SRS & BillD -

It would seem that the tinyurl site would have to be up for the links to work. That doesn't seem like too much of a problem - you just gotta' have faith in some things, and the life of a link more often ends because the site you link to goes down - or gets edited.

The link posted here, "62ug," assuming a "base 36" numbering (10 digits + 26 letters), comes out at about the 15,210,629th link posted through them (don't check the math, I was in a hurry). Given modern web traffic, that's not too unreasonable.

If the links are separate files, they're already at about 7.5GB on an nNIX drive with 500 byte clusters - or 30GB on the more common 2K cluster formats. I'd suspect they use a database format that breaks the cluster granularity, but that's still a lot of data for one of us - but not unreasonable on an Amazon-scale server.

They should be able to (affordably) support it for about as long as most "real" links will survive (except for mudcat, which is forever!)

John