has shut down

tny.im was a URL shortener that operated between 2013 and the start of 2025. It was certainly one of the longest-running URL shortening services within its popularity and revenue class. As of the 9th of January, it has now shut down, as a consequence of:

• Repeated phishing complaints resulting complaints to the multiple hosting providers and domain registrars we've used over the years, because even though we always acted on all reports sent to [email protected], or which reached us through other means, entities like Netcraft just wouldn't respect our repeated requests to receive reports strictly at our dedicated abuse report address - which was clearly listed on our website.
  These "security" companies would constantly, simultaneously or even exclusively, send reports to our hosting providers regardless, who would then act on those reports and suspend hosting services, despite the offending short URLs having been suspended by the time they acted on these complaints;
• Google making it so that access to its Safe Browsing database is no longer free, which significantly hampered our ability to automatically detect abusive short URLs, for some years now. Google now requires hefty payments to use this API, despite much of its information being crowdsourced or received from other companies in the security space - like the aforementioned Netcraft. tny.im has never brought in sufficient revenue to cover these costs, and manual moderation became more fallible and more time-consuming.
• The most recent event: our hosting provider was overloaded with phishing reports related to tny.im and kindly asked us to cease hosting the website on their network. We decided to comply with this request, as we too were tired of the constant churn of having to suspend malicious short URLs ourselves.

To reiterate, tny.im mainly shut down because, thanks to companies like Netcraft which take a "shotgun approach" to "brand protection," phishing prevention and takedown enforcement, it has become impossible for independent website operators to host any kind of user-generated content, of which a small part could be malicious. This is the case even when these independent operators take good care in proactive moderation and report handling.
While we're hopeful this was not what happened in our particular case, many of these "security" systems are highly automated and become weaponizable: malicious actors can take down perfectly legitimate websites simply by filling false or overreaching reports, as others have reported (example).

Presumably, the only way to avoid these overreaching actions from these "security" companies of dubious intent, is to own your own AS and IP address block, such that there is no 3rd party which could possibly be contacted in order to report abuse, other than yourself. However, such investment would instantly make any kind of smaller legitimate URL shortener extremely unprofitable - operating an AS or having your own IPv4 block does not come cheap, and hosting redirects doesn't exactly bring in much revenue.

We were already planning on discontinuing tny.im due to the aforementioned maintenance overhead caused by malicious users, but the request from our hosting provider today was the straw that broke the camel's back. tny.im was a service provided free of charge, and for its low revenue, it was causing too many people too much work, including people outside of its team.

We apologize to all legitimate tny.im users who will be, without a doubt, affected by the loss of their short URLs. This is not the outcome we desired, as you certainly imagine - tny.im has never really been profitable, and we only kept running it for so many years because we wanted to avoid link rot (a problem affecting the internet since its inception) and because we understand that there are legitimate actual businesses depending on our shortening services, even if the popularity of independent URL shortening is much reduced since the social network formerly known as Twitter rolled their own URL shortener.

Throughout over 12 years of operation, tny.im served 117 370 551 clicks on 2 057 350 short URLs. At a later time we may find the means to once again host the redirects for the short URLs that had been created up until the moment tny.im was shut down, but for now, this page is all we have.
Note that this long-term plan would require some effort, as we'd have to doubly-check the legitimacy of every single URL we'd reinstate - and there are two million of them. We may end up just doing this on a case-by-case basis. One thing is for sure, we won't be operating a URL shortener anymore.

For any inquiries, the former tny.im team can be reached via email, and gbl08ma (the creator of the service) may also be reached via Bluesky.