Can't access some education sites from my house

I live in Vietnam, and I’m building applications to colleges in the US. Things were going well until about a week ago. I can no longer access several websites, for example https://apply.mitadmissions.org/ But the strange thing is, mit.edu itself is still loading OK, so the issue seems to be limited to a few selected application process sites.
It got weirder. When I go out of my home and use another wifi, those problematic sites are now accessible. So it looks like it’s limited to my house. I’ve tried using another browser, unplugging & replugging the router, deleting all cookies, to no avail.
Do you have ideas of what’s going on here? And solutions? The prospect of going to a cafe whenever I have to work on my applications isn’t appealing… Besides, this oddball problem is both getting on my nerves and making me curious.

Try changing your Internet settings to use OpenDNS— see if that makes a difference.

Also you could try signing up for e.g. a free ProtonMail account and turn on a VPN tunnel, that might help and certainly cannot hurt

Oh, I forgot to mention that I’ve tried proxy services such as hide.me. It has 3 options of Netherlands, Germany and Finland. The first 2 couldn’t connect to the sites but Finland did. However, hide.me still can’t load some components of the sites using Finland server.

@DPRK I changed my internet to openDNS’ IP but it didn’t solve the problem. But I registered Proton and it works! Thank you. Follow-up question: should I turn ProtonVPN on all the time, or does the free plan has a kind of limit?

This also makes me wonder what’s wrong with the internet at my house. Perhaps there’s a service which handles the application process of several schools (MIT, Notre Dame…) and that service marked my ISP as spammer or something? But that would make everyone using that ISP affected, and from my experience with quite a few cafes, it’s likely not the case (the ISP, VNPT, holds about 50% of the market; yet I can’t find any other place affected but my home). FYI, the sites simply won’t load; after some time the browsers just display the “connection timed out” message.

Usually the spam filter sites display a message like “click here to prove you are human” or some other banner, not simply silently drop the connection.

If it is only at your house, I forgot to say, the first thing you should do is disinfect your system to make sure it is not infested with malware. Also you should test if it only happens from a particular computer/operating system/device or all of them.

Furthermore, to test the internet connection for censorship, do run

There is a bandwidth limit, but that does not matter if you are browsing the web, only if you are trying to download something.

I’ve just done a scan with the local antivirus and found nothing. I’ve also tried accessing the sites with my phone, which doesn’t have Proton installed like the laptop, and as expected it can’t load.

I’ve done a bit of research and found out that most colleges in the US use a service called technolution. Perhaps it has a quarrel with my ISP/IP or something?

I couldn’t say what type of cloud services, if any, colleges in the US use for various purposes. I can tell you that both private and state schools in the US absolutely do admit students from Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, etc.; just be aware that both on paper and in practice you may get charged a high tuition.

Did running the OONI probe indicate any internet censorship? That may detect issues on the ISP level.

If you have Proton installed, try switching it to a free VPN server in, say, Japan to see if there is geographically based blocking.

Ultimately the people working for the schools themselves do not know or care about your internet access, of course, so if using a VPN tunnel solves the problem, that may be regarded as the end of the story. However, knowing about internet censorship and glitches is important for people trying to study such things, so it would be good to narrow it down.

Yep, it’s unfortunate. OTOH, AFAIK the US is the only country having schools with generous finaid.

Errr… I didn’t run it. That OONI requires an install like ProtonVPN, but the difference is that I heard about Proton before. I’m worried that app may harm my computer in some way, like opening a port for hackers.

I’ve done it. Both Holland & Japan work OK.

Agree wholeheartedly. Currently my theory is: someone used some particular IPs from my ISP to attack technolution, perhaps with DDoS. The edu company responded by blocking connections to those IPs. Now, after a while, 1 of the IP got rotated and assigned to my router, thus giving me problems.