URL Shortener Visual Solutions

Step-by-step animated walkthroughs of system design solutions with architecture diagrams and key insights.

A URL shortening service creates 500 million new short URLs per month. The read-to-write ratio is 100:1. Estimate the write QPS and read QPS.

02Easy4 clips

Calculate Base62 Key Space

You use Base62 encoding (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) for short codes. How many unique short codes can you generate with 6, 7, and 8 characters? Which length would ...

03Standard4 clips

Base62 vs MD5 for Short Code Generation

Compare two approaches for generating short codes: (A) Hash the long URL with MD5 and take the first 7 characters, (B) Use an auto-incrementing counte...

04Expert4 clips

Design a Complete URL Shortener

Design a URL shortening service like bit.ly from scratch. Cover requirements gathering, API design, encoding strategy, database schema, caching, scali...