14 DAY TRIAL // Today's news that the Chinese government banned all the web RSS feeds made me search for a utility able to verify whether a certain website is blocked or not in certain regions of the world. After a few minute researching process, I discovered WebSitePulse, a pretty nice utility which checks if your page is banned in Seattle, WA, Munich, Germany or Brisbane, Australia. Moreover, you can try the 'Test behind China Firewall' utility which tests your website in order to find out if you're banned in China. This feature would be quite useful since it was reported the local authorities blocked all the RSS feeds and some of the websites.
"The Website test verifies the server status, downloads the full HTML content and measures the response time of the test website. The test results display the times for DNS lookup, connect, download the first byte and download the complete HTML of the tested website," WebSitePulse describes the testing procedure.
I really don't know if the information provided by this utility is accurate or not but some of the Chinese locations reveal that a website is not banned while others sustain the page is blocked. For example, your page might be filtered in Hong Kong while the Beijing test reveals it is available. However, you can register an account in order to receive more locations but you'll have to pay for it.
"Test any website in real-time and see if it is accessible from China. The Golden Shield Project (a.k.a. Great Firewall of China) is owned by the Government of China (MPS) and started in 1998. The system blocks content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through and consists of standard firewall and proxy servers at the Internet gateways of China's ISPs. The banning of websites is mostly uncoordinated and ad-hoc, with some web sites being blocked and similar web sites being allowed or blocked in one city and allowed in another," the parent company states about the Chinese tests.
Besides these tests, WebSitePulse offers some additional utilities such as DNS tools, ping test, traceroute, WHOIS, network lookup, server test, email validation test and port scan.