Articles about URL shortening, link management, analytics, security, and best practices — written by the person behind hrva.cc.
In September, scam links imitating Njuškalo and Jófogás got past Google Safe Browsing and every other check we tried. Here's what hrva.cc checks now, what it still can't catch, and how you can help.
Read more: How hrva.cc stops phishing linksLong URLs are ugly, hard to share, and easy to mistype. A URL shortener solves these problems — but modern tools go far beyond just shrinking links.
Read more: Why You Should Use a URL Shortener in 2026Knowing how many people clicked your link is just the beginning. Here's what link analytics can tell you — and why it matters for your marketing.
Read more: The Complete Guide to Link AnalyticsSet it and forget it — expiration dates and visit limits give you full control over your links, even after you've shared them.
Read more: How Expiration Dates and Visit Limits WorkURL shorteners are everywhere — but not all short links are created equal. Follow these best practices to keep your links trustworthy, trackable, and effective.
Read more: URL Shortening Best Practices for 2026How Google Safe Browsing keeps your short links safe — and why every URL shortener should check destinations before sharing them.
Read more: Why Safe Browsing Matters for Link SharingA deep dive into the architecture behind hrva.cc — how we keep links fast, safe, and always available through Redis caching, JWT auth, Safe Browsing, and zero-downtime migrations.
Read more: How hrva.cc Handles Security, Speed, Reliability, and MigrationHow we use Liquibase, backward-compatible schema changes, and careful deploy ordering to evolve our PostgreSQL schema without downtime.
Read more: Zero-Downtime Migrations: Evolving a Database Without Breaking AnythingHow we use Spring's TaskExecutor to fire-and-forget visit tracking, email sending, and cache warmup — keeping the redirect path under 5ms.
Read more: Async Everything: Keeping Redirects Fast While Counting Millions of VisitsA deep dive into our Redis caching architecture — how we keep 99% of redirects cache-hot, validate stale data, and survive Redis outages.
Read more: Caching Strategy for a URL Shortener: TTL, Warmup, Priming, and Graceful DegradationHow we integrate Google Safe Browsing v4 to check every URL at creation time and recheck all active URLs daily — with auto-deactivation and email notifications.
Read more: Safe Browsing at Scale: Checking Every URL TwiceHow we used Spring AOP to auto-log every admin action — and why we had to exclude read-only endpoints to avoid noise.
Read more: Building an Audit Log That Doesn't Suck: AOP, Pointcuts, and Meaningful EventsHow we migrated from Angular 14 to Next.js 16 while keeping the live app running — and the lessons we learned about incremental rewrites.
Read more: Rewriting an Angular App to React Without Stopping DevelopmentThe design decisions behind hrva.cc's interface — why we removed the advanced options toggle, how we upsell without being pushy, and what we learned from user behavior.
Read more: Designing a URL Shortener UI That Works for EveryoneWhy we made hrva.cc open source, what the community taught us, and the surprising number of people who want to self-host their link infrastructure.
Read more: Open Sourcing a URL Shortener: What We Learned