Our company is hosting a chinese language website from Europe, targeting Chinese professionals. Our website URL ends at .CN.

Since 1 month it is not accessible within China, several people tried to open it at China mainland and it does not work anymore, while Europe collegues, from Germany, England and France have no problem entering it.

How can I find out what happened ? If it was blocked, can we get rid of this ? Was there any extra risk in choosing the .CN address ?
Any other reasons for the non-access at China mainland ?

Thanks for all your welcomed comments/answers,
Frank

I doubt you can get the Chinese government to un-block your site. In fact, though, it isn't really your site specifically, but the IP address it uses. This IP address is often allocated to serve multiple domain names and likely one of those is the offender.

You can ask your hosting provider to change servers for you. They will usually do this.

^Thanks

Agree, this is what happened to us. While our IP is dedicated, Chinese government blocks "RANGE" instead of "SPECIFIC"IP.

For example:
My website is 255.255.200.123
An adult or political site hosted by the same provider is 255.255.200.110
YOU MAY STILL GET BLOCKED at 100-130 range... maybe more.

The advise is to get your provider to give you an IP in a higher range if they have it, meaning something in the 255.255.XXX.XXX range rather than the 255.255.200.XXX range.

If they don't have a higher range (most decent providers have multiple IPs in the higher range), you want to be at least 50 numbers difference UP AND DOWN of your present IP numbers away.

Using above example: 255.255.200.1-70 and 255.255.200.80-255 are probably safe, but I, being the paranoid type, wouldn't be 100% confident.

Conversely, some larger providers provide "CLEAN RANGES" which are on the higher range, that they do not assign to any adult sites or other "questionable sites", tho unfortunately political sites are still present in those numbers.

Also, you need to know that your site, while they transition the IP over the world (they need to tell all the DNS servers in the world that your .CN site is now the new number), may not be accessible (for up to 24 hours usually) in parts of the world that the DNS haven't registered the change yet. To them, the site will appear "DOWN".

Just something to keep in mind, hope that helps.

Dear UnderH20 and Cybornut,
Thanks for your very useful advice and 'strategy'; we already implemented it and it seems as everything is working again as before !
A great help; i don't know what to say.......
thanks&kind regards,
Frank