Vapurl.com is Dead
After less than a year in service, Vapurl.com has been shut down. I haven’t been monitoring it very closely for a good six months, but apparently a Russian spam network was using Vapurl to mask their URLs. Spamhaus figured out what was going on and reported our domain as bad. Apparently, GoDaddy.com doesn’t like to be the registar for anyone listed on Spamhaus, so they suspended our account.
If we wanted to bring the site back up tt would have cost us at least $75 just to reactivate our account to transfer away from GoDaddy, and then we would have needed to figure out a way to keep block the spammers; a very time consuming battle, I’m sure. It just wasn’t worth it to try to fight the spam. We could have probably engineered the site differently from the get-go to make the site less appealing to spammers, but we were really just looking for a fun weekend project to play with Google App Engine. At the end of the day, I’d say the site was a success. It was a fun learning experience, even if it didn’t last very long.
June 14th, 2010 at 11:01 pm
How many hits did you get over the life of the site? You should move the site and relaunch it in static form to preserve your \weekend project\.
June 15th, 2010 at 11:33 am
It looks like we got about 30,000 visitors (63,000 page views) over the lifetime of the site. There was a spike to about 2000 visitors (from about 100) the day before it got shut down. That’s probably when the spammers really started using us. There wouldn’t be much to see if the site is just static. Maybe I’ll get in and take some screenshots.
May 13th, 2011 at 7:29 am
Any chance on getting the code you used to create VAPURL. So people can integrate it in to their own website. Basically make the disposable URL’s without the public interface so the spammers don’t use it.
July 1st, 2011 at 7:10 am
Charles: Interesting question. I’ll have to think about it. I’ll send you an email with a little more detail.
August 1st, 2011 at 2:54 pm
heya!! would love to integrate this too!!! actually need this for a project i am working on too!!
what do you say??