Why & How Do Companies Block Websites & How Can You Unblock Them?
It is a truth that nowadays practically all businesses tend to block access to certain Internet sites such as personal email accounts, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, YouTube and the like. The main reason why companies block certain websites is quite simple. These websites are considered waste of official time which decrease the productivity of employees and managers in a noticeably way. In fact, you only have to browse a little chilling on internet and you will find information such as;
- 26% of people lose between one and two hours daily hours surfing the internet.
- 10% of people say that they spend between one and two hours a day on their smartphone surfing for no specific purpose.
- Overall 11% of people spend between one and two hours a day on social networks while 75% of people are said to spend more than two hours a day.
Viewing this waste of time, the business owners, managers and administrators tend to take action on this matter because all the time lost by employees make a serious on the productivity level of employees. As a result, the owners instructs the IT department to take action and the certain sites are blocked. In some cases, companies also block access to certain services like Dropbox.
Usually in most companies, all units have fixed IP and are interconnected to each other by switches. When a network user wants to access the internet, usually he/she send the request to a proxy server. Once the proxy server has received the request, it analyzes whether the request made by the user with a specific IP meets the filters that the system administrator defined in the proxy configuration file or not.
If the user's request meets the established filters, the proxy router permits the access. In the case of failure to comply with the set filters, the internet connection gets blocked and the user remains unable to connect to the website and visit.
The filters that the system administrator has entered in the proxy file are different. A sample of the type of filters that can be applied are as follows;
- All computers have access to sweets except the computers with a particular IP or IP range.
- Only a specified range of IP users have internet access.
- Restrict access to URLs containing certain words such as porn and the like.
I have mentioned here three common examples of rules that can be created on the proxy server, but the administrator can generate any other type of rules as required. If you are experiencing website blockage, a great source to access such sites is InstantUnblock which you can access at http://instantunblock.com/.