China DNS woes

[sthubbar]

Not only is there a Great Firewall of China, there is also the less popular Great DNS of China.

I have some domains registered at smallbusiness.yahoo.com. I thought they were working from within China, without VPN, though it appears I forget that I had hardcoded US based DNS servers, and using China DNS servers they don't seem reachable.

Roddy, I don't see an ICP number on your site, so it doesn't appear you have registered chinese-forums.com with the Chinese authorities?

Any idea why chinese-forums.com is reachable, but YourGuideToChina.com and BlueRiverCompany.com are not?

BlueRiverCompany.com was created over 1 month ago, so I doubt it is due to DNS propogation.

If I were to use GSIhosting.com, like chinese-forums.com, would that make a difference?

Thanks.

[roddy]

Are you hosted on Yahoo? They historically have problems, going back to geocities (ie free hosting) days. Also, avoid hosts which allow adult or gambling sites - China goes after those aggressively and you'll be collateral damage sooner or later.

[sthubbar]

Roddy,

Yes, it is on Yahoo. Darned. I like their Site Builder program.

Who can recommend a hosting provider that provides:

1) Extremely simple website setup/design/templates (concrete5 at Bluehost is harder than I prefer)

2) Accessible from China

3) 100% Support Chinese characters on the simple website setup program/CMS

4) 24/7 Support phone or chat

5) Affordable, around $10/mo

6) Reliable

7) Ability to offer professional services once I get around to hiring professional designers.

Yahoo provides me with all these, except it appears #2!

Thanks.

[Dashu]

I'm asking myself the same question with google hosted sites (google sites, appengine, etc).

Does it have the same problems as yahoo? I'm not talking of blogspot/blog sites.

@sthubbar

Maybe you could try weebly.com but I don't know whether you can access it from China

[roddy]

Avoid free hosting and hosts which accept adult and gambling sites. If possible run the site on its own IP address. That's really all you can do, I think.

[gato]

Google appengine is not blocked at the moment. But there are a lot of people running proxy servers off of it, it could be in the future, if the authorities think it's a big enough threat to the GFW.

[Dashu]

Well I have a site that is hosted on appengine, but is seems that it is blocked in China.

Can anyone in China tell me which of these websites are reachable: www.b-speak.com and b-speak.appspot.com

What are the solutions to handle this? Buying .cn domain?

[jbradfor]

I had hardcoded US based DNS servers

How does one do that? I thought that DNS lookup was only on the client side, how does a website enforce using a certain DNS server?

[gato]

B-speak.appspot.com is not blocked, but b-speak.com appears to be.

[roddy]

He's referring to specifying DNS servers on his own computer, rather than having his site tell people what DNS servers to use (which would be a neat trick, bit like having people call you up to ask for your area code).