Hotsuto.com

I posted the other day asking for advice on how to improve hotsuto before going to PH (https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/launching-on-product-hunt-next-week-can-i-get-some-improvement-suggestions-e997c6868c)

And was informed by the ever helpful @ness that the order domain results came in were a bit wonky, and not super actionable for people who weren't logged in.

What's that mean?

Well, people who were just checking out the site might not get anything of value on their first search and bounce!

Not GOOD!

Now, the results are ordered by availability AND the length of the domain name. This way people are more likely to sign up, or even (dare I even hope) register a domain so I can make a little scratch off of this thing!

In the process of a very soft launch, and I've had 220 visitors come through the site. Not bad for being just a few days old! But I haven't had a single sale yet.

I'm an affiliate site, and make my money when someone buys a domain or hosting package through my links.

I just added a link to Sellfy, a dope ecommerce platform and logojoy.

I'm hoping that those can do something for me. But really I just need to find a more consistent source of traffic!

Fun haha

So I was doing some very hacky silly ways of looking up to see if a domain was registered or not, this was because running a who is command on my own was slow (at scale) and using most services to do the same were super expensive!

Then I was fortunate enough to stumble upon domainr.com that has a killer lightning fast API for lookups and they give you 10,000 searches a month for free and then every additionally thousand is $2.00. Not a bad deal!

Now all I have to do is tighten up the UI a bit, get my login logout stuff a little bit cuter and we should be good!

But for real search times dropped from minutes to 10s of seconds. I've still got a couple optimization tricks up my sleeves, that I'm excited to try out soon!

That was scary, I thought something fundamental had broken but it was just that my free trial to the translation service had ended.

But I was able to get back in there and fix it with a new API key. phew!

I'm still getting some false positives in the results, and that's annoying as hell. But I'll fix it soon enough.

That, and multi threading, gotta figure that out. to get these things sped up!

So this is the resurrection of a product I built (and made a couple hundred off of) years ago, but had to kill because I built it in a VERY expensive way.

So it'a back now!

I learned a bit more about using NoSQL databases, and that real WHOIS lookups are expensive at scale. So I've found a way to do a series of other lookups to check if a domain is being used at all. This sadly results in some false positives (a domain appears to be available but isn't) I'm working on getting that better and hope to be able to in the next couple.

I also learned how to implement Firebase authentication, which is sooooo much easier than rolling my own. I totally recommend it for time crunched indie hackers.

Revenue comes from affiliate links to domain registrars and from selling WP hosting packages.

Yeah, it was a very fun project to build, and I'll be making improvements to it sporadically when my schedule permits.

I hope you all can get some use out of it!

This is very much a side project