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October 29, 2007

WebSitePulse™ Releases an Upgraded Website Test behind the Great Firewall of China


Enforcing the "Great Firewall of China" has not been very consistent by the Chinese government, but recently there has been a lot of activity. In the beginning of October, the China's Great Firewall turned its attention to RSS feeds as reported by Ars Technica and TecchCrunch. In the middle of October TechCrunch reported on several occasions that China has unilaterally blocked all three major search engines in China and is redirecting all requests to Baidu.

In response to the increased need and interest from webmasters, IT managers and business operators, WebSitePulse has upgraded the Website Test behind the Great Firewall of China to provide them with useful information in determining how their websites are seen from visitors and users located in China. The upgrade includes the following:

- users can select one Chinese and one non-Chinese locations to run the test from and compare the results, including which IP address was resolved from each testing location

- users can select that results display the HTTP response headers from both testing locations. This helps to determine what page is being served to each request and if any redirects have been done. Combined with the IP address of the tested URL, as resolved from the testing location, the test results will clearly indicate if the same page is being served to the requests from China and outside of China.

- users can run MTR tests (combined traceroute and PING) from each testing location after the results are displayed.

To perform real-time testing go to the China Firewall Test

Customers who use our monitoring services and maintain active accounts, can select any of our monitoring locations for the non-Chinese tests, while the other users can select between three locations. Current Customers can also set websites and servers to be monitored from multiple cities in China on a regular basis and keep an eye in real time if they are visible to their Chinese audience.

There will be more upgrades to this and the other free tests that we provide. So please check the Test Tools section often for upgrades to the existing tools and for new tools releases.