For a moment I thought you were saying ipinfo runs example.com.
replyInstead it just seems to be an advert for ipinfo on a post about example.com?
Not an advert. I wish we ran example.com. However, we run a few other services.
replyThe issue with example.com is this statement:
> This domain is for use in documentation examples without needing permission. This is not a service; avoid relying on it for testing and monitoring purposes.
The problem is that, disclaimer or not, if a website provides a useful utility, people will use it as a service.
If example.com breaks, IANA can reasonably say it was never intended to be stable. But that does not change the fact that people will use it for testing and monitoring.
What we do is adopt legacy services whose maintainers can no longer afford, want, or have the resources to maintain them, and invest in keeping them running reliably.
My question was rhetorical ;)
replyExample.com is one of the sites I visit most often for troubleshooting my connection on the go. It's great for tickling a captive Wi-Fi login that didn't trigger properly.
replyneverssl.com is slightly better for that, since it resists caching.
replyI think what you describe is exactly right, it has organically become a service and it is maintained with that in mind. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be clear about what its for and what should be avoided. Otherwise it is setting up an implicit contract that it will service those needs without limitation which turns it into an even bigger dependency.
replyNot to mention indefinitely. Any decommission, even decades in the future, will be messy. Or imagine if ipinfo got bought up by private equity and they turned off the free service, or maybe attached some sort of agent-pay token to the response[0] so that they collect revenue from running it when possible.
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