Today I will cover why you should consider hosting your own URL Shortening service. The purpose of this post is to provide information to those looking to get started without investing any time or money developing their own custom programmed URL shortening service. Not all of us need an advanced service to share our URLs, many of us just want a bit more control, maybe a fancy looking panel with statistics about the links we share. There’s no reason to recreate the wheel here. I’m going to show you how to get up and running before that new sexy short domain is even in your hosting account.

Let me cover a few pros and cons of running your own URL shortening service before moving on…

Why you should host your own URL shortening service

  1. You share URLs regularly.
  2. You want detail statistics on CTR (click-through rate) and other statistics
  3. You want to increase traffic to a specific domain or subdomain
  4. You want a themed URL shortening service address
  5. You want a reliable service, which you control
  6. The software necessary to do so is free

Why you may not want your own URL shortening service

  1. It comes with a fee – you need hosting and a domain
  2. You never share links… ever!
  3. You use Bit.ly or Goo.gl religiously and trust their stability to last forever.
  4. You don’t want to be bothered with the setup time involved (Hint! It only takes 5 minutes to do)

Let’s just go one by one. If you share URLs on a regular basis, it is always good to know how often they actually get clicked, and even more importantly – where the clicks are coming from (both physical and digital locations.) I won’t go into more specifics on that bit today though.

Having your own service is a great way to increase traffic to a specific domain or subdomain. At the time of writing this, my Alexa rank for DB84.us is just over 8,000,000. Now keep in mind, I don’t use this domain for anything but hosting my URL shortening service. I share URLs on Twitter and a few other websites. It is nice having total control over your shortening service. You are responsible for backing it up (or not), but you don’t have to worry about a website shutting down and having all your short URLs disappear. You also don’t have to worry about having a moderator remove your URLs for “poor taste” or any other particular reasons they may knock our your short URLs. Finally, a “themed” URL shortening domain can be used to help with branding. “DB84″ is themed to me. “DB”, are my initials (Dan Bochichio), and “84″ represents the year I was born (1984.) Let’s look at others, shall we?

The list above is by no means complete, I just wanted to provide a few examples of how companies have used short domain names to keep their name present in the URL while using as few characters as possible.

Now I said it was easy, that part is true. You will want your own web host which supports MySQL – most hosts do. Next, head over to YOURLs.org – follow their directions on how to get their software installed. They provide solid direction and should have you up and running in less than 10 minutes depending your skill level (they use technical terminology – so pull out your dictionary if necessary, no shame in that!)

Here’s the hard part

Coming up with a domain name can be a difficult process. It took me a day to find one I liked, and then I decided I didn’t like it and ended up buying another, shorter, and better domain name. Plan ahead, think about it and the overall purpose of it. Are you using it for only your personal use? Are you going to try to make money by serving Ads on the domain and making the service available for public use? Is it for an organization, association, or company use (ie New York Time’s service is only available for their articles.) All these factors should have an impact on the domain name you choose to use.

So there you have it, use this information and start your own service today … or don’t!

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Host Your Own URL Shortening Service was written by Dan Bochichio is a freelance Internet Specialist with over a decade of experience in web design. I specialize in taking new businesses from a web-zero to a web-hero by creating attractive sites which meet today's standards on the Web.