During the last Friday’s Clubhouse Weekly event, through two attendees, to my horror, I discovered that SkilledUp Life has been banned for traffic from India by our hosting provider.

Not every Volunteer registered on SkilledUp Life recognises where they live. But from those who do, it shows that 123 Volunteers live in India. That’s a mere 2.86% of our global volunteer base.

According to Google Analytics, the blacklisting seems to have coincided with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is unclear why India was blacklisted with Russia. The reason given was that there were excessive intrusion attempts from India.

According to our hosting provider,

We issue blacklisting based on targetted intrusion attempts against our clients. This is a process we do automatically and manually so if you have issues with a client accessing a site then you’ll need to contact us stating their IP. We do not offer the ability for clients to manage our blacklisting as we run this as a security service to protect all our clients’ sites from various forms of attacks.

It is widely understood that one of the countries which generate the most cyber attacks is United States. But I’ve never heard of any hosting provider in the UK blacklisting the USA, have you?

The above map shows threat levels as reported live by a service provider. Sadly, we do not have any control over which country or IP address is blacklisted by our hosting provider. At present, the whole of Russia is blacklisted.

At SkilledUp Life, we want to serve the whole global population. We take no side. Politics are best left to politicians, and we hope it won’t be too long before our hosting provider removes the blacklisting in place for Russia.

On behalf of SkilledUp Life, please accept my apologies for any inconvenience caused. And here’s my voice note powered by Shortcast

If you cannot access SkilledUp Life for any reason, please do let us know.