Posted by jgx0 1 day ago
Even though IANA says example.com is intended for documentation purposes and not as a service, I feel that it nonetheless serves as a service to the broader internet. I think there are some cornerstone services on the internet, regardless of the maintainers' intentions or their legal definitions.
For example, we ourselves sometimes have to recognize that we are not a standard API service. Considering that we expect to process 3 trillion requests this year, a major outage could take down a good chunk of IT systems everywhere. So, we invested in infrastructure to avoid outages. We then started adopting other cornerstone services and running them indefinitely because we might as well support the users who depend on them because we have infrastructure to support them and us.
Instead it just seems to be an advert for ipinfo on a post about example.com?
The 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.
It’s always funny when I get French YouTube ads. As if YouTube is desperately trying to offload the adbuys anywhere they can by pretending that Canada must mean French.
And get I often get websites and ads in the language of the country my IP points to
> As it tends to be heavily trafficked, the overall bandwidth is a key consideration
(And false often enough that guessing language based on IP address works badly in practice, I hear.)