Make small
tny.im started operating in 8th August 2011, when the first shorten link was created. However, it didn't operate on the domain tny.im, but on the subdomain 4.l.to, from the FreeDNS service.
tny.im, or better, 4.l.to, operated under this domain for a somewhat long period of over seven months. On 19th March 2012 something unexpected happened: all l.to subdomains stopped working and never came back up.
The solution we found was to start operating on another domain. By that time, this service operated under a non-profit business model and the team was commited into not putting more money into the project than what it could generate back. So there was no money to pay for a "serious" short domain name. The only thing to do was moving to yet another subdomain from FreeDNS, and this time, we chose l.f.nu. Note that during this transfer there was no data loss: the server kept being the same, as well as the database; all the 4.l.to links worked as long as you changed the links' domain from 4.l.to to l.f.nu.
The domain change was the chosen time to give a new face to the shortener: we changed themes, the layout, added features and fixed bugs. Later, we also added the ability to edit short links through a passcodes system.
This URL shortener worked as l.f.nu until 13th June 2012, when another unfortunate and unexpected event happened: f.nu sububdomains were removed from the FreeDNS service by its owner, and all subdomains were pointed to f.nu, which then became an URL shortener - but with much less features than l.f.nu/tny.im, despite providing shorter links (the userbase appeared to be smaller too, and for good reason). Nowadays, f.nu is no longer an URL shortener.
So, you ask, did we change to yet another unreliable FreeDNS subdomain? No. Gradually, after the change to l.f.nu, we started thinking about ways to increase the revenue of the website, so that it could be better while still being self-sustaining. We had made a few cents with ads, which we had hoped and still hope to be non-intrusive (because we hate annoying ads!), and we thought it was time to spend that little amount of money in buying a domain.
Fortunately, a nice guy called Joseph Paz offered to pay for the first year of the domain. Finding a domain that was short, cheap and available took some hours, but in the end, we managed to spend only $11 on a 3 letter domain. This domain is tny.im, the current domain for this URL shortener.
Again, no data was lost in this change. All 4.l.to and l.f.nu links work as long as you change their domain to tny.im. Repeating, statistics and other data were also preserved.
We hope you enjoy tny.im as much as we enjoyed running it over the past one year and some months. We should be running for at least another year, now with a serious, nice and tiny domain. Remember: next 13th June, if we don't have enough money, it's because you haven't used tny.im enough! :)