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Icanhazip: A simple IP address tool survived a deluge of users (2021)

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Re: Icanhazip: A simple IP address tool survived a deluge of users (2021)

#11

Post by alpb »

karamanolev wrote: post #6
alpb wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their sponsorship of icanhazip.com has saved me tens of thousands of dollars per month. Can someone please explain how does returning a few hundred bytes of plaintext response can cost thousands of dollars? Either I'm really bad at estimating things or there's some hidden cost somewhere I'm not seeing. Also why could it not work fine behind a Cloudflare free tier?

> In 2021, the traffic I once received in a month started arriving in 24 hours. The site went from a billion requests per day to 30-35 billion requests per day over a weekend. 30 billion times 350 bytes (size of my response) is equal to 10.5 terabytes (base-10) a day. 84 terabits per day, 84000/3600/24 ~= 1 gigabit if my math is right. A fully saturated 1 gigabit pipe of worldwide internet costs a lot. So, there.

Really interesting. I never heard of this website and was surprised to hear this volume of traffic it's getting. (I always used curlmyip.org or whatsmyip.net|.com). I wonder what is the rationale for providing a non-rate limited service that can be easily abused like this. The volume almost suggests some stuff like IoT devices or other software use this to test internet connectivity. Or botnets?

Re: Icanhazip: A simple IP address tool survived a deluge of users (2021)

#13

Post by ComputerGuru »

Not related to the story of scaling the tech but rather to the IP business in 2023:

I’m not affiliated with any of these services, but my goto has been ip4.me, ip6.me, and ip6only.me because they’re short and memorable and because they acknowledge the IPv4/IPv6 split. The first two domains give you your v4 and v6 IP respectively and the latter only resolves over IPv6 (useful to ensure your IPv6 is off when using a VPN). You can tack on /api to any of them to get a plaintext response.

Re: Icanhazip: A simple IP address tool survived a deluge of users (2021)

#14

Post by 0x6A75616E »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #13

Not related to the story of scaling the tech but rather to the IP business in 2023: I’m not affiliated with any of these services, but my goto has been ip4.me, ip6.me, and ip6only.me because they’re short and memorable and because they acknowledge the IPv4/IPv6 split. The first two domains give you your v4 and v6 IP respectively and the latter only resolves over IPv6 (useful to ensure your IPv6 is off when using a VP…

the issue is that these return a bunch of html so using them from the command line is not ideal.

I made wgetip.com back in 2008 to solve this. icanhaz must've been pretty suboptimal back then to have issues with traffic. wgetip still gets about 3M requests per hour. All from a single $5 droplet.

Re: Icanhazip: A simple IP address tool survived a deluge of users (2021)

#15

Post by zokier »

0x6A75616E wrote: post #14
ComputerGuru wrote: post #13

Not related to the story of scaling the tech but rather to the IP business in 2023: I’m not affiliated with any of these services, but my goto has been ip4.me, ip6.me, and ip6only.me because they’re short and memorable and because they acknowledge the IPv4/IPv6 split. The first two domains give you your v4 and v6 IP respectively and the latter only resolves over IPv6 (useful to ensure your IPv6 is off when using a VP…

the issue is that these return a bunch of html so using them from the command line is not ideal. I made wgetip.com back in 2008 to solve this. icanhaz must've been pretty suboptimal back then to have issues with traffic. wgetip still gets about 3M requests per hour. All from a single $5 droplet.

ip4.me and ip6.me have /api endpoint for programmatic access

Re: Icanhazip: A simple IP address tool survived a deluge of users (2021)

#16

Post by NelsonMinar »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #13

Not related to the story of scaling the tech but rather to the IP business in 2023: I’m not affiliated with any of these services, but my goto has been ip4.me, ip6.me, and ip6only.me because they’re short and memorable and because they acknowledge the IPv4/IPv6 split. The first two domains give you your v4 and v6 IP respectively and the latter only resolves over IPv6 (useful to ensure your IPv6 is off when using a VP…

https://www.ipify.org/ is my go to, mostly because it has a really simple JSON version. Funny how many ways there are to do this simple thing.

Re: Icanhazip: A simple IP address tool survived a deluge of users (2021)

#19

Post by thefifthsetpin »

alpb wrote: post #11
karamanolev wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 2021, the traffic I once received in a month started arriving in 24 hours. The site went from a billion requests per day to 30-35 billion requests per day over a weekend. 30 billion times 350 bytes (size of my response) is equal to 10.5 terabytes (base-10) a day. 84 terabits per day, 84000/3600/24 ~= 1 gigabit if my math is right. A fully saturated 1 gigabit pipe of worldwide internet costs a lot. So, there.

Really interesting. I never heard of this website and was surprised to hear this volume of traffic it's getting. (I always used curlmyip.org or whatsmyip.net|.com). I wonder what is the rationale for providing a non-rate limited service that can be easily abused like this. The volume almost suggests some stuff like IoT devices or other software use this to test internet connectivity. Or botnets?

I believe that creating a traffic rate-limiting system, which is more cost-effective than simply echoing back the requestor's IP address, is likely to be a complex task. However, I haven't personally performed the calculations to confirm this.
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