I’ve been a .com purist for over two decades of building. Once, I broke that rule and bought a .online TLD for a small project. This is the story of how it went up in flames.
Update: Within 40 minutes of posting this on HN, the site has been removed from Google's Safe Search blacklist. Thank you, unknown Google hero! I've emailed Radix to remove the darn serverHold .
Post, for posterity, below.
Namecheap's Alluring Offer
Earlier this year, Namecheap was running a promo that let you choose one free .online or .site per account. I was working on a small product and thought, "hey, why not?" The app was a small browser, and the .online TLD just made sense in my head.
After a tiny $0.20 to cover ICANN fees, and hooking it up to Cloudflare and GitHub, I was up and running. Or so I thought.
The Disappearing Act
Poking around traffic data for an unrelated domain many weeks after the purchase, I noticed there were zero visitors to the site in the last 48 hours. Loading it up led to the dreaded, all red, full page "This is an unsafe site" notice. The site had a link to the App Store, some screenshots (no gore or violence or anything of that sort), and a few lines of text about the app, nothing else that could possibly cause this. [1]
Clicking through the disclaimers to load the actual site to check if it had been defaced, I was greeted with a "site not found" error. Uh oh.
Initial Recon
... continue reading