why is it so hard to open this website?

[rezaf]

I don't know if others in China have the same problem but for me recently it has been getting more and more difficult to open this website, sometimes I need to press the refresh button many times to open it and sometimes it is just impossible.

[jbradfor]

I've been having issues with google-analytics.com for many many sites. Just like you, the site never appears, then I press refresh, and here it is. In all those cases, the URL it is waiting on involves google-analytics.com. I think this site uses that as well, perchance you are seeing this problem as well?

[imron]

Yeah, I'm guessing it's either that or the facebook/twitter login stuff.

If you are using windows, what you can do is disable google-analytics.com (or any other domain that you don't really care about) by editing your 'hosts' file.

This is a file can be found in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Simply add a line:

127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com

and any domain name requests for google-analytics.com will be redirected to your local machine, and will instantly fail.

If you notice any other domains that it's pausing on, add similar lines for those in the hosts file.

Either that or look at getting a VPN or setting up a proxy.

I've been using one for basically most of my web-browsing on my current visit to China, not to get around blocks, but just because it seems to speed up loading times of the pages I mostly visit.