being blocked in China at cnreviews and peking duck. Littleredbook, and other sites I run, have been blocked a few times before; to remedy this, I figured out how to unblock using a simple trick.  Now whether this works for you or not, I’m not sure – but I’d put my money on this solving your problems.

So first the theory: When China blocks a site – they do not actually block your site – they block your server. Now many servers house hundreds or even thousands of websites – especially true if you use godaddy or a similar host that services a ton of small websites.

OK, so let’s say you’re on server A and someone on that server writes something the Chinese government doesn’t like. The Chinese will then block that entire server; so that means your unoffending site will also get blocked.

How to solve this problem? Oh so easy… you simply ask your host to switch you from server “A” to server “B” (which isn’t blocked in China – if that doesn’t work – follow the logic and switch your website to sever “C”). I’ve had this happen at least 3 times, one of them recently, and the switch of server clears up the problem within 24 hours.

The host I personally use is icdsoft.com; specifically for small sites (below 200 GB transfer/month) due to their beyond excellent customer service; also I set up a thing with them so you can get a 20% discount if you use my promo code: “littleredbook”.

Important to note is that if you host your blog on a free hosting service (like blogspot) then you will stay blocked; at that point the only thing you can do is move your blog to a new server. You should actually do this anyway – that allows you to build value in your domain – hosting through free sites means all your hard work builds up the value of that free service’s domain – and you can’t take that with you.

Anyway, hope this helps.

EDIT: Here is the actual reply from ICDsoft on this problem:

Hi,

Your account is hosted on a server that is currently listed in the “Great China Firewall”.

All services (web, FTP, mail, etc.) are not available to users from Mainland China. Messages from and to mail servers located in Mainland China will not be delivered.

Unfortunately, the Chinese authorities are not cooperative in resolving similar matters at all.

What we can offer is to have your hosting account moved to a different server free of charge. Once the account is migrated to the new server, users from China will be able to access it.

We will move all your data and settings automatically. The site will be temporarily down during the migration. A short notification will show up to the web visitors during the procedure, informing them that the site is being moved.

You will later need to update the nameservers for your domain to point it to the new location. We will send you the necessary nameserver values via e-mail. You will need to apply the changes at your domain name registrar. We will set custom records on the old machine, pointing all requests to the new server. This way your site will not be down and you will not lose e-mail correspondence during the DNS propagation.

The completion time of the migration may vary, the procedure usually lasts between a few minutes and one hour.

Please let us know if you want us to migrate your account. Post your confirmation here at the time you want us to start the migration procedure.

Thank you.

Best Regards,
Support

Related Posts:

1. China Consumer Profile; “Young Digital Fashionistas” “Young Digital Fashionista” is a young Chinese girl with college education. She has an average yearly income of RMB 63,420 (USD 9,342), which is considered to be a high income in China; this allows her to “spoil” herself. She is...
2. My logo is bigger than your logo! The culture of Chinese consumerism. One billion material girls… for the single man, both a blessing and a curse. China consumes 25% of the world’s luxury goods; this surpasses every country, even the US. When considering its per capita income of USD 2000 (I’m rounding...
3. China’s Copycats; Online vs. Offline. Bizarre Bazaar Kai Pan over at cnreviews.com made one of many interesting comments the other day in reference to China’s SNS copies; it was an excerpt from Gang Lu’s (chief editor of mobinode) presentation at Barcamp Shanghai: simply copycats in...
4. “Sichuan Earthquake Coke Boy”; Profit motivated generosity sparks controversy. A recent post at Chinasmack features a young boy who received a free college education from Coke. Named “Earthquake Coke Boy” by netizens, Xue Xiao became famous when after being rescued from the SiChuan earthquake, the first words he muttered...
5. China Ghetto-Level eCommerce. Here’s something I spotted over the weekend; the series of pics looks like a woman purchasing DVDs; but upon closer inspection I realized it was China ecommerce in action, albeit on a ghetto-level and dealing with “illegal” pirated Nintendo Wii,...

Tagged as: gfc, great firewall of china