Comment by blakewatson
3 years ago
You get a surprising amount of functionality for $20. I just got an account and I've been poking around for about an hour. I'm seriously impressed. You get:
- a webpage
- DNS
- email forwarding
- a statuslog
- url shortener
- a pastebin
- a weblog
- an optional Mastodon account
- optional IRC/Discord
- and probably some more stuff I missed
And all of this stuff is much more configurable than it would typically be on other services. It is ripe for creative integrations. Oh and the whole thing can be interacted with through an API. Pretty cool for $20. Definitely not the same as "just getting your own domain."
It's not $20. It's $20 per year. I know that might be semantic for some people, but for much of these services, I wouldn't want it going away after 1 year if I'm unable to pay that cost again. And for that reason, I think it's worth noting.
These are ongoing services so a once off payment doesn't make sense for the business. The alternatives are self-hosting and free services, self hosting is great. If you are using free services though, they could disappear too, and you have to question the business model of anyone givingyou something for nothing.
At least if you are paying for it you are entering into a contract of service from the provider which gives you a lot of legal recourse and leverage and also supports the business so that they do keep providing you the service.
Domain registration has to be renewed, either per year or per <x> years if you buy a bunch of licenses up front. So what's the alternative to this then? A lot of domains can cost around $20 per year.
It is totally reasonable to charge a recurring fee for providing an ongoing service, but to be clear you are not buying a domain that needs registration. You are buying a subdomain of the domains that this company already owns. Some other sites give those away for free because there is no marginal cost per subdomain.
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Creating a subdomain once you have the domain is free, probably for the domain omg.lol they're paying $20 / year.
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What if they offered a 'lifetime' rate which is the NPV of $20 over 20 years, so like $1000 or something? You pay once and get it forever.
Of course, only as long as they can operate the service forever...
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The thing with a domain registration is that you know if you pay for ten years in advance, you WILL have it for ten years. With most SaaS, you have absolutely no guarantee this is going to be the case.
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My domain is 26 per year. This is cheap af and I'm reconsidering ditching my domain in favour of this.
What if this service stops to exist after 2 years? Then any place you advertised/published this subdomain will need to be updated. With your own domain you won't have that issue, ever. Why would you give that up?
Worth noting many of the services on omg.lol support custom domains, e.g. https://zwe.st/omglol is on the URL shortener.
I extensively use the API for pastebin and URL shortener. It's very much a selling point for me -- love being able to control things on the command line with a few simple scripts.
Great package of tiny little web apps for a good dollar amount and a great author.
https://zac.omg.lol/
I love the service, I hate the name. It's got too much cute/whimsy for my taste, and it just makes me feel like the "hello fellow teenagers" guy. If they had the same everything but it was a "short and easy to spell/pronounce" domain service, I would 100% go for it.
It doesn't have to be entirely boring, but less... cute. Also I think that meme language has a high risk of drifting into the cringe zone, and then that will feel bad too. I would have the same problem with lit.lol or yeet.lol.
Am I alone in being willing to pay more for less whimsy? Give me the $30/year plan where I can pick bucket.web or tiny.star or something less of the moment.
I'm sorry for the quality of this comment, but boo hoo.
oh same. I'm not sure I'd want this with anything other than my own domain name anyway, but definitely I wouldn't want "omg.lol". I hate that internet-ass humor.
You can use your own domain, you're not tied to omg.lol
Where does it talk about using your own domain?
https://home.omg.lol/info
I can't find it in the Help docs.
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That's actually a shockingly decent list of provided features for $20 a year. A more than fair price, and worth every dime as long as the servers are at least semi-reliable. I pay $12 a year for a domain, and another $5 per month for a VPS to host services on that domain, and even that's totally worth it to me, so $20 a year for all that they're offering (even if it is only on a subdomain)? Quite good indeed…
And Fastmail. Fastmail is to programmers what Superhuman is for salespeople.
What is so great about fastmail? I keep hearing people talk about it but haven’t “gotten it” yet.
I tried fastmail once when I was looking for a new provider. Free trial, they said. So I created an account, switched over my MX records, changed my mail client, etc. Seemed fine.
That is, until I received an email from my father. I couldn't open it. It was so perplexing that I eventually opened a ticket with support to see what I screwed up. Turns out their "free trial" only worked with other fastmail addresses until verified my account. The only supported method of verification was to create a paid account. Support wouldn't or couldn't help until I verified. I was pretty pissed; felt like I got bait and switched. What good is a trial that only works with a service that (relatively) very few people use? I closed my account, moved to purelymail, and haven't looked back.
I still have no idea what email my dad sent me. They might be a great service otherwise, but this gave me a very sour experience.
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It's just really good at being an email provider. Reliable, privacy-respecting, good support, and with a webmail client to rival (or beat) Gmail.
Plus they frequently develop new useful features, like partnering with Bitwarden and 1Password to generate throwaway email address on the fly at your domain.
I have been a paying customer for years, and I don't expect to ever leave. My favorites are: - DNS capabilities - Friendly and fast customer support - Great, smooth, pretty UI on all platforms
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Fastmail is just normal IMAP unlike Gmail, so it works with email clients without weirdness around folders and archiving. It also supports native push notifications on iOS, which Gmail does not. And it works well with your own domain names.
That said I switched to using iCloud mail with my own domain as soon as it was available.
I find latency on gmail (for work or otherwise) makes gmail unusable. I am more latency sensitive than most of my colleagues though.