Background
In early 2022 the httpstatuses.com domain started redirecting to a web agency’s site instead of serving the simple and useful site it once had.
The site had been fairly popular, and I found other people online also wondering what had happened. Had the domain expired? Was the site purchased?
What happened?
After digging around a bit I found Sam Ryan, the creator of the original httpstatuses site. His personal website mentions the httpstatuses.com domain was acquired by WebpageFX in 2016. WebpageFX seemingly did nothing with the domain for years, then came 2022.
After some more searching I found the original httpstatuses site was an open source project. Although, it hasn’t received a commit since the year of the acquisition.
Given the last commit date and the domain being acquired I have to think the project was essentially frozen as a term of the deal. A handful of stale issues without much traffic and outstanding pull requests lend more evidence to that view. However, it was MIT licensed, so with that…
Bringing it back online
I forked the original repo, then registered and redeployed the project to https://httpstatuses.io. 🎉
I’ve placed the repo under a GitHub org specific to the site’s purpose.
Tech Details
- The project is a static site built with Metalsmith
- I removed a sponsorship banner and Google Analytics snippet in this PR
- I deployed the site using CloudFlare Pages
I hope someone else might find the revived httpstatuses.io useful!
Edit
Edit 1: Someone on Reddit asked when httpstatus.es stopped serving the old site (because it too serviced this site!) I looked into that a bit and it seems httpstatus.es was the original domain for the site, but then the project was moved to httpstatuses.com primarily for SEO reasons in ~2015. See this GitHub issue. httpstatus.es was then set to redirect to httpstatuses.com going forward. That redirect continues to this day, httpstatus.es leads to the WebpageFX domain.
— Jon