On a recent trip to China, I was having trouble accessing this site: immigrationroad.com which was hosted here in the US. Always saw the dreaded "page cannot be displayed, server or DNS error, blah blah." Actually it showed up the first time, then never again. I randomly checked a few other websites on the same server, but had the same problem. This was using ADSL with reasonable connection speed, over a period of a few weeks. What could be the problem? Any way to debug the issues? Thanks for any pointers.
Its called the Great Firewall of China. They censor the internet and most sites are blocked. If you are able to get through once and not again it means that the content of your site was seen and blocked there after. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/ -- inaccurate, see later post for a more accurate test
As it turns out the greatfirewallofchina.org site is broken. I did find another one though. http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html
Yeah, its reporting almost all sites as blocked. According to the link on wikipedia its been down since September. I was thinking the same thing seeing that I coudln't get some fairly well known Chinese sites to work. The later link I gave is showing more accurate results.
I was actually afraid of that, but hoped it wasn't the real issue because the site is mere informational and I don't see any reason for it to be blocked by a government. Oh well.
Its not just China....singapore, thailand...most asian countries impose strict content control rules... And of course for the sake of catch-all, blocking keywords unfortunately result in the prevention of universally legal content from being viewed.