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I remember coming across this service a year ago, when it hit the top of the HackerNews? website, and somehow came across it again today. The service is so inexpensive that I spent some time ruminating whether I should pick up another domain, and finally decided to continue as I was. Nevertheless, the reasoning seemed worth putting down.
If I was not fascinated about self-hosting, and did not already have a domain and a little VPS on Linode, I would have been sorely tempted to sign up. The main driver would be the price. For the cost of 20$ per year, you do not have the hassles of managing .. well anything, including the domain name and the webhosting.
For anybody more interested in hosting a website and developing a 'branded' or fun social presence, and significantly less interested in the nuances of system administration :- omg.lol fits rather well, based on the services they offer.
The type of services offered seem to fill just the 'right' spot, one between sophisticated and basic needs (and some more). For example, you get a domain, a landing page, email forwarding, an IRC service, a microblog and access to a mastodon instance, all of which are generally interconnected.
What more would somebody want to establish their online presence, at a fundamental level, independent of large corporations?
Usually the issue with using services of this kind is the danger of outgrowing them or needing something a bit different, and of course, the cases where the service shuts down. This echoes why I use Emacs over Todoist.
In contrast, for the curious who have much time and curiosity to burn, on a server with root access: is the freedom to setup almost any desired service. For example, I was running a weechat instance on tmux to connect to IRC for most of the year, after which I moved on to a self-hosted ZNC bouncer. While these activities by themselves did not add a tremendous value, the process of figuring out indirectly connected things, like tmux, mosh and working on a terminal were certainly useful. An earlier post talks about some aligned points related to self-hosting your own blog.
It is probably worth noting that if it's only a website or blog that is desired - one can do so without a domain name, and at no cost with say Github, or alternatives like tildeverse. Which is how omg.lol probably caters to a niche set of nerds who would like to self-host but just have neither sufficient time or motivation to plunge into that rabbit hole. And Yes, it is a rabbit hole!
omg.lol is not alone in this space. There is also Disroot, which started out as a privacy focused mailbox service, but seems to have expanded to offering a number of services with partnerships.