Host Shlink without installing anything
Short links on your own domains, with their QR codes, their statistics and an API — and nobody able to shut the service down for you.
Starting at €4.99/month
Introduction
Shlink installed, updated and backed up by us, on a machine in France. You install nothing and configure no server: the application is online a few minutes after you order, under your own name.
The plan that suits it is App Essentiel at €4.99/month incl. VAT — 2 GB of memory. Shlink redirects quickly, but it does more than redirect: each visit becomes a row in the database, enriched with country and city from a geolocation database held in memory, then aggregated for the charts. A campaign producing a few thousand clicks in one evening means that many writes and lookups to absorb without keeping the visitor waiting.
Shlink replaces Bitly, and the argument fits in one sentence: the domain is yours. A link shortened by a third party lives exactly as long as that third party decides, which becomes a problem the day the QR code is already printed on a thousand posters. Here, one instance handles several short domains, the API lets your own tools create links, and the statistics stay with you instead of feeding somebody else's dashboard.
What managed hosting changes
Short links on your own domains
A single instance handles several domain names: a short domain for communications, another for events. The identifier is generated automatically, or chosen by hand when the link has to stay readable.
A QR code for every link, on demand
The QR code is retrieved from the short link address, in the size and format you want. Enough to prepare a poster or a label without depending on an online generator whose handling of your address is anyone's guess.
Statistics per link, from the first click
Date, referrer, country, city, browser, device — and visits identified as bots counted separately. Every link has its own statistics page, and the whole set filters by tag.
Expiry, visit quotas, conditional redirects
A link can expire on a date, stop after a number of visits, or send Android and iOS visitors to two different destinations. Everything is drivable through the API as well, bulk creation included.
Why hand it over rather than install it
A poster or a label carrying a QR code
The printed code points at your domain, and the destination can be changed afterwards. Handy the day the event page moves the night before printing… or the morning after.
A campaign whose results have to be measured
One link per channel — newsletter, poster, social post — and the counting happens on your side, without an intermediary reselling the information on the way past.
A text message send-out
A short link fits in an SMS and stays readable. On your own domain it inspires more confidence than an anonymous shortened address, which spam filters tend to dislike.
A mobile app to get downloaded
One link to publish: Android visitors land on the Play Store, iOS visitors on the App Store, everyone else on the presentation page.
An internal tool creating its own links
The API creates a short link from an invoicing system, a CRM or a script, and returns its statistics straight away — with no per-call quota to buy.
Hosted in France
In our own infrastructure in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, which we operate ourselves. Your links and the statistics that go with them stay with you, and the person on the phone speaks your language.
Frequently asked questions
That is the whole question, and the reason to host your own shortener. A bit.ly link belongs to Bitly: you cannot take it with you. A link on your domain belongs to you — if you replace Shlink in five years, you keep the domain and rebuild the redirects. The posters printed in the meantime keep working.
No, and it is worth knowing before switching. A bit.ly link already out in the world will always route through Bitly: nobody else can answer at that address. What people do in practice is create the equivalents on their own domain for everything published from now on, and leave the old ones running as long as the original account exists.
Shlink spots visits that look like a bot — indexing crawlers, and the previews messaging apps generate when a link is pasted into a conversation — and lets you exclude them from the counts. Without that filtering, a link shared in a group chat shows dozens of clicks before anyone has actually opened it.
Nothing. You choose the application, fill in the fields it asks for — often an email address and a name — and it goes online. Access arrives by email with the address and the credentials.
Yes, they are part of the service. A shortener is a door open on the internet whose only job is to redirect: exactly the kind of service that should not keep running on last year's release.