With the outburst of Twitter and microblogging services, many companies who want to make some quick money started services that include, URL shortening like tinyurl, bit.ly, tr.im and others or image sharing services like TwitPic, yFrog and so on. However, due to lack of a proper business model, some of these sites are struggling to meet their bandwidth costs. Because most of these services are just a week long PHP programming work, it’s easy for other companies to enter the URL shortening bandwagon. As such it’s difficult for companies to really make a business model out of this.

Recently, Twitter’s switch from tinyurl to bit.ly as it’s default shortening service infuriated companies like tr.im as they announced that they will probably be shutting down their service, though they reverted their decision later. When such companies go out of business, what will happen to your URLs? Dead and gone for good? So why not host our own URL shortening services? How difficult is it to write our own URL shortening service? Turns out that a few couple of PHP files, and a MySQL database and a mod-rewrite enabled Apache server is all what you need for hosting your own URL shortening service. Writing those PHP code is not for the those who are not conversant with PHP (including me). For people like us, two smart guys, Lester Chan and Ozh Richard at yourls.org have written a custom URL shortener that you can use it for free on your blog. In this post, I will briefly explain how to host your own custom URL shortener using YOURLS. Later we will also look at how to host your own “TwitPic” service.

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