Is your website accessible from China and features of Chinese hosting?
Everyone heard about the Great Chinese Firewall, but not everyone saw it. Can I order hosting in China? What limitations can you face? How to check if a specific website is opening from China? About this all - under the cut.
It all started with the fact that servers in as many countries as possible were needed for the HostTracker monitoring network. At least in all the big ones. For what? Greater reach, SEO, marketing and so on. But in the case of China there was a special reason - it is well known that in China the Internet is “special”. To give a chance to feel these features personally is quite an interesting task.
Search for information, in fact, did not give as much as we would like. The general description, the best of which I found, was found here, on Habré . I will not repeat the things described there, but I will try to add. In short, for the acquisition of a domain and / or hosting in China, you must obtain a special license to operate on the Internet. Our need was to get 1-2 servers or even just virtual hosting in order to just be able to see the world through the eyes of a Chinese. We did not count on any serious exhaust from this, it was more a question of prestige for us. Accordingly, there is no desire to establish a legal entity in China (by the way, a similar condition applies in some European countries) and to contact only a dozen different institutions to successfully complete the procedure. However, I note that all this is really quite quickly (but not very cheap) to be done via the Internet to those who really need it.
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Therefore, we decided to look for workarounds - which, according to rumors, existed. Here, everyone gets out as they can. For example, there are hosting sites on which you can place scripts and programs for linking, proxy checkers, parsers, and the like, but apart from hosting sites, and with quite biting prices. At prices, by the way, the spread is very large - from kopecks to something cosmic, with approximately the same parameters. This is still a secret for me, but the problem with the license is the same regardless of the price. If we needed a Chinese domain, we would not have gone anywhere. But we were completely satisfied with the IP access for our tasks, so there was hope, and it was finally realized thanks to the collaboration with MaxiDed . As I understand it, when renting multiple servers, the control over everyone by the authorities is no longer so strict - as long as there is no prohibited content.
The opportunity to see how the world looks from China. For example, make sure Google is really unavailable :
At the same time, the Chinese analogue of google baidu.com works quite well for itself, as expected. And, interestingly, it redirects requests from China to another address than requests from outside:
Thus, we see that the Chinese analogue of Roskomnadzor does not sleep. By the way, we also have something interesting about Roskomnadzor itself.
Another interesting fact is that there is a big delay for requests to China. Therefore, even our servers do not always respond on time. However, some sites work as if nothing had happened . It inclines me to the idea that this delay is of a piece nature. Some sites are banned for good, and others - just in case are hung with “brakes”. Or vice versa - for the elect there is a separate channel. The truth here, too, failed to dig down.
We continue to work on expanding the monitoring network. If you have any comments or suggestions, we always welcome a constructive discussion.
It all started with the fact that servers in as many countries as possible were needed for the HostTracker monitoring network. At least in all the big ones. For what? Greater reach, SEO, marketing and so on. But in the case of China there was a special reason - it is well known that in China the Internet is “special”. To give a chance to feel these features personally is quite an interesting task.
Mysterious East as it is
Search for information, in fact, did not give as much as we would like. The general description, the best of which I found, was found here, on Habré . I will not repeat the things described there, but I will try to add. In short, for the acquisition of a domain and / or hosting in China, you must obtain a special license to operate on the Internet. Our need was to get 1-2 servers or even just virtual hosting in order to just be able to see the world through the eyes of a Chinese. We did not count on any serious exhaust from this, it was more a question of prestige for us. Accordingly, there is no desire to establish a legal entity in China (by the way, a similar condition applies in some European countries) and to contact only a dozen different institutions to successfully complete the procedure. However, I note that all this is really quite quickly (but not very cheap) to be done via the Internet to those who really need it.
')
Therefore, we decided to look for workarounds - which, according to rumors, existed. Here, everyone gets out as they can. For example, there are hosting sites on which you can place scripts and programs for linking, proxy checkers, parsers, and the like, but apart from hosting sites, and with quite biting prices. At prices, by the way, the spread is very large - from kopecks to something cosmic, with approximately the same parameters. This is still a secret for me, but the problem with the license is the same regardless of the price. If we needed a Chinese domain, we would not have gone anywhere. But we were completely satisfied with the IP access for our tasks, so there was hope, and it was finally realized thanks to the collaboration with MaxiDed . As I understand it, when renting multiple servers, the control over everyone by the authorities is no longer so strict - as long as there is no prohibited content.
What we have as a result
The opportunity to see how the world looks from China. For example, make sure Google is really unavailable :
At the same time, the Chinese analogue of google baidu.com works quite well for itself, as expected. And, interestingly, it redirects requests from China to another address than requests from outside:
Thus, we see that the Chinese analogue of Roskomnadzor does not sleep. By the way, we also have something interesting about Roskomnadzor itself.
Another interesting fact is that there is a big delay for requests to China. Therefore, even our servers do not always respond on time. However, some sites work as if nothing had happened . It inclines me to the idea that this delay is of a piece nature. Some sites are banned for good, and others - just in case are hung with “brakes”. Or vice versa - for the elect there is a separate channel. The truth here, too, failed to dig down.
We continue to work on expanding the monitoring network. If you have any comments or suggestions, we always welcome a constructive discussion.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/315832/
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