Want to hear a fun story?<p>You remember dyndns.com ? Well, it used to be a small app run literally from a dorm room at WPI. Well, after a while, it became one of the largest dynamic DNS providers in the world, and router manufacturers around the world started supporting it in the UI. Dyndns used to provide an address (an olden-days plaintext web API of sorts) to check the external IP of a router. Eventually, manufacturers realized that even if they didn't have a deal with dyndns or even formally support them, they can use their IP address to check the router WAN IP. Major manufacturers like linksys and d-link (I think, don't take my word for it) jumped on the bandwagon and everyone started pinging the crap out of that page and if they took it down, these routers would break in interesting ways. So they built it up and kept it running.<p>That API runs to this day, at checkip.dyndns.org.<p>edit: Today that company is dyn.com, bootstrapped pretty much all the way, and provides DNS to twitter, etsy, fastly, the guardian etc.