Am I getting this right? You spent 35K on a 5-syllable .io domain to capture traffic from a twitter account with 43K followers who misspelled your actual domain in a tweet? That can’t be right.

In the math you laid out, you have to get 6 subs a year for 10 years on your $600/year plan in order to recoup your investment.

Why would this tweet generate leads for 10 years? Why didn’t you figure discounted cash flows into the calculation? Will 36K be worth 36K in today’s money 10 years from now? 10 months from now?

And now, your hosting provider is rate limiting your website and returning 429. All this HN traffic is going down the chute. Perhaps you should have spent some of that cash on a more robust hosting plan?

> This website has been temporarily rate limited

Irony of losing out on HN traffic this time.

Hmmm.. Cloudflare’s free tier can’t handle an HN hug? Kinda surprised about that.. not really a great advertisement for their free tier tbh.

Edit I see another comment mentioned Workers. Well that is much less surprising. One shouldn’t expect the Workers free tier to handle an HN hug..

Archive.org version: https://web.archive.org/web/20220625155059/https://testimoni...

Seems to be Cloudflare Workers rate-limited

> This website has been temporarily rate limited

I guess you spent all the money on the domain and not your CloudFlare account.

It probably would have been better in the long-term to rebrand to a non-dictionary .com

Yestimonial.com is for sale and I bet for less than that .io.

I bought dozens of domain typos for my company. I summarized the results in my blog post https://catonmat.net/domain-typos.

Did you try contacting the owner of testimonial.com and offering them the 35k??

Oh my oh my... I'd rather bribe a Twitter employee to edit that tweet

A .com is infinitely better than a .io and 6 letter brandable .coms are way cheaper than 35k

Is the domain worth 1,000x the cost of a paid CloudFlare account to capture all the traffic you're currently losing

> This website has been temporarily rate limited

Huh? Isn't Cloudflare CDN free forever? Is it because its hosted through a Worker?

So the $35k question is, realizing that they bought the wrong TLD to begin with, will the company rebrand as .io?

https://web.archive.org/web/20220625131156/https://testimoni...

Makes sense you would want to capture that traffic. But why did d you decide on the .to tld to begin with?

>This website has been temporarily rate limited

>You cannot access this site because the owner has reached their plan limits. Check back later once traffic has gone down.

should have paid a little bit more for hosting then

Just to be clear "I" is not me in this :) I just thought it was interesting.

(Although I have spent a bit more than that on a totally different domain a few years ago, perhaps I should blog that!)

Missed an opportunity with the tweet that pointed to a different domain. Now missing an opportunity due to the Cloudflare Workers reaching the free tier limit.

It makes seems to me, especially since it seems to be a common typo and the price would continue to rise along with the success of his business.

couldn't handle the traffic of I guess 10 people...

Please check back later Error 1027 This website has been temporarily rate limited

You cannot access this site because the owner has reached their plan limits. Check back later once traffic has gone down.

testimonial.io still redirects me to the domain parking site as of right now.

CF Error => This website has been temporarily rate limited

And now no money left for an adequate hosting provider.