14 November 21
That's a very good question to ask.
The answer is also simple - because I needed to in order to free myself from the clutches of my existing domain name hosting provider and provide a solution which whilst functional is also elegant and quick to check and get working.
Every since I wrote the original Domain Name management tool for Melbourne IT back in 1996, I've had a great interest in the DNS system. It runs the front facing part of the internet after all.
The original system was written in Perl (Perl3 I think back then!) and linked up to a miniSQL database. The system allowed the processing of domain name applications in the .COM.AU domain space which numbered only around 10,000 at that time. There were over 3,000,000 .AU domains in 2017, and now many more.
These days, the .AU domain space is managed by AUDA and there are many more domain name providers, but not all provide the same level of capacity.
25 years has seen a great many changes in the DNS space with many new TLDs becoming available for the public to register. Indeed the idea of a .LINK domain (which this site is set on) would not have even been thought of back then.
But what about this REDIR301.LINK site?
It's simply there to help people for now. It starts by helping me, and if it can help others, then awesome.
What are the big plans? Well, I really don't know currently. It depends on how much traction the project is able to generate. If people want to use the redirect service, then that's great. If they don't then the project will continue quietly to service my needs.
In the end, it's a good, simple and easy to use DNS based subdomain URL redirection system - and that's what I needed.