Heavy Networking 587: When Your Side Project Gets Billions Of Hits – The ICanHazIP Saga

Today on Heavy Networking, the icanhazip story. On the surface, icanhazip.com is simple enough: You hit the URL, and get back your external, public IP address. That’s it. There are no blinky lights or banner ads, listicles or lechery. Just a tiny HTML page with the minimum number of tags required to render correctly. Many of you listening have probably used it before, and that’s kind of the problem. Icanhazip was, and is, popular. Really popular—as in, billions of daily requests. Our guest is Major Hayden, the person behind icanhazip.com. He’s going to share just how crazy this service he created in his spare time got, and the lessons about efficiency and scale he learned along the way as he scrambled to keep it running. We discuss: * Why Major started the project * How icanhazip began to spread * Nerdy networking details he had to learn to support it * His quest for hosting * How much of his own time and money he poured into it * What happens when icanhazip gets billions of hits every day * The impact of bad actors * Why some people thought icanhazip was a CIA front (it’s not) * More Sponsor: InterOptic InterOptic makes high quality optical modules you can rely on. Plus, they are far cheaper than OEM optics. Save big money without compromising quality. Visit interoptic.com/packet-pushers. Show Links: icanhazip.com @majorhayden – Major Hayden on Twitter Major.io – Major’s blog