Access in China and a Solution

Several years ago I renewed my website and in the process I changed the hosting account. This resulted in the website being moved from one server to another and being assigned a new IP address.

This is all well and good unless your website shares an IP address with a website that China doesn’t like. China using their filtering software will simply block that IP address, thereby blocking that website and solving their problem. Unfortunately doing this also blocks the other websites sharing that IP address. This was the situation I found myself in when I renewed my hosting account. The new IP address was blocked by China and therefore my website was not accessible. Considering my content this was amounted to a show-stopper issue.

I decided to deal with this issue recently as it clearly wasn’t going to go away on it’s own. I tried to get the hosting company to move my site or allow me to change servers, essentially anything to give me a new IP address, unfortunately there was nothing they could do. Eventually I discovered that my viable solution short of changing hosting companies would be to move to a dedicated IP address where my site would be assigned it’s own IP address.

So, for a dollar or two a month my site not sits on a dedicated IP and is once again fully accessible in China. It would have been nice to come up with a free solution, but I just view it as a part of doing business in China. Sure I can eat out every night , hire a maid and taxi everywhere, but I can’t order books from Amazon, I need a VPN to access Facebook and my site needs a dedicated IP address.