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Nilesh Raut
Nilesh Raut

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URL Shortener Using Snowflake IDs and Base62 Encoding

#algorithms #architecture #systemdesign

Short URLs look simple, right? But designing a scalable URL shortener that can handle millions of requests per second is an entirely different game.

I wanted something lightweight, fast, and globally unique — without depending on auto-increment IDs or UUIDs. That’s when I discovered the power of Snowflake IDs and Base62 encoding.

⚙️ Why Snowflake IDs?

Traditional databases can’t safely generate sequential IDs once you scale across multiple servers. You risk collisions or need heavy synchronization.

Snowflake IDs solve that beautifully.
They’re 64-bit unique identifiers that combine:

  • Timestamp (for order)
  • Machine ID (to avoid overlap)
  • Sequence number (for uniqueness)

This way, every short URL gets a unique, time-ordered ID — even if generated across different instances.

So, for example:

snowflakeID = 177101848939540480
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looks huge, but it’s guaranteed unique and sortable.

🔠 Base62 Encoding – Making IDs URL Friendly

A Snowflake ID is long and not URL-friendly.
To convert it into something like abc123, I used Base62 encoding, which uses:

0-9, A-Z, a-z
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That means:

  • Every number turns into a short, readable string.
  • No weird characters — safe for URLs.
  • Compact and consistent across systems.

So, 177101848939540480 → "bA7zD4"

Neat, right?
That’s how services like Bitly and TinyURL generate their neat short codes.

🧠 Why Microservices?

I also split the system into small services:

  • ID generator
  • Redirect handler
  • Analytics tracker

Each service runs independently, making it easy to scale horizontally as traffic grows.
This is the same philosophy big URL shorteners use behind the scenes.

🔗 Full Breakdown

In my full post, I’ve explained the entire architecture, scaling decisions, database design, caching strategy, and microservice communication flow in depth.

👉 Read the full article here:
Designing a Scalable URL Shortener — Snowflake IDs, Base62 Encoding, and Microservices

Even a “simple” project like a URL shortener can teach powerful lessons about distributed systems, unique ID generation, and real-world scalability.
If you’re building backend systems, this is a great place to start learning how to scale smartly — not just widely.

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