Ask HN: Domain for my SaaS app blocked by corporate web filters | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Domain for my SaaS app blocked by corporate web filters

4 points_fat_santa8 comments

Hey HN,

I run a SaaS app called Crewsum (crewsum.com), it's a time tracking software so most of my users are inside corporate networks / on corporate VPN's when they access the app.

An issue me and my co-founder have noticed is that our domain is being blocked by corporate web filtering software. So far we have had a number of users reach out to us saying that they are unable to access the site on their corporate VPN's

I did a ton of digging into the domain history and I can't figure out why it's blocked. WHOIS history shows the domain as being parked and I checked and it's not part of any blacklists.

What recourse do we have here? So far we have considered changing the name of the app, moving to another TLD (.net, .org or .io) or reaching to vendors of web filtering software to try and get us unblocked.

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I just accessed it from a Palo Alto Firewall and it get categorized as "Games" which many Admins would block.

https://urlfiltering.paloaltonetworks.com/query/

Ask those users who the vendor of the firewall is (or have them ask their IT department) and reach out to them. It's probably one specific vendor. It might not even be on any kind of list, could easily be some kind of heuristic matching some traffic pattern or even it not liking your domain name or IP somehow.

You can check your domain in things like https://talosintelligence.com/reputation_center/lookup?searc... or other domain reputation engines. But nothing seems wrong with it.

Moving to another domain will make things worse (at least, for a while). New domains are flagged as suspicious just because they're new. I suppose you could prime the domain before moving to it, but I would just play whack-a-mole with the filtering software.

Unfortunately, the reevaluation request forms are hard to find, and some companies (like Zscaler) don't even have one. So they just casually defame your business and you can't correct the record.

You need to get in touch with a senior IT guy at one of your larger clients. This is not an uncommon thing and somebody with experience will be able to figure out the cause of the problem, which will probably help you with all your clients.

Ask the customer to whitelist your domain/ip in the web filtering software?

Can you get crewsumhq.com or something like that?

Are you sure it's the name and not the IP address?

Positive. We first hosted the site under GCP and then moved to AWS late last year. Site was blocked on both providers which seems to indicate it's a domain issue and not a IP issue.

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