I'm surprised there's still any interest in standalone URL shorteners. Didn't Twitter make them obsolete when it implemented its own?
http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=URLTeam
(edit: and you can imagine how useful that's going to be once browsers start checking the Wayback whenever they see a 404... we're getting close to starting a trial of that with Firefox, with other browsers to follow.)
That's not the primary use-case for it[2][3], but we're happy to support people shortening URLs if they want to. The reason there's room for this is that our URL shortening function has no ads, no third party tracking, no bloat ... no dark patterns.
That's worth something to some people.
[1] Oh By, Inc.
But it’s still a closed, proprietary database and there’s no way to decode an “Oh By Code” if the service goes down, which is the disadvantage number one you have with URL shorteners.
> The real utility are the easily recognizable codes, prefixed with "0x".
Why not using a prefix that helps differentiate your codes from hexadecimal numbers? How do you plan to get people to know your service if it’s not recognizable? Let’s say I put one of those codes on my business card, I still have to write somewhere that people should use 0x.co to access the content, which ruins the advantage of having just one code rather than a URL to my website (literally anyone knows how to open a URL in a browser).
Yes, that's correct. In this case, "Oh By" will continue running indefinitely. This is true for two reasons:
1) Building an extremely lightweight, ad free interface has a happy byproduct of ... being extremely lightweight. The infrastructure requirements for even a wildly popular "Oh By" are trivial.
2) Because Oh By is self-funded, there is no pressure from outside parties to break the pattern of an ad free, tracking free service with zero bloat.
If you're having trouble swallowing this, remember that rsync.net has been running continuously since 2001[1]. I think that's a credible track record[2].
[1] As a feature of JohnCompanies, the first VPS provider, and then as a standalone corporation in 2006.
[2] In fact, the rsync.net warrant canary turns 10 years old this year.
There's a 0% chance this will be running "indefinitely." You're just skirting the issue by making a promise you can't keep.
Well that's the real trick, isn't it ?
I'm happy to report that while Oh By itself does not display ads, we are a consumer of ads. We have a decent budget for sales and marketing.
I used to run a public one but it was getting abused for spam so I stopped.
And when your URL shortener goes down, all links are dead. Shortening URLs is the last thing you want to do when you need to preserve pages that might go down. Caching is a better solution.