The Great Firewall of China has several different ways of blocking websites, so your website’s availability may change over time. If you have a front-page report about Tiananmen Square, you might find your website blocked, only to find it unblocked after the report vanishes from your front page. Another website might have had its DNS records tampered with or might see any connections ended by the firewall itself, no matter what the website’s current content is.

Great Firewall Of China

In spite of its name, the Great Firewall’s policies can be patchwork and inconsistently applied. Websites blocked in one region may not be blocked in another region. Great Firewall Of China is the quickest way to check your website’s availability at different locations in China.

Enter a website address and the service will send it to five different servers in China. Each server tries to access the website and shows a success or failure message.

It’s simple and quick, but this service has some drawbacks. You can only test homepages and not individual subpages. When I tried to specify a subpage on a website, I received an error message. The service also only checks if a website responds – the Great Firewall could re-route website requests to another web server and you’d be none the wiser.

WebsitePulse

WebsitePulse is useful because it lets you check specific subpages. The Great Firewall doesn’t only block websites, it also filters individual pages based on forbidden words and phrases in their URLs or content. WebsitePulse also offers different regions of China. Both Great Firewall Of China and WebsitePulse can test from Beijing, but the other locations are different.

Plug in a webpage address and you can see whether or not it’s accessible. WebsitePulse can only check one location in China at a time.

The English Wikipedia looks available. We’d get the same results if we tested it on Great Firewall Of China.

Further investigation reveals that some parts of the website are being blocked. Here, the Wikipedia page on the Great Firewall itself is inaccessible. Note how it says “Failure in Receiving Network Data” instead of providing a clear “Blocked” message. The Great Firewall does not inform users when it blocks a website; blocked requests just appear as network errors. The results from Seattle help clarify this – Wikipedia itself isn’t down; it just appears down in China when you access this page.

ViewDNS

ViewDNS checks for DNS poisoning. One tactic the Great Firewall uses is redirecting website addresses to other websites. For example, an Internet user in China might be redirected to Baidu, a search engine based in China, when they try to access Google. This subterfuge will show up as your website loading successfully in other tools. Another tactic is just changing a website’s DNS entry and pointing it nowhere – the website won’t load at all.

Enter an website’s address to see the expected IP address and whether it matches with the IP address returned from DNS servers in China. ViewDNS also tries to access the website in different regions and informs you whether or not it was successful.

Note how each different region points Facebook’s website to a different IP address — none of them load anything, but this prevents access to Facebook. It’s also interesting that the server in Inner Mongolia received a timeout rather than an incorrect IP address — is this because Facebook is being blocked differently in that region, or because of a legitimate network problem? That’s the thing about the Great Firewall: it’s hard to tell whether the firewall is interfering or whether there’s an actual network problem.

Bypassing The Great Firewall

Is your website blocked in China? You may be wondering how to unblock it. Unfortunately, there’s no appeal process. The most you can do is remove blacklisted words and content and hope that helps. There’s no official list of blacklisted content, either – Kafkaesque, isn’t it? The Great Firewall blocks by IP address, so multiple websites may be blocked if they share an IP address with a flagged website.

The good news is that the Great Firewall doesn’t block encrypted traffic. There’s no way to inspect encrypted traffic and businesses require encryption for security, so blocking it isn’t an option. This means that any foreign VPN service or proxy server can be used to bypass the great firewall. If you’re in China, you can tunnel out of the Great Firewall of China with a VPN or proxy server and access the full Internet.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Luckily, I have a resource for you that can conduct a domain name search for those which were recently released or deleted. People forget to renew domains or companies go out of business. With JustDropped, we can which domains have become available in the last day, week or even hour.

The site is very easy to use but it does require registration. But as always, you can check out BugMeNot for a user name and password. If you will be using this service constantly, I suggest registering for your own set of credentials.

Once you are logged in, you will see this on your screen:

As you can see, the search engine has lots of available options. I started with filling in the “Domain should contain” field and put in a word I wanted in my domain name. Then, I chose the check box that says “contains only words”. Next, I made the maximum length 15 characters and then I clicked on the Domain Availability drop-down list.

