A Short Follow-Up: What Actually Breaks First in URL Shorteners at Scale
Source: Dev.to
Background
This post follows up on Creating Short URLs at Scale via API (Without Reinventing the Wheel). After sharing how myapi.rest handles short URLs at scale, several questions came up about what actually goes wrong first when teams roll their own URL shortener.
Common Pain Points
The fast redirect endpoint is usually the easiest part to get right. The real problems appear around everything surrounding that redirect. Early‑stage pain points include:
- Shortcode collisions as traffic or batch creation ramps up
- Analytics write pressure during spikes (campaigns, SMS blasts, QR scans)
- Expiry rules that quietly grow complex over time
- Abuse patterns that weren’t planned for on day one
- Operational overhead (monitoring, retries, edge cases)
Each issue is manageable on its own, but together they create ongoing drag.
When Effort Shows Up Later
Most teams can build a basic shortener quickly. The effort tends to surface later, once the service is already in use:
- Making changes without breaking existing links
- Keeping behavior consistent across environments
- Handling edge cases that only appear under real traffic
- Supporting the shortener alongside everything else the team owns
These concerns don’t tend to be dramatic individually; they quietly add up over time.
Moving to a Standalone Service
After rebuilding short‑URL logic multiple times, I realized I was spending effort on infrastructure that wasn’t core to the product. I extracted the logic into a standalone service—the same one now exposed via myapi.rest. The goal wasn’t to be clever; it was to:
- Remove repeated work
- Standardise behavior
- Keep the API boring and predictable
Rolling your own short‑URL service can make sense for very custom needs, but for most teams the value lies in not owning the long tail of complexity. That’s the gap I’m trying to fill with myapi.rest.
Takeaway
If you’re curious or have strong opinions either way, I’m always happy to discuss.