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 Kinsta.
Great Firewall of China and cloud platforms
If you’re reading this, you’re probably wondering how cloud platforms are impacted. Kinsta’s cloud platform runs on globally distributed infrastructure and does not block traffic originating from China. In fact, we have many clients successfully target users in China.
However, we also can’t guarantee accessibility as no international hosting provider has control over what the Chinese government may choose to block.
The same goes for our Kinsta CDN, powered by Cloudflare. While many customers successfully serve traffic to China, 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 offers 27 global data centers locations. While there is no data center inside mainland China, customers targeting users in China often select locations geographically closer to the region to reduce latency.
The closest Kinsta data center locations to Hong Kong and mainland China are:
- Batam, Indonesia (ap-batam-1)
- Singapore (ap-singapore-1)
- Osaka, Japan (ap-osaka-1)
- Tokyo, Japan (ap-tokyo-1)
- Seoul, South Korea (ap-seoul-1)
- Mumbai, India (ap-mumbai-1)
Actual performance depends on ISP routing and regional network conditions, so we recommend testing latency from your specific audience location before choosing a data center.
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.
