I’ve recently returned from a fairly eventful trip to China where I was a groomsman at a traditional Chinese wedding. I ate lots of interesting food and experienced my first ever episode of gout, (which may be related to eating too much interesting food).

This was my third visit to China and like my previous visits to China was very enjoyable.  I love the culture, people and especially the food.  There is one thing I dislike however: The Great Firewall of China.  This is an Internet censorship mechanism introduced by the Chinese government to protect their citizens from content that is not deemed “suitable”.

Great Firewall of China

Facebook and Twitter are two examples of this, however fairly recently, Google was added to the list of blocked sites.  This meant that I couldn’t check my email; use Google Maps to work out where I was; use Google Translate to work out what things meant or just use Google Search to determine things to keep me amused.  The fact that the idea of using Bing never occurred to me – which says a lot about Bing!

Thankfully I was prepared for this and could connect to my office VPN to ensure all traffic was routed via our Internet connection in Belfast. Then I suddenly had an idea!  We have a Virtual Appliance hosted in Amazon’s EC2’s data centre in Dublin.  If I configured this to accelerate Google, Facebook and Twitter, (or the whole internet in general), my internet connection would be tunnelled through the great firewall to the VA and then initiated from Amazon’s data centre in Dublin that doesn’t have any censorship applied.

Needless to say, this isn’t a typical use case for Replify Accelerator, however it is an interesting one.  It’s just a pity those who would benefit from this can’t Google us.

Those who can though can contact us at sales@replify.com for more information.

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