#Tinyurl alternative plus

It's yours to own and operate as you please.įortunately, there are many open source options out there if you want to build the next bit.ly, goo.gl, or ow.ly yourself. You decide who has access to your analytics. With a self-hosted service, you decide how long your service operates for. While some services will let you pick your own domain to use, sometimes, that's about the level of customization you're going to get. But despite these challenges, URL shorteners aren't going anywhere anytime soon.īut with so many free link shortening services out there, why roll your own? In short: control. They make it challenging to figure out where a link is actually taking you before you click, and they're vulnerable to linkrot, should the service providing the short URL for you ever disappear. There are some challenges to URL shorteners, to be sure. They make it possible to provide a consistent entryway to a URL that may change frequently on the other side. They make it easier to perform analytics across a group of URLs. They can bring a consistent branding to a social media account.

They can make it much easier to type, or remember, an otherwise lengthy bare URL. Today, people use link shorteners for a slew of reasons. And back in the days before Twitter added their own link shortener to their service, a long URL meant taking precious characters away from your tweets.

#Tinyurl alternative plus

But sometimes, between a deep directory structure on a site, plus a large number of parameters tacked on to the end, URLs just begin to get unwieldy.