The hardest part of building AlShorty was not the URL shortening. That part is genuinely simple — a hash function, a key-value store, a redirect. The hard part was building analytics that felt fast, a custom domains system that was actually reliable, and an architecture that could handle traffic spikes without falling over.
We use edge workers for redirects. When someone clicks a shortened link, the redirect happens at the nearest edge node — typically under 20ms globally. The analytics event is written asynchronously so it never blocks the redirect. This sounds obvious in retrospect, but getting it right required three rewrites.
Custom domains were the feature that took the longest. Supporting user-supplied CNAME records, provisioning SSL certificates automatically, and handling certificate renewal without downtime is genuinely complex. We use a combination of Cloudflare and Let's Encrypt, with a queue-based certificate provisioning system that handles edge cases gracefully.
The most important architectural decision we made was separating the redirect infrastructure from the dashboard entirely. Redirects run on edge workers globally. The dashboard and API run on a traditional serverless architecture. If the dashboard goes down, links still work. That separation gave us tremendous confidence when we started scaling.
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