I have a similar website called http://clickhere.lol (yes, the missing ssl is intentional). Has a weak server though..
I enjoyed the link to your Geocities throwback page:
A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy
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Re: A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy
#32question besides the lols whats a good use case for this
Re: A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy
#33http://not.verylegit.link/WP;tRQAfOE6661trojan+mobiads(.jar....
„Turns out this site is powered by money. We ran out of Google App Engine credit. Fear not, we'll get more within 24 hours.“
How does it cost them less to serve a HTML page with an image instead of compared to a simple database lookup and HTTP redirect?
Re: A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy
#34My goto for this purpose used to be https://shadyurl.com but sadly it seems like it's gone, so glad to have a replacement!
I blogged about ShadyURL in March of 2022 so it hasn't been gone for long! Bummer.
Re: A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy
#35Pretty useful for security awareness training
Re: A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forgive my old-fashioned-ness, but... Why is metered cloud hosting a better choice here than a $5/mo. VPS?
Personally, for long-running things, metered cloud has two upsides: - IaaS, static hosting, etc. can maintain security updates on their end. My own VPS will eventually be broken into if I don't maintain security updates. - Many things are accessed only intermittently. For low access patterns, it's cheaper to pay for what you use. What I'd really like is something like Heroku, Amazon Lambda, or similar, but with an op…
I don't use these services because I've seen the prices Amazon asks for a gigabyte of traffic but I think you'll have to have VERY intermittent access to make these scaling providers worth the money.
If you expect your website to one day go from 100 requests a month to a million a day and expect that traffic to continue from that point on, these services will be a huge benefit for uptime while you rework your code to a more reasonable system. However, a simple $10 VPS with Nginx can handle much more than people seem to expect, assuming you don't use some excessively bloated platform or your content can be cached.
In terms of security updates: a cron job to reboot weekly and unattended-upgrades will keep your server safe without much to look into. Your only risk will be end of life software, your own code, and your dependencies, but those aren't fixed by going with some managed platform either.
There are definitely upsides to these quick deploy tools if you want to iterate quickly with an API that's not accessible from your dev workstation, setting up a multi tenant K8s/Docker/whatever server to deploy to is much harder than giving devs API keys to push to external parties, but I wouldn't consider these services for 99% of the stuff I would deploy.
Re: A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy
#37My goto for this purpose used to be https://shadyurl.com but sadly it seems like it's gone, so glad to have a replacement!
I blogged about ShadyURL in March of 2022 so it hasn't been gone for long! Bummer.
This service:
> Turns out this site is powered by money. We ran out of Google App Engine credit. Fear not, we'll get more within 24 hours.
> In the meantime, you can use www.shadyurl.com for all your dodgy URL needs.
So it might just be that they went down today.
Re: A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy
#38I would consider this innovative, but Office365 has had this built in (and as far as I can tell impossible to turn off) for years. What used to be a sensible link turns into a vast "safe link honest, guv" mess. I call it "man in the middle attack as a service"
Re: A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy
#39Ah yes, the URL worsener
All shorteners are worserners, even if the URL was long/ugly/crap to begin with.
Re: A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because credit is free and $5 is not free, I guess.
"£Free" is rarely £0. It usually means "£you do some of the work yourself and we indirectly profit due to metrics/economies of scale/network effects/data/kudos".
I don't think that's the trick at all. Running up bills will only make people leave for other services once their business does get money flowing.
Instead, I believe the reason cloud companies give away free stuff is the same reason Microsoft will give away Windows upgrades to students: if their weird, proprietary API is all you learn, you'll only be able to get started quickly on their platform so the moment you need to pick tech for a small business/your startup, you'll be quicker to choose their service.
There's a reason AWS Lambda (and Azure's competitor) is free but OpenStack/vSphere providers expect you to pay off the bat: if your workload and knowledge transfer (relatively) easily, there's no lock-in with which to trick people into choosing you.