Often it happens that you tried to open a website and you failed to open the website. It is a boring situation since you know it started a pain. There are numerous reasons which can result in the non-loading of a particular website on your computer. You should check your internet connection speed and open common websites, such as `google.com`, `twitter.com`, `ibm.com` to make sure that your internet connection is fit!
Before we discuss the ways you can try to open a website, there is a necessity to guess the root cause of the problem. If a particular website has blocked your shared IP address to access our server, you need to know the fact since you can contact the admin of the website and request to unblock the IP. The shared IP addresses are often used by many users and one of them may run malicious activities for which the security system block the access.
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Why and How You are Blocked to View a Website
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When a user enters a domain name such as thecustomizewindows.com into their, browser, the computer connects to the internet service provider and places the DNS request. Then the internet service provider starts an effort to find the DNS record that contains the name. This process is visible to the users on their browsers as a textual phrase “looking up”. When the record is found, the browser gets the IP address of the server and communicate directly with the server. Now the above process may get halted because of various reasons :
- Your access is denied from the server: Our example of a particular website blocking you is one of the reasons a website can block you. However, a particular server’s administrators can deny the users to load from certain countries or regions. This is common in e-commerce since not all businesses can accept all currencies and most importantly, can not deliver a physical product to all the locations.
- Your internet service provider is blocking you: If you are using an internet connection from your workplace, then they may impose their own rules not to access all the websites. Often, this precaution is for keeping the devices of their employees free from malware. Also, a particular ISP can blacklist certain websites.
- The technical problem of the website: Problem of DNS, name server, change of web host may result in temporary downtime in certain geographical areas since the propagation time widely varies. If you are living in the central part of North America, you are less likely to face this issue.
- Governments have blacklisted the website/service: Governments can instruct the ISPs operating in their countries to disallow certain websites to load by the citizens. For example, China enforces its firewall.
How to access a blocked website
There are a lot of ways to access a website that is blocked on your computer. You should adopt the method which fits your need.
Use the TOR browser
The Tor project is designed to keep a user anonymous on the web by routing through a set of proxy servers. This is a quite simple process of installing the browser, initial configuration and usual browsing. While this is a free method, Tor is designed to read the text. Tor is not designed to provide you with higher bandwidth to smoothly browse and watch videos. The Tor browser is great to understand whether the website is functional when opened from a different country.
Use a VPN connection
Perhaps, using a paid VPN is the popular method at present. We suggest avoiding the free VPNs for private usage since they are not designed for higher security. There are good guides on the web to evaluate a good VPN among the various VPN service providers.
Apart from the mentioned resource, we have numerous articles on this website on VPN, kindly perform a search with the word VPN in the search field on the right-hand side of our website to get a list of articles related to VPN.
Read from Google’s cache
Google caches every website and updates regularly. All you need to do is to perform a Google search with the URL of the webpage you want to visit, you’ll find the website’s web page’s name on the search result page with a link to the cache.
This method will work even when the website is temporarily down. This method will not work if the website has opted out of caching by Google.
Read from Way Back machine
You can visit the website of WayBack Machine, search with the website’s name, select a date for viewing a snapshot of the website. This method will work even when the website is permanently down. This method will not work if the website has opted out of caching by any website.
Other methods
By changing the DNS provider, you may be able to open some of the blocked websites. However, this method can not be recommended to a novice user providing a hope to open an unknown blocked site.
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Conclusion
We can see that there are numerous reasons which may result from a “blocked to view” situation and there are a lot of ways to view and surf the website. While peoples commonly use a VPN connection to overcome the problem and enhance privacy (and a good VPN is a first-line defence), it is important to know the other methods since a VPN may fail in certain situations.
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