A little while ago, one of my oldest friends spent several months refining and launching EasyRedir, a URL redirection service he created to help solve some problems he was seeing.
He wanted a simple, easy to use service for managing URL and domain redirects, but most of the ones he saw were anything but - so, as is his custom - he created a really good tool and is offering it as a service.
In the past, I’ve gone about doing this sort of thing by building my own little tools, using mod_rewrite on Apache or updating web server configuration files, but I no longer have the patience for this - it’s generally not an effective use of my own personal time.
William built the EasyRedir web application with a friendly Rails frontend and a custom lua powered nginx backend - all hosted on AWS in a well built and scalable fashion.
I generally like to use the best tool for the particular job - rather than get tied into a single provider for everything - it gives me much more flexibility going forward.
If you’ve got some vanity domains or need some redirects and don’t want to worry about it - give EasyRedir a look. It’s a great company, with solid technology under the hood that’s focused on the problem.
Don’t buy the big package of services from “insert-barely-capable-telecom-company-that-gives-you-free-hosting” - then you’re locked in to their terrible services and it’s a real pain to untangle it all later.
PS - Here are some of the small focused tools that I personally like to use:
- EasyRedir - for URL and domain redirects - they even have a free tier.
- dnsimple for domain names and dns hosting. I also have a couple of domains hosted at DNS Made Easy - but will probably move them over when I have a moment.
- Packagecloud - to host my apt repos - which are often built automatically by Wercker
- Papertrail - for log aggregation and tail-as-it-comes-in capability.