I’m so excited that I can announce this—prior to my contract lapsing with the current company that handles my URL shortener—I will be bringing slade.link, my URL shortener, home to my own servers. It’s hosted on servers in Washington, DC and replicated to Keene, NH. Servers located in Albany, NY are being retired next month in favor of the Keene, NH datacenter. There are reasons for that—mostly performance related.

And for those who were asking, I will be adding an additional server cluster further to the west later this year. I’m hoping the move will be completed within the next couple weeks.

I do want to acknowledge the assistance that short.io gave in making my URL shortener possible for all these years. However, as I begin to care more and more about control over my web presence, I have decided that hosting things myself is the better way to go. Control and ownership over the whole stack means I can rest assured no company going bankrupt can destroy my work on the net.

My URL shortener will be powered by the open-source YOURLS! There’s more coming home to my own hardware this year that I can’t wait to talk about, but we’ll talk about that another time.