China: Unlicensed websites expelled and blocked

Recently, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) issued a notice concerning a special action on website licensing and demanded all Internet Service Providers (ISP) to close down websites that do not have Internet Content Provider (ICP) license before 16:00, Feb 24, 2009. The notice also demanded ISPs to host properly registered websites in the future otherwise they would be subject to heavy penalty.

Websites forced into exile

According to dupola, among thousands of websites have been forced to close down by the new policy and some of them have actually registered at the MIIT before. Dupola explained that when the authority identifies trace of “vulgar” content in a server, it is quite likely that the whole server would be closed down, affecting all other websites without vulgar content. Worse still, the MIIT is very slow in issuing website license, there are cases when it takes more than 4 months to get a license.

Many websites decided to migrate out of the country. However overseas websites are very slow, usually not indexed in local search engines and very likely they will be blocked by the Great Fire Wall (GFW).

Chinese Globalvoicesonline blocked

In fact, around end of February, the traditional and simplified Chinese versions of globalvoices were blocked by the GFW.

Dupola have a number of suggestions for bloggers:

1. 尽快将域名转出到国外注册机构(Godaddy、DreamHost 等),无论你是否决定使用国内主机
如果有可能,将主机或服务器也迁移到国外
2. 不要仅仅盯着那点网页流量,多用一下社会化媒体。
无论是经营性网站还是个人 Blog,社会化媒体除了在一定程度上可以抵消“速度慢”等问题带来的不良影响外,可能还会给你带去不少意外惊喜
3. 国外IDC也要谨慎选择,先搜索对比一下,价格、速度、配置等
4. 肚破惊天的域名和主机都放在 DreamHost
5. 同时推荐国内主机 Meyu,他们在国外也有服务器,并且提供迁移服务
6. 如果你是 Blogger,还可以看看数字游牧计划是否适合你

1. Move your DNS to overseas domain registration company such as Godaddy and DreamHost, no matter whether you decide to keep your website in local server. If possible move your server overseas
2. Instead of keeping your attention on your websites’ hit rate, use more social media websites to deliver your content. These social media can help to overcome the problem of slow data flow.
3. Be careful in choosing overseas IDC service, compare the price, speed and backup service carefully.
4. Dupola.com's DNS and server is hosted by DreamHost.
5. I also recommend local server hosting Meyu, they have overseas server and have migration service.
6. If you are a blogger, you can check out Digital Nomads project.

For those who want to get a ICP license, you can take a look at this.

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