Update to “Trapped… behind the gre*t fir*wall of Ch*na”

Trapped… behind the “gr*at fir*wall” of China! at U Tech Tips

So, I learned a lot this week about web hosting… thanks to my experience of having my website blocked from within China. As you may have read in the above post, I was distraught to find my website and blog inaccessible except through proxies due to an apparent block by the Chinese fir*wall. A visit to my tech director’s office confirmed this, as he was able to trace where the block was coming from, and it was indeed a government firewall.

I asked every techie in my school for advice, and began the tedious process of rebuilding my blog from scratch on our school’s server. The greatest disappointment was that I would never be able to fully recover the hundreds of posts and comments from students and other readers that my old blog had accumulated, since I could not log on to download an export file. This obstacle was overcome through a Skype call to a friend in Thailand, who was able to log onto the blog with my username and password, download the export file, and email it to me, which allowed me to salvage a good portion of the posts and comments for upload to my new school hosted blog.

I was still greatly disappointed, however, and did not want to abandon my beloved blog which I had worked for months to fine tune and customize its design and overall feel. I loved that blog, and I did not like the options for customizing my new blog hosted by the school. So I refused to accept defeat… On Thursday, a saving grace presented a potential way to save my blog… in the form of fellow U Tech Tips author Shaun McElroy, author of internationalcounselor.org.

Shaun told me something I never knew, that when you use a web hosting service such as Bluehost you are not actually given your own unique place on the internet, only a domain that is in fact hosted at a shared IP address. This was very significant, because it meant that (despite the somewhat flattering notion) my blog was probably not specifically being blocked by the Chinese, rather some other website hosted at the same IP was being blocked, and mine was therefore inaccessible. Shaun suggested I contact Bluehost and request my blog be given a “dedicated IP”, which would supposedly allow me to regain access to it in China, and prevent the likelihood of it being blocked again as a result of a shared IP address being blocked by the Chinese.

So Thursday night I Skyped Bluehost, and five minutes and $30 on my credit card later I was the proud owner of a dedicated IP address. Immediately my blog was accessible from within China once more. Problem solved! I was shocked how easy the solution was, once I was given the right advice. It took three days of emailing and visiting everyone tech in my school before Shaun suggested this simple solution! Brilliant!

So, if you are hosting your own blog, and have at times found yourself a prisoner trapped behind China’s fir*wall, consider contacting your web hosting service and signing up for a “dedicated IP” address. Forget the proxies like anonymouse.org and proxify.com. These are great for viewing blocked websites, but if you’re a blogger yourself, you need unrestricted access in order to maintain a blog, and a dedicated IP seems to be the way to go!

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