One Reason Your Site Get Blocked in China

In the last couple days, our blog wasn’t accessible from China. I have tried to diagnose it in different ways:

Try to visit it via VPN (the server is in Washington D.C., and with it, we can view YouTube videos in China.) and it is accessible. So it is very likely we have been blocked by a firewall, probably GFW. But I can’t understand why as we don’t have any sensitive contents here and the site is very new to really make any big influence.
Contact our hosting company Bluehost. I was told that the site works well in the server, and it is very likely blocked by the China firewall. And it is not necessary caused by the contents on our site, but other sites on the same server as we are not using a dedicated server.
Chat with a friend who happened to have the similar experience before and he settled the problem by getting a dedicated IP.

So I spend 30USD extra a year and purchased a dedicated IP using PayPal this afternoon. Bingo! We are back, Yeah! Lesson learned:

SEO tactics 101 warns us to live away from BAD neighborhood in Internet world. Because it not only affects your site’s ranking, but more fundamentally, it makes your site inaccessible. One way to prevent it happens is to have a dedicated IP address when you can’t control who are your neighbors.

photo credit to Za3tOoOr!