Mia
How frequently do you get the warning that the website you’re attempting to visit is prohibited in your location while you’re traveling or spending time abroad?
More than once or twice, we suppose.
Perhaps you are attempting to access confidential information from your home country while abroad, or perhaps you simply want to watch a specific YouTube video. Your location decides if you can access it or not.
It is a challenging issue for tourists to cope with.
This is referred to as geoblocking. Geoblocking occurs when you cannot access a network or internet service due to your location, whether for copyright grounds, operational costs, or another reason. For example, https://thenewpiratebay.org/ is blocked in many countries due to copyright issues.
Let’s find out how travelers can access the blocked sites as they travel abroad.
Why Are Certain Websites Blocked In Some Countries?
Countries censor internet information for multiple reasons, many of which are based on national cultural standards or political concerns.
For example, India utilizes the guise of public safety to create legislation that enables some websites to be banned, while other nations, such as Qatar, primarily block websites that include pornography or additional information that they allege offends its citizens’ sensibilities.
Russia prohibits child pornography and internet information that promotes drug misuse, suicide, or extremism.
Others ban websites or domains under the guise of protecting intellectual property or trademarks. A growing number of countries are also blocking the websites of their political opponents, human rights organizations, and independent media.
How Can Travelers Access The Blocked Website?
Although the Internet is intended to be a global network that connects the whole world, many websites are restricted to individual nations. Find out the strategies to access these blocked websites as you travel abroad.
Let’s take a look:
1: Use A VPN
A VPN is most likely the most dependable technique to circumvent geo-blocking.
A Virtual Private Network acts as a tunnel allowing your data to travel anonymously between the network and your device. In addition, it secures, encrypts, and safeguards the vital information contained in your data from intruders.
Your information moving to and from the network is subject to hackers and cyber thieves if you do not use a VPN.
If you spend a lot of time on websites that demand sensitive information, you may use a VPN to get the extra security you need.
When it comes to traveling and geoblocking, a VPN will allow you to access previously prohibited sites and services too.
2: Use Proxy Sites
Using a proxy website is a straightforward approach to get around geoblocking on websites and specific movie sites.
Consider a proxy site as the middleman.
Instead of going to the website directly, you utilize a proxy to access it for you. Then you connect to the proxy site to acquire access to the desired material.
Another approach to protecting your information from the websites you visit is to utilize a proxy site. It’s like a barrier that appears when you activate it, protecting your data and keeping you anonymous.
This approach allows you to see YouTube videos that are otherwise unavailable due to your location.
3: Use DNS Services
Some services function as a result of DNS magic. For example, alter the DNS server on your computer or change it network-wide on your home router.
When you visit a geo-restricted website, such as netflix.com, the DNS server will route a portion of your traffic through a tunnel.
In short, the distant server believes you are visiting it from the correct country, and it will just operate.
The wonderful thing about this is that once you enable it on your router, it will work for all devices on your network.
Even better, it isn’t something you have to turn on and off. But, unfortunately, it only works when you go to a geo-blocked website and does not affect the rest of your traffic.
4: Use Hola
There’s no reason to ignore the fact that Hola was one of the most popular ways to access geo-blocked websites. This is partly because it is free and straightforward to set up.
Hola comes with a wide range of features.
It provides browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, installed with a few mouse clicks.
After that, just click the Hola icon in your browser’s toolbar and choose a country. Your browser activities will be routed through IP addresses in that country.
This means you may access the US Netflix collection from your present location or the UK-based BBC iPlayer website from the US.
5: Use IP Instead Of URL
Each website’s URL has an IP address. However, the authorities who restricted the site might have just blocked the URL and not the IP.
You can use this IP address to access blocked web pages in your Chrome browser in such an instance.
To obtain the IP address on Windows, open a command line and execute traceroute websitename.com.
Traceroute applications for iPhone and Android may be found in the App Store and Play Store.
To locate the IP address on a Mac, open Network Utility > click on the Traceroute option at the top and input the website address.
Closing Thoughts
As we attempt to end this discussion, we are optimistic that you have found specific ways to access the blocked websites.
All the strategies that we have mentioned here are practical and risk-free.
This is why you can apply any of these strategies to access blocked websites abroad.
However, you can always reach us in the comment section below for further queries.
