Throughout 2020 I was part of the small team at Cryptopia working to reconcile, recover, and repatriate the funds not stolen in the hack, as part of the liquidation. Since the company was no longer operating, its website was simple: a static page announcing the demise of the company and linking to the website of the liquidator (now it doesn’t even have that - it just redirects to the liquidator’s site).
I forget the exact numbers now, but the site received something like 100 hits per month - essentially nothing. Despite this, the liquidator was paying thousands of dollars a month for hosting of the website! This is because when the company was active, it had an API that was served on www.cryptopia.co.nz/api/, and there were still thousands of clients trying to hit the API every hour of the day. All that expense was to handle completely pointless requests from trading services that hadn’t been updated.
If the company had instead served its API on api.cryptopia.co.nz, all of this traffic could have been avoided at the DNS level by just dropping the record, and the website could have been hosted almost for free.
This is of course a specific case of the more general use of subdomains for handling uneven traffic levels (very useful), but it struck me as quite absurd and worth sharing.
