net4people
Good options for VPS in Iran for circumvention testing
I'm developing a new censorship circumvention tool. It works well in China and Russia, but a few users in Iran have tried it and said it is completely blocked there. So I would like to rent a server that is located in Iran to do some more detailed testing and figure out how to get around the blocking.
Does anyone have suggestions for good VPS providers that can rent to people outside the county? Thanks!
most if not all datacenters in iran do not have gfw(at least not the same as normal isp),people use them as a relay for their traffic since they have less restriction , so not sure if they will be usefull for testing bypassing tools
Instead of a single VPS, try checking the following measurement platform:
- RIPE Atlas: https://atlas.ripe.net/. It has 102 probes online currently in Iran; some of them are from datacenters, others are not. HTTP, ping, DNS and other measurements are supported.
- OONI Run: https://run.ooni.org/, for generating measurement for a single URL. Only useful if your entry point is HTTP(S).
- OONI Test Lists: https://ooni.org/get-involved/contribute-test-lists. Only useful if your entry point is HTTP(S).
@firewallPass I didn't realize that. That's too bad!
@UjuiUjuMandan That's an interesting option. It would at least help rule out whether the initial HTTPS connection is what's causing problems.
@wallpunch Hey mate, If you're working on a VPN for Iranian users, you might find this post useful. It's been an active discussion since last year, with many Iranian users participating in tests and sharing their results up to the present day:
https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core/discussions/3269#
Might be worth a look, hope it helps!
@Phoenix-999 Thank you! From the discussion, it seems quite likely there is either an issue with the spoofed SNIs I use for the tunnel connections, or the IPs of the cloud providers I am using have been blocked. I will take a closer look and see if there are other possible issues.