Please don’t use derefer.me anymore

When derefer.me was launched in 2008 it wasn’t the first of its kind, but it offered features apparently not found anywhere else – in particular the option to customize redirect pages without thwarting the dereferring function.

The site is a personal project – I never intended to make profit from it, neither through ads nor by selling the site once it had attracted many users and links. I’m happy it helped many people and I won’t betray their trust.

However, an increasing use of the site means increasing costs[note] that aren’t matched by any revenues. As blocking search engines didn’t stop the trend, I’ve now decided to post this message instead of the site’s previous content.

The dereferring service continues to work.

I don’t want a zillion links to become broken. But I’ll appreciate it, if you use a different dereferring service in the future. I’m sure there are decent ones out there. (I won’t recommend a particular one.)

By the way, the web has changed since 2008. Some browsers have implemented HTML5’s rel="noreferrer", an easy and awesome alternative to dereferring services, although it might be to early to completely rely on it.

Thanks
Martin <inno@spamfo@dereno@spamferno.spam.me>

Note: The current webhost has a very fair pricing system, actually. I have been charged much more for less load by another webhost in the past.