The Great Firewall of China (GFW) was put in place by the Chinese government in 1998 to block and regulate different parts of the internet.
According to Wikipedia, many websites and online services like Google.com, Gmail, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest are blocked in mainland China.
Today we dive into what this means for hosting your sites on global cloud platforms like that of Kinsta.
Great Firewall of China and cloud platforms
If you’re reading this, you’re probably wondering how cloud platforms is impacted. Kinsta’s cloud platform runs on globally distributed infrastructure and should be accessible within China. In fact, we have many many clients currently targeting China just fine.
However, we also can’t guarantee accessibility as we have zero control over what the Chinese government may choose to block.
Cloud platform providers have publicly stated that they do not restrict traffic originating from China at the platform level. For example, a Google Cloud support representative has previously noted:
Google Cloud Platform does not have a restriction on the traffic coming from China. If you are hosting a website on GCP, traffic coming from users in China will not be blocked.
That being said, Google does not have any control over the GFW blocking methods.
The same goes for our Kinsta CDN, powered by Cloudflare. While we haven’t had any reported issues, we don’t have control over what China could block.
Check your website behind Great Firewall of China
You can use a free tool like WebSitePulse, vpnMentor, Comparitech, or ViewDNS.info to test a website in real-time and check if it’s accessible from China (behind the Great Firewall of China). Remember that accessibility can differ from location to location. Using these tools, you can test your site from the following locations:
- Shanghai, China
- Beijing, China
- Guangzhou, China
- Shenzhen, China
- Inner Mongolia, China
- Heilongjiang Province, China
- Yunnan Province, China
Just enter your website and check for the status. It should show an “OK” if your website is accessible. As you can see below, Kinsta.com hosted on our cloud infrastructure is accessible behind the Great Firewall of China.
Recommendations for sites targeting China
Kinsta has 27 different data centers you can choose from. While there isn’t a location in China, the Osaka, Japan data center is a good choice. You can also use a tool like Cloud ping test to determine the lowest latency data center based on your current physical location.
If you’re experiencing issues, another solution is to try putting your site behind Cloudflare. Due to the fact that this is a reverse proxy, your site gets assigned a different IP address which may have better luck getting through. They also have additional options in China for Cloudflare Enterprise clients.
Brian has a huge passion for WordPress, has been using it for over a decade, and even develops a couple of premium plugins. Brian enjoys blogging, movies, and hiking. Connect with Brian on Twitter.