I like to use Deleted so that I can see what I can buy right now. Choose your extensions that you want to search for, I strictly use .com. So my options looked like this:

Finally, hit the Show The Domains! button at the bottom and you will see the results from the domain name search on screen, like so:

It pulled up a list with more than 2000 items, and that is the maximum number of results displayed. But what I like to do is create a search and then have JustDropped email me a text file with all the names. I can then go through them in Excel. To do this, all you have to do is click this button at the bottom of your results page:

That emails me a list that looks something like this:

To me, this is an invaluable domain name search tool. They even offer some more paid services besides domain searching. But we won’t go into that here. Do you have a free tool you use to help you find domain names? If you do we would love to hear about it in the comments!

Haven’t got a clue for your new domain name? Check out 6 Domain Generators To Find That Killer Domain Name. From our directory, take a look at DomainTyper and BustaName.

If one site uses too many resources or a bad piece of code, it can crash the server taking down every site with it which in some cases can be thousands of websites. Wouldn’t it be useful if you could see what other kind of sites were on the same server as you?

You Get Signal has just the tool for this. It’s called a “Reverse IP Domain Check” and it takes a site URL or IP address and tells you all or many of the domains pointing to that server. This is a good way to check to see if your webhost or ISP is overselling or if there are very high traffic sites on the same server as you. By using this tool, you can see whether or not that $2 per month hosting plan based out of some guy’s basement in Russia is worth it or not. You will save yourself hours or potentially weeks or months of frustration from crashing sites and slow loading pages.

Although the “Reverse IP Domain Check” is an extremely useful tool for website owners, YouGetSignal.com also offers other utilities, some unique and some common. They offer the popular WHOIS Lookup Tool so you can check out who owns and manages a domain name, Phone Number Geolocator to find where a call originated, Port Forwarding Test to see if a port or ports are insecure on your computer, Visual Trace Route Tool to visualize the route of network traffic, and the nifty Network Location Tool to locate a physical network on a Google Map. YouGetSignal was originally created as a project from a Brigham Young University student but in my opinion is a very helpful collection of web tools in network and website management.

What web services or applications do you use to manage your networks or websites? Let us know in the comments.

(By) Nick Volpe is a freelance blogger and web guru from techNETWORK.US, a provider of tech news, open source software, web development tools, useful tips, as well as podcasts, tech videos, and much more.

WhoIsTheOwner – This service lets you quickly lookup who is the owner of the website. Such services also known as WhoIS lookup tools.

MyIpNeighbors – Ever wondered which other websites are hosted on the same server as yours? MyIpNeighbors can help you out. Not only can it give you a good idea idea about how crowded (reliable) your server is, but also explore the overall quality of ‘neighboring’ websites.

BuiltWith – Unlike the above tools, BuiltWith focuses on the website itself. With the help of BuiltWith you can instantly lookup all implemented technologies behind any website (Google, Digg, Reddit, Youtube, yourdomain.com, etc.). If you ever plan to replicate some website, this is the tool you need. Among other things, it will aso give you a basic SEO profile.

Did we miss something? Please share it in comments.

Website Grader – Free seo is a tool that measures the marketing effectiveness and popularity of a website. Find out things like website traffic, its popularity on social bookmarking networks (Digg, del.icio.us, …), incoming link count, and lots of other relevant factors. It also provides some basic tips on how the website can be improved.

Just type in your URL, primary keywords, competing websites (shhhh! you can check up on them too) and the email address where you want them to send the Full Report!. And a FULL REPORT is exactly what they will send, too! It’s very informative, and gives you a ton of ideas on how you can make your site better. So, pour yourself a stiff one, then sit down and check it out!

And while you’re at it, you may also take a look at their report on SEO Capabilities of the Top 20 Bloggers.

SEOMOZ -Page Strength – Similar to WebsiteGrader but takes a slightly different approach. Instead of giving the effectiveness of the website in comparison to other rated websites, it does a thorough SEO check and grades the website (from 1 to 10) based on the actual stats. Extremely useful at tracking website’s performance over time. Take a look at MakeUseOf report here

How Much is Your Blog Worth ? – Exactly does what it says, find out how much $$$ the website is valued at. This tool uses the same the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc. deal. The only problem, it pulls link count from Technorati, which unfortunately doesn’t work well anymore.