In the summer of 2009, I had an idea. My workdays were spent deploying tons of cloud infrastructure as Rackspace acquired Slicehost and we rushed to k

A new future for icanhazip

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2021-06-06 19:30:03

In the summer of 2009, I had an idea. My workdays were spent deploying tons of cloud infrastructure as Rackspace acquired Slicehost and we rushed to keep up with the constant demands for new infrastructure from our customers. Working quickly led to challenges with hardware and networking.

That was a time where the I Can Has Cheeseburger meme was red hot just about everywhere. We needed a way to quickly check the public-facing IP address of lots of backend infrastructure and our customers sometimes needed that information, too.

It has always been simple site that returns your external IP address and nothing else. No ads. No trackers. No goofy requirements. Sure, if you looked hard enough, you could spot my attempt at jokes in the HTTP headers. Other than that, the site had a narrow use case and started out mainly as an internal tool.

Lifehacker’s Australian site featured a post about icanhazip.com and traffic went through the roof. My little Slicehost instance was inundated and I quickly realized my Apache and Python setup was not going to work long term.

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