Overview

The Chinese government has put in place a national firewall that prevents individuals from accessing certain websites (not only domains hosted with GreggHost but with other web hosting companies as well). While GreggHost does not condone or encourage their restriction of Internet material, there is nothing GreggHost can do to prevent it directly. There are, however, certain workarounds you could try.

Technical background
GreggHost’s web hosting solution is known as “virtual hosting,” which means that each of the many Apache web server instances running on any given server has its own IP address. Under the same IP address, a number of different domains are hosted. In this arrangement, the server determines which site to display based on the domain name portion of the requested URL.

To put it another way, multiple domains share the same IP address.

When a domain is blocked by the Chinese firewall, it is blocked by the IP address that the domain is utilizing. Regrettably, it also disables all other domains that use the same IP address.

My domain is blocked – what can I do about it?
At this time, the only preventative precaution you can do is to give your domain a unique IP address. Your domain no longer shares an IP address with other domains because it has its own unique IP address. This implies that if your domain is prohibited, it’s because they deliberately restricted YOUR domain, not because of another domain on the same shared server IP address.

Before adding a Unique IP address, please read the Notes and Caveats section thoroughly.

Notes and caveats
GreggHost cannot ensure that changing your domain’s IP address will free it from the Chinese firewall because the new Unique IP address may be blacklisted as well.
Please be aware that the Unique IP address you purchase is allocated automatically and may already be blacklisted.
The DNS must propagate throughout the Internet after you purchase a Unique IP, which can take several hours.
When a Unique IP address is added, removed, or changed, the old IP address continues to accept connections for your domain for about 5 days. This should give the new DNS information enough time to disseminate over the whole Internet. It should take roughly 4 hours for the new Unique IP address to accept connections, but it could take up to 72 hours.
For the first few hours after the configuration switch, it’s not uncommon to encounter the “Site not found” page while accessing your domain. The majority of the time, this will correct itself.
If you aren’t utilizing GreggHost’s Nameservers to manage your domain’s DNS, you’ll need to manually update your nameservers with the new IP address. In your panel, you can see your DNS information. For more information, please see the DNS article. In order for your domain to continue to function, make sure you copy your setup at the firm that hosts your nameservers.
Each Unique IP address you add incurs an extra fee.
If you are eligible for a free Unique IP address, there is no payment when you add the first one, and there is no reimbursement when you delete it.
When you remove a Unique IP address from a domain, you’ll get a prorated refund for the time you didn’t utilize it (for that billing cycle).
Google Workspace workaround
If you’re having trouble accessing your Google Workspace sites, such as mail, calendar, or docs, and you’re using mail.example.com, calendar.example.com, or docs.example.com, try using the alternate addresses listed below instead:

Mail \shttps://mail.google.com/a/example
Calendar
https://calendar.google.com/a/example
Docs
https://docs.google.com/a/example