After my blog was blocked in China about 2 weeks ago, GoDaddy moved it to a new server and now it works fine. I therefore think that the reason for the block was that GoDaddy’s server had some ‘non-harmonious’ sites on them, causing all the other sites on the server to be blocked as well.

Because GoDaddy is not able to check for you whether their servers are blocked in China, and because many of them seem to be blocked here, I had already decided to change from GoDaddy to a European provider. Early next week this blog will likely be offline for a while again when I transfer it to a new hosting provider.

Of course GoDaddy’s China PR stunt also did not help to keep me as a client: during a Congressional hearing they claimed to stop registering .cn domains after Google’s departure from China, but in fact they had already done so weeks ago because of the difficult administrative process (I have an email from GoDaddy support about them stopping .cn registrations from early February, when I asked them some questions about my domain marc.cn). They claim to leave China, but because they never had an office here they can’t leave – they have never been here! And I just did a quick check, you can still order GoDaddy .com domains from within China without any problems. Nice PR for you GoDaddy, but I don’t buy it.