Be careful about running a link shortener. They are very prone to abuse. They don't cost money to run because of bloat but because they require a lot of moderation. Spam is incessant.
NearlyFreeSpeech bans very little, but treats link shorteners as equivalent to running a mail server on their service, because they are always found and exploited by spammers.
They write:
https://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/section/policy/proxy#proxy
>URL shorteners are, unfortunately, a lot more fun to write than they are to maintain. If you want to set up a URL shortener for your own use, that's fine. If you let the general public submit URLs to it, expect us to shut it down the first time it gets exploited. (And it will get exploited.) Properly-run URL shorteners aren't successful because they have the shortest or cleverest URL, they're successful because they have a team of people working 24x7 both proactively and reactively to prevent and mitigate abuse. If you have such a team, and you want to run a public URL shortener on our service, please contact us for special arrangements. If you don't have such a team, you'll have to find another host that's less concerned about the Internet's welfare.
Worth bearing in mind.
Cheers,
Miles.
Received on Tue Jun 20 2023 - 10:49:40 CEST