With their assortment of techniques to prohibit access to websites they do not like, China is probably the country where the “Site not found” errors are most common, with the possible exception of North Korea. This can be frustrating, especially if your website isn’t intended to be politically subversive in any way, but it happens to contain out-of-context keywords that the Chinese authorities have deemed undesirable. This broad brushstroke is unfortunate, but luckily, there are ways to bypass the China Firewall and get past China’s so-called Golden Shield.

The concept of the Domain Name System (DNS) can be a confusing subject even to skilled and experienced system administrators. DNS is the system used to abbreviate Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which are in the form of numbers, to memorable, user-friendly names. These Domain names address systems on TCP/IP networks (e.g. the Internet) by certain Web applications, such as browsers. This system enables computers to communicate using the numeric addresses, and computer users to use simpler names, for example, “www.google.com” and “www.yahoo.com” to call up services including websites and email servers on the internet.

How Domains and the Domain Name System Work

When you type a domain name into your browser’s address bar, your computer (or client) sends the name to a publicly accessible computer called a DNS server. This server contains a database mapping of human-readable names to their corresponding numeric addresses. The DNS server sends back a response to the client computer and informs it of the IP address of the target system you would like to access, thus enabling it to send the request directly to the target. Through a process known as recursion, the DNS server may also request the IP from other DNS servers.

You may want to measure any given server's response time for any reason, but the most common one is to gain better understanding of the visitor's experience by using an external testing locations. Another reason would be to ensure that the website is actually accessible by your clients. By performing a visitor emulation you can determine the status of the server and get additional statistics based on the time it takes for each one to complete.

Web servers are vital to make sure that your website is up and running. Yet sometimes there can be hiccups in service and the response time of your web server can change drastically. Slow server response time can make the difference between a reliable website that anyone can access and a website that drives users away, perhaps to your competition.

Here’s a brief example - just recently domain and hosting provider GoDaddy experienced downtime with their servers which resulted in thousands of websites either being down or responding slowly (or even just hanging, never loading the page). As a result GoDaddy had to go through a big PR mess to get everything fixed. They also had to deal with a throng of angry business owners who rely on their servers to make a living.

Our friends from UKHost4U are in a playful mood, and ask you to join them on their Facebook page! To enter the competition you only need to like the page and wait until Oct 15^th to see if you are the winner. It’s that simple. Oh, we forgot the prize – it’s Google Nexus 7 tablet.