Forum Announcements

Some readers have complained of an inability to access Middle Kingdom Life from within China while others are reporting no difficulties at all. We suspect that some of the difficulties may be due to increased firewall activity on connections to U.S. web hosting accounts and are not necessarily directed at Middle Kingdom Life (but we are still investigating this).

Most of our readers are accessing us from outside of China but, of course, we have numerous readers from within China as well. If you currently living in China and find that you are having trouble accessing our website, you will probably want to invest in a good virtual private network (VPN): Ken and I use and highly recommend Astrill.com.

It is the best of the whole lot that we've tried (extremely fast and versatile) and is very reasonably priced. You have over a dozen different ports throughout the world you can choose from and their service supports POP access (so you can send mail through the VPN).

Hello,

I'm flying out to work in Henan Polytechnic University on the 31st of August and am currently trying to decide which VPN would be best. Many of the people who are part of the same organisation chose Hide My Ass but I know that you recommend Astrill. I have no idea about anything electronic like this so it would be great to know whether you still recommend Astrill over HMA.

I had never heard of HMA (Hide My Ass) until I read about it just now in your post. As my Astrill.com account is nearing expiration, I decided to sign up for a 30-day account with HMA for the purpose of making a comparison.

HMA is about 15% more expensive than Astill (based on annual subscription rates) but claims many more VPN connections throughout the world than is currently offered by Astrill (131 vs 70). They also claim, like Astrill, to offer unlimited data transfer speeds.

Like Astrill, HMA’s VPN software installed easily and I was up and running in no time. However, it seemed to take HMA considerably longer to make a VPN connection than it does Astrill (at least 30 to 40 seconds as opposed to 5 or 6, respectively) and the first couple of connection attempts failed due to very slow ping rates.

For my comparison test, I downloaded a 400MB file from my Usenet server account. I tried several HMA VPN servers throughout the world including servers in Turkey, Russia, the United States, and Canada. The fastest download speed that I experienced with HMA was a terribly slow and disappointing 1.7mb per second (in most cases, the transfer speed was much slower than that). With Astrill.com, I was able to download that same file at the maximum speed of my Internet connection, which is 30mb/s. The difference in transfer speed was day and night.

Based on this very unscientific speed test, I am going to cancel my HMA account and renew my annual subscription to Astrill.com. So, yes, I can still highly recommend Astrill.com and I can definitely recommend it over HMA.

Thanks for the question and best of luck in China.

Thank you very much for testing that out for me. I shall buy Astrill instead.