The Great Firewall of China

Hi jacksonlin,

You will need to have seperate websites. You need a website hosted inside China for all domestic traffic and a server hosted outside of China for the rest of the world. Getting information in or out of China can be spotty at best.

China is famous for their great walls, both virtual and real world.

Huh?

I was in China this past summer for six weeks and I was able to touch, tweak,
and update my blogs. Not one issue ocurred with my sites. I also logged in
and checked my AdSense and GMail accounts.

And my sites are hosted in the good ole US of A.

I would love to live there and work since it would cost less than $500/mth.

The only stipulation you could encounter is if you have religious websites
or sites that go against Chinese society (at least in the Gov'ts opinion).

As far as the Chinese is concerned, none of my students are having a problem
because they keep FaceBooking me.

One other note. If you can hook up with a English speaking Chinese that
can write then you will have a VERY affordable outsourcer. hint...hint...

Buddy

There are no simple answers for this. Sites get blocked at times, and there are no good reasons for it.

When we lived there, we had to move hosting twice, because of our sites being blocked. We finally hosted them with hostgator and it was fine until March last year when they once again got blocked.

Remember it might not be a problem with your site, but the hosting company. If you are on a shared hosting package, it could be that there is a religious site, gambling or porn hosted on the same site.

Also the rules change and you site might be blocked today, but access is available tomorrow.

China loves google now, so make sure you set up a gmail account, and then forward all your business mail to it, so you always have access to that.

With sites like google which has a local portal you can use those easily inside of China. Hosting could be as simply as hosting with yahoo which isn't the cheapest option.

We ran our business from inside China for 3 years without any problem, it was only when we moved to HK that our sites became blocked there again.

I am also wondering why I don't have any visitor from china considering that China is second to US in internet user population...

jacksonlin

I tested quite a few of my sites and they passed. Bev is correct. Sometimes they will work and sometimes they won't. Restricting sites based upon IP address or hosts makes sense because it is a quick fix to a problem they have discovered.

In each of the major cities they have monitoring stations. Think of them like Google's data centers, except they do not have many of them. But they do monitor the traffic.

IF (and that is a big if) see, catch, or smell a problem with a site they can easily add it to their proxy list to bounce and even track.

Someone mentioned Olympic, no. I have been going to China for four years now and will go again this summer and the access will be the same. They don't block Facebook because many of my students use that to communicate with me.

One more thing. I worked at special locations (which I cant mention) but security was left up to that location. Many times, they avoid using dhcp servers just so they can control the user. BE CAREFUL, if you tweak your settings. They do use low tech security for some locations. I like looking but I never alter.

They have an unbelievable base of users accessing the internet and monitoring each and everyone is impossible. Scare tactics at its beast. They use their bright minds for analyzing bigger targets like USA, UK and other western countries.

Sorry for the tangent. At any rate, Bev's experiences sounds VERY reasonable.

Buddy

Buddy as you say you could access adwords and gmail and that's because there is a local portal in China for Google.

I don't know where you were for the cost of living to be $500 a month, but where we were our apartment was like $175 a month, and we could live on less than $100.

Access to the internet from inside China was restricted because of the Olympics, and in the last few months (since Oct) a lot more sites have been restricted or banned in China.

I have been going to China for 9 years, and we lived there for just over 3 years and are now based in HK but still go back to China, and have a lot of friends there.

Hey Bev,

Yeah the $500 was an about cost factoring in Food, transportation and other stuff. If I could talk my wife into living there we would.

I have been going to Xi'an, Shanghai, Beijing and my favorite spot in Xining up on the Tibetian Plateau. I teach English as a send language and work with High Schoolers as well as College kids. They are awesome and really soak up the conversational nuiances of our language as well as our Culture.

My dream is to have a decent IM business that enables me to work there at any time that I can go.

Buddy

I would step back and look at it from a bigger picture point of view. Where are you? A Hotel, School, private residence, appt complex, business, or accross the street from a gov't building. Or maybe even in a highly concentrated gov't area.

Have you tried accessing the sites from an internet cafe? Gotta be careful there because some believe those are watch stations.

Also, be careful who you ask and how often you ask. It is still a communist country.

I use HostGator and like I said no issues. I have about 20 IPs and all passed this summer.

Sorry I can't be of more help. If anything comes to mind I will post back or PM you.

Buddy

Sounds like China is a difficult place to make money online
I might stay out of it