Everyone has wanted the short address at least once. Somebody finally registered it — and instead of a gag, wired a serious, standards-respecting German mail platform behind it.
A small API, about 50k requests a month, priced three ways: a Hetzner VPS, Lambda behind API Gateway, Cloudflare Workers. The compute is almost never the number that decides it.
Five years of push and pull between my rack and everyone else’s cloud. The services that stayed, the ones I evicted without regret, and the two that came back.
Three-two-one holds until you try to restore from it. One Saturday, a scratch VM, a stopwatch: what the drill found in an hour that two years of green checkmarks never would.
One chatty service, one logrotate rule that never matched, and a disk that hit 100% at 3am. The incident, the archaeology, and the four configs now checked on every box.