My name is Edward Hsing.
I’m 18, and I build internet infrastructure.
Today, something I started at 15 serves over 400,000 users, with more than 150,000 GitHub stars.
I was 15 when I bought a domain name.
I didn’t expect it to become something hundreds of thousands of people would end up using.
It wasn’t a startup.
It wasn’t a plan.
I just wanted to see what I could build.
At the time, getting a domain felt unnecessarily hard. It cost money, required setup, and for many people, it was simply out of reach.
That didn’t make sense to me.
So I started experimenting.
It Started With One Question
A friend asked me something simple:
“Can I use a subdomain under your domain?”
I said yes.
Then someone else asked.
And then another.
That was the moment it stopped being mine.
What began as a personal experiment quietly turned into something people started relying on in their projects.
Building Something That Didn’t Exist
There wasn’t a system for what I wanted to do.
No platform designed to let anyone register and manage domains freely, at scale.
So I built one.
That eventually became DigitalPlat FreeDomain - a platform that lets people register and manage domains freely, at scale.
I set up BIND9 on a small VPS.
Wrote my own backend in Python and Flask.
Connected everything directly to the DNS layer.
It wasn’t perfect.
It wasn’t elegant.
But it worked.
And people kept coming.
Growth Without Permission
There was no launch.
No marketing.
No funding.
Just developers sharing it with each other.
Hundreds of users turned into thousands.
Thousands turned into tens of thousands.
And eventually, something I built at 15 became infrastructure.
At some point, it stopped feeling like a project.
It felt like something people actually relied on.
Today, it serves over 400,000 users worldwide, with over 150,000 GitHub stars.
That still doesn’t feel real.
The Part No One Sees
People think building is the hard part.
It isn’t.
Keeping something alive is.
Running a free domain infrastructure means dealing with abuse at scale - spam, phishing, misuse.
You don’t get to ignore it. You have to design for it.
So I built systems to handle it:
Automated review pipelines.
Behavioral pattern scoring.
GitHub-based identity verification.
Structured abuse reporting and response.
Not to eliminate abuse completely - that’s impossible.
But to make sure everyone else can still use the system.
What This Was Really About
At some point, I realized this was never just about domains.
A domain is identity.
It’s the ability to exist on the internet — to build something, share something, create something that is yours.
And for a lot of people, that’s still harder than it should be.
I don’t think it should be.
Access to a digital identity shouldn’t be a privilege.
It should be a basic layer of the internet.
It Became Bigger Than Me
What started as something I built alone didn’t stay that way.
Some of the earliest users stayed.
They helped.
They contributed.
Today, people help manage reports, moderate discussions, and support the system.
It became something bigger than me.
And honestly, that’s the part I’m most proud of.
Looking Back
I didn’t set out to build infrastructure used by hundreds of thousands of people.
I just bought a domain and started experimenting.
But if you keep building - even when no one is watching, even when nothing is certain -
something small can turn into something that matters.
I’m 18 now.
I’m Edward Hsing.
And I’m still building things people rely on.
Because I believe the internet should be something people can access - not something they have to earn.
If you’re interested in how it works, the project is open on GitHub.
Top comments (1)
Awesome 👏🥹