I run eth0.me - a similar service. This might be the IP lookup service with the shortest URL, which is the reason why I run it.
Some anecdotes:
-At the moment the service has 10 GiB of traffic/day. In February, there were 295 476 879 requests.
-Because the service returns only the IP address and nothing else, the requests are larger than the replies.
-At some point a russian ISP began querying eth0.me from (apparently) all of their eyeball routers. Thousands of devices from their address space would query this service every second, which resulted in many Terabytes of traffic monthly. I decided to block their address space.
This service was run by somebody else up until a few years ago. It became more and more unreliable and went offline. At some point I noticed that the domain had expired. I decided to buy it and run it myself.
I have a similar domain with a 9 character URL that I have been running (wow - I had to look it up!) for 16 years for my own use and for my clients. I have some ddns clients that use it to update their DNS records when their IP changes.
I won't be advertising it here on HN any time soon, though, since it would probably fall over from the traffic. :)
Some anecdotes:
-At the moment the service has 10 GiB of traffic/day. In February, there were 295 476 879 requests.
-Because the service returns only the IP address and nothing else, the requests are larger than the replies.
-At some point a russian ISP began querying eth0.me from (apparently) all of their eyeball routers. Thousands of devices from their address space would query this service every second, which resulted in many Terabytes of traffic monthly. I decided to block their address space.
This service was run by somebody else up until a few years ago. It became more and more unreliable and went offline. At some point I noticed that the domain had expired. I decided to buy it and run it myself.