We use Digital Ocean and recently have been told that our forums are being blocked in Russia and parts of China. I contacted Digital Ocean and they replied saying the blockage was outside their control and moving to another one of their data centers was not likely to solve this.
Can anyone recommend another VPS provider that isn’t blocked?
What is / might be the reason for the censorship?
Unfortunately, if you’re community violates local laws, it doesn’t make sense to publicly recommend “special” service providers for your use case.
In case, you’re fully compliant, I would recommend you to involve some legal experience.
@slackmoehrle I have a forum on a VPS hosted on Google Cloud Engine, and at least one person from China have posted comments there, and I asked, are you in China (because he wrote in Chinese), and he said yes and that he could access the forum from his location inside China.
I’d guess, though, that … GCE is risky? I’m slightly worried that China or Russia etc, at any time starts blocking the whole GCE, or the IP range where I have my server, for reasons unrelated to me and my community. — Would be interesting to hear abuot other people’s experiences :- ) Edit: B.t.w. I’ve heard that GCE blocks Iran.
Our forums aren’t special, we are a game engine.
Digital Ocean said that it is their IP space that is blocked, not us specifically.
@KajMagnus thanks. It does seem that other VPS providers are blocked as well. I’m checking with the popular ones to see if anyone isn’t blocked.
This is a well known issue for Russians and many websites are affected by it. Selecting another host may only give you a temporary solution as Russia can update their blacklist at any time. If you really NEED to service Russian users you’ll have to host in Russia, but that will probably be a bureaucratic nightmare.
@bartv Thanks. Our users are indeed reporting that it is hit or miss. One day it might work and then it may stop.