Url shorteners how do they work

We're going to use TinyURL , but the process will be similar when using other shortening services. The exact steps are below:. When other users go to the shortened URL, they will be automatically redirected to the full address. The webpage will still exist at the longer URL—the shortened URL is simply a shortcut to make the link easier to manage.

URL shorteners aren't just useful with Twitter. There are lots of situations where a shorter URL is more convenient:. It does everything you need: create a tiny new URL. With Rebrandly, you can create a branded shortlink of your own with a custom domain—even with a free account.

A short, branded URL just for link sharing, like su. Source: Rebrandly. Get real-time notifications when links are clicked with the help of Hyperlink, or change the settings to hourly, daily, or weekly summaries. Hyperlink also provides per-click details: find out the device, location, and referral info for every visitor, and a live tracking dashboard. The app for iOS and Android is a nice complement to the Chrome extension, for those who need to share links on the go.

We get it! Source: Hyperlink. Custom URL slugs are available, and if you register an account, you can track the stats for the shortlink. Source: Tiny. Do is another simple and sweet option that has all you need: the ability to customize, traffic stats, and even an automatic QR code generator. At a glance, you can monitor broken links and latency, find the visitors yielding the best conversion rates, track views and clicks, and more.

Source: ClickMeter. Data is valuable for your insights, right? Well, third-party companies are often interested in that information, too, which is why a cottage industry has popped up of businesses that actually pay you to shorten your links with them.

For example, Shorte. Source: Shorte. Ly, or even to customize the URL, but an account will get you access to real-time analytics, including click-throughs and social media referrals.

Ly also has a free custom URL shortener button you can add to your browser toolbar, so shortening your link just takes one click. Source: Cuttly. Plus, Clkim offers retargeting based on custom lists of people who have clicked on your shortlist. Source: Clkim. Try a few, try them all—just make sure to keep it short and sweet. Drive more traffic to your website and save time with Hootsuite. Thanks for visiting DZone today,. Edit Profile.

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Join For Free. You may also like: Building Blocks of a Scalable Architecture. Third-Party Library A very reliable library that generates unique, random tokens ids is Hashids which has support in more than 30 languages! Service workflow with Hashids The Zookeeper service can be replaced by an instance of DynamoDB , which can maintain a counter.

Complete System Design The complete system design can be summarized, as shown below. Final architectural diagram Note : A Redis cache setup is added here to improve application performance, as newly generated short URLs can be responded to from the cache rather than querying the database.

The URL Shortening application nodes works in a cluster; whenever the application nodes start or when a new node is added to the cluster, they talk to a Zookeeper service. The Zookeeper service allocates a unique number range to each application node on request. A request to shorten a long URL reaches the Load Balancer, which then appropriately delegates the call to one of the URL Shortening application nodes in a round-robin fashion.

If the long URL does not exist in the database, then the URL Shortening application uses the next available number from the range allotted by Zookeeper in step 2 and generates a new token by using the Hashid library. A short URL is generated using the token and the configured expiry is set and then saved to the database and to the cache. If there is no cache entry, then the application checks in the database and goes to step 9. This redirects the client from short URL to the actual location i.

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