This post is a follow-up to
Creating Short URLs at Scale via API (Without Reinventing the Wheel)
I received a few good questions after sharing how myapi.rest handles short URLs at scale, so I wanted to follow up with something more practical:
what actually goes wrong first when teams roll their own URL shortener.
It’s rarely the redirect
Most people assume redirects are the hard part.
They’re not.
A fast redirect endpoint is usually the easiest thing to get right.
The real problems show up around everything surrounding that redirect.
Where things usually start to hurt
From experience, these are the pain points that surface early:
- Shortcode collisions once 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 you didn’t plan for on day one
- Operational overhead (monitoring, retries, edge cases)
None of these are hard individually — but together they create ongoing drag.
Where the real effort shows up
Most teams can build a basic shortener quickly.
The effort tends to show up later, once the service is already in use:
- Making changes without breaking existing links
- Keeping behaviour consistent across environments
- Handling edge cases that only appear under real traffic
- Supporting it alongside everything else the team owns
None of this is dramatic on its own — it just quietly adds up over time.
Why I ended up externalising it
After rebuilding short URL logic multiple times, I realised I was spending effort on infrastructure that wasn’t core to the product.
So I pulled it out 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 behaviour
- Keep the API boring and predictable
Final thought
Rolling your own short URL service can make sense — especially for very custom needs.
But for most teams, the value is in not owning the long tail of complexity.
That’s the gap I’m trying to fill with myapi.rest.
If you’re curious or have strong opinions either way, I’m always happy to discuss.
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