Blog on vanityURLs

Redirects as Code: Managing Short Links the GitOps Way

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Most URL shorteners are black boxes. You log in through a web UI, create a link, and hope the service stays running. When something breaks — a link stops working, a campaign URL points to the wrong page, someone accidentally deleted a redirect — there’s no audit trail, no rollback, no way to know who changed what and when.

vanityURLs takes a different approach: your redirects live in a plain text file, in a Git repository, deployed via Cloudflare Pages. This is GitOps applied to URL management.

Why vanityURLs? The case for owning your short links

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

URL shorteners look like a solved problem. Pick a free service, paste a long URL, get a short one. Done. For years, services like bit.ly, goo.gl, and TinyURL made this trivially easy and free.

Then bit.ly slashed free accounts to 10 links per month. Google killed goo.gl. Millions of published links — in books, presentations, printed materials, email footers — started dying.

The problem isn’t that these services got worse. It’s that they were always the wrong architectural choice.

Say Goodbye to Third-Party URL Shorteners: Introducing VanityURLs

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

For years, URL shortening services like bit.ly, goo.gl, and tinyurl have been go-to tools for anyone needing to share compact links. These services were free and convenient — but the landscape is changing, and not for the better.

The Problem with Relying on Third-Party Services

In January 2024, Bitly — the leading URL shortener since 2008 — made a significant change: accounts created after 2018 were suddenly limited to just 10 links per month. For those who had relied on the previous limit of 10,000 free links per month, this was a major blow.