FTP, Proxies, and the Great Firewall

[NewDominion]

Hello all,

As I officially hit the t-minus one-month mark on my countdown to moving to China, one particular loose end continues to aggravate me particularly because I have no blinking clue how to address it. So I was hoping that some of you, since many of you are living in China, may help me address it.

In a nutshell, my personal website is blocked in China. It's completely innocuous, and I think it may have been blocked due to a stated interest in Xinjiang (it's more of an online CV sort of page). Anyways, I'd like to updated and maintain this website of mine while I'm in China, especially since I'll be applying to grad schools at that time, but I'm unsure of how I can go about do that. Both here and elsewhere I've read plenty about getting around the Great Firewall to view sites, but I haven't seen anything that addresses specifically the issue of connecting to the ftp's of blocked sites.

A few details: I'm extremely computer illiterate and am maintaining a website based on a class I took with Dreamweaver, and I use both Dreamweaver's connection utility and Filezilla to connect with and transfer files with my webspace.

In some, does anyone out there have any experience maintaining a blocked website while in China, and can offer some suggestions?

Thanks,

NewDominion

[gato]

Assuming your site is not a blog on blogspot or one of those public sites that are blocked in China, you can try asking your hosting company to move your site to another machine at a different IP address for you. Sometimes that works.

Here's an email I got from icdsoft, my hosting company based in HK, when I asked them about a similar blocking problem.

Dear ____,

I am afraid that currently the server hosting your account for polycrit.com cannot be accessed from Chinese networks.

We had similar problems a year ago and we were able to resolve them with China Telecom. Nevertheless two of our server got blocked several weeks ago and this time China Telecom is not cooperating at all. They deny to have blocked the access to our servers, but it is a fact the no one in China can reach the "blocked" servers.

Unfortunately we will not be able to provide you with any time frame in which the problem would be resolved.

We suggest migrating your account to another server. It will not take more than 20 minutes to move your website to the new server. There will be no downtime. The propagation of the new DNS will not affect the uptime of polycrit.com since we will set manually custom DNS records on the old server.

Please let us know how you would like to proceed further.

I would like also to request from you to contact your ISP in China about the connectivity problem that you experience and ask them for assistance on the issue. If you manage to obtain any information about these blocks, we will greatly appreciate if you share the details with us. Thank you!

Best Regards,

Abuse Team

[NewDominion]

Thanks for your reply, Gato. Actually, after I posted this request I found this exact post you are referring to with the search tool, and I sent a similar letter to my host (bluehost). Being a good company, they advised me to consider getting an independent IP address for $30 a year. Ah well, I think I'll do it, an extra $2.50 a month ain't so bad. And if after I get a new IP address the gov blocks my site again, I guess that's the point where I give up and start trying crazy SSH tunnels and Linux and what not.

Anyways, thanks for your advice! It's the most helpful lead I've gotten so far.

[Fireblade]

There are many ways around this problem, but for an easy life, carry on what you are doing and put your site where you can see it easily.

I've often had the problem that I know how to proxy to see my site, but friends in China don't know how or can't be bothered, thus making your content non-viewable to many of the people that want to see it!

[gato]

Being a good company, they advised me to consider getting an independent IP address for $30 a year.

Ask them to move your account to a machine with a different IP first. Maybe that'll do the trick. If that doesn't work, you can then ask for your own IP address. You're probably being blocked because another site that you're sharing the server with has some "naughty" contents.

[Justin Goldberg]

TOR should work in china. Using filezilla directly with TOR works, by using the socks-4a protocol within filezilla. Just google for 'torify filezilla' for the goods.

Also there is the psiphon network.

[liuzhou]

When my blog was blocked, I was still able to maintain it via Tor. Bizarelly, the number of hits actually rose.

Anyway, it is no longer blocked.

[NewDominion]

Liuzhou, was your site blocked when blog-city.com as a whole was blocked, or was it blocked specifically with other blog-city blogs still being accessible at the time?

[liuzhou]

Liuzhou, was your site blocked when blog-city.com as a whole was blocked

Yes. They have never blocked my site individually. I try to upset them, but I'm clearly far too nice!

My website has never been blocked.