URL Shortening Service (URLSS)

URL shortener service.

Motivation

This app takes a long URL and shrinks it down to fewer characters.

Benefits

Aside from just being more pleasing to the eye, shortened URLs can have the following added benefits:

More streamlined in appearance
- If you’re trying to build a brand and are doing so through a social media campaign, having all your links be the same length and appear very similar is crucial.
- Shortened links display better in emails, print material, and other places.
Tracking capabilities
- Clicks on the link can be tracked
More validity in social media engagement:
- A shortened link matching other links on your digital marketing materials and social media content lends validity to you as a business.
- Long URLs with random characters and numbers can look shady, especially to someone who’s a new customer

Downsides

Security issues
- You have no idea where a link is sending you when it’s in a shortened form. This can be helped by using a custom domain, but even then, it could seem suspicious.
Unreliable service:
- links become defunct after timeout

System Design Doc

Technology stack

This service should store relatively small amounts of data, no need to store relations between different data models, and redirections should be processed as quickly as possible
I use Go with Redis and Base 62 encoding.

Overview

Generating unique URL using randomization and Base62 encoding

Data model information

Id integer
Original string
Expiration date
Visits integer

Endpoints:

Create a new short link
Redirect to the origin URL on passing a short link
Get general information about the short link

Insight

source: https://www.example.co.uk:443/blog/article/search?docid=720&hl=en#dayone

Destination: http://localhost:8080/ZNkw23qpiss

Request:

curl -L -X POST 'localhost:8080/encode' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{
    "url": "https://www.example.co.uk:443/blog/article/search?docid=720&hl=en#dayone",
    "expires": "2022-10-04 17:18:00"
}'

Response:

{"success":true,"shortUrl":"http://localhost:8080/ZNkw23qpiss"}

AN4553R/UrlShortener