How to bypass internet restrictions in China and other countries that block VPN

We are constantly trying to make our VPN work globally. However, in some countries, firewalls are quite good at blocking VPN. Besides, blocking seems to depend heavily on your current ISP and also your region.

Internet providers in the current countries may block VPN service:

  • China
  • UAE
  • India
  • Pakistan
  • Qatar
  • Turkey
  • Egypt
  • Iran
  • North Korea
  • Sudan
  • Syria

The Internet in China is known to be very restrictive. Most Internet providers try to block as many VPN servers and protocols as possible. This is why the default configuration may not be optimal for customers connecting from China.

In this article, we will provide some tips and adjustments that may help you get connected.

Change your VPN connection protocol

If changing servers did not help you get connected, try changing your protocol. We recommend using OpenVPN via UDP or OpenVPN via TCP (available in Windows and Android app) configuration for customers in China. If both fail, try the aforementioned protocols with the enabled Scramble feature (available in Windows app).

Change your VPN server

Our VPN servers in the US are more likely to be blocked. According to recent tests, the US west coast (Los Angeles and San Jose) is the best possible location to connect to from China. It not only provides the optimal speed for customers connecting to the USA, but it is also reported to successfully bypass the Firewall.

Use IP addresses instead of our server names

FastVPN app is unlikely to work properly if you are attempting to connect inside the countries that block our VPN server addresses.

Alternatively, you may be able to use our VPN via a manual configuration by connecting to our servers' IP addresses instead of our server names. However, China has also started blacklisting our IP addresses, so even this measure may not help.

NOTE: When you are requested to enter a FastVPN hostname or server name during the setup, you will need to enter the IP address of your chosen server instead.

There are two ways how you can get the IP address of a particular server:

1. Ping the server name from your computer (will not work properly inside China).

For this, go to the VPN dashboard and choose preferred server (e.g mel-a07.vpn.wlvpn.com). Open a terminal and ping the selected server using the following command:

 ping mel-a07.vpn.wlvpn.com

Screenshot of the VPN terminal window with green arrow indicating to ping a server

2. Use any available third-party tool to convert the hostname to an IP address (a Google search will give multiple options).

NB! Make sure you do not have any DNS Leaks, IPv6 Leaks or WebRTC Leaks after the connection is established, and fix them if there are any. Otherwise, it will negatively influence the VPN performance.

If none of the provided steps work and the VPN connection is still blocked, please contact our Support Team to find a possible solution for you.
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