Witopia was the main VPN that I used in China from 2009 to 2015. I was generally happy with it until it became very slow and unreliable in 2016. The poor performance of Witopia is what encouraged me to find the best VPNs for China and create this website.
Although their VPN performance is not good anymore, they do have good customer service and you can chat with them online 24/7. The online chat has only ever been down once or twice when the government was cracking down on VPNs and trying to block their service. They had to close the online chat due to the high volume of requests but were still answering emails. They did manage to restore their service eventually.
The only complaint I had was that they blocked access to bittorrent sites several years ago. They didn’t block P2P traffic, rather they blocked access to the torrent sites (torrentz, pirate bay, etc). I later found out that you shouldn’t download torrents with Witopia anyway because they keep activity logs.
The last time I used Witopia in 2015, they did have a few PPTP servers that worked from China. You had to contact customer service to get these custom server IP addresses to add to the software. The majority of the IPSec servers are working, but most are very slow and the connection is not stable (you need to reconnect often).
Tips for Witopia
- PPTP is the most stable. IPSec is sometimes faster but requires reconnecting often.
- Witopia’s OpenVPN and 4D Stealth work very poorly or don’t work at all in China. If you decide to go with Witopia don’t waste your money on the Pro package. Just get the basic package.
- Talk to the support staff by online chat or email to get custom servers that work in China.
- Leave your tips and comments for Witopia below.