Sat, 28 March 2020 00:14 — Cloudy 7°C — Kifissia, Greece — #en #etc-hosts-com

etc-hosts.com is a dynamic DNS crafted with care.

How does a paid offering makes sense in a market that is niche, over-saturated with free services and not sexy at all?

At first it may seem stupid. It's the kind of idea that would be immediately rejected by a VC or an angel investor and if they are honest they would tell you that you are wasting your time, because there is no market for such a product.

But what if you are not looking (or hoping) to make millions? What if the project's viability is not based on a 10x or 100x return on investment?

This is the case of etc-hosts.com, "a dynamic DNS service crafted with care".

First of all, I've already had a blast working on it.

So in a way, my initial investment (100% in time so far) has already been returned: I spent some nights trying to solve interesting problems, I dusted off my Python skills, I caught up with the latest versions of AppEngine, I learned Vuejs, had an crash course in BigQuery and so on.

I tried to make the site clean, fast and mobile friendly, to make the service stable and reliable, to add features that are not available in other similar services, like a logs and charts.

If the result is good enough for 200 or 500 people to pay something like $1/month (that's a ballpark estimation of the pricing, it has not been fixed yet) over the free alternatives, I'll be more than happy and I'll consider my little experiment a success.

I still have some way to go until the service is open to the public. But you can sign up today, and I will let you know as soon as it does.

And BTW, if you have an esoteric, niche feature that you would like to see implemented in a dynamic DNS service, ping me on twitter or drop me an email at vrypan@gmail.com. Who knows, I may implement it.