YOURLS

YOURLS is a classic, battle-tested open-source URL shortener written in PHP that has been in active development since 2009. With over 10,000 GitHub stars, it is one of the most widely adopted self-hosted link shortening solutions available — chosen by teams and individuals who want full control over their branded short links without paying per-click fees or handing analytics data to third-party services.

Common Use Cases

Marketing teams use YOURLS to create campaign-specific short links on their own domain, keeping audience click data in-house rather than sharing it with commercial URL shorteners. Developers integrate the YOURLS REST API into CI/CD pipelines, documentation generators, and notification systems to create short links automatically. Content creators use custom keywords to build memorable branded slugs like brand.com/newsletter or brand.com/download that are easy to print and share. IT departments deploy YOURLS as an internal redirect service — managing dozens of vanity URLs for internal tools and dashboards from a single, auditable admin panel.

Key Features

• Per-link click analytics — track total clicks and referrers for every shortened URL
• Custom keywords — assign memorable slugs instead of random characters
• REST API — create and retrieve links programmatically from any application
• 300+ plugins — community extensions for QR codes, geolocation redirects, link previews, and more
• Public or private mode — toggle whether visitors can create links or only admins can
• Bookmarklet support — shorten the current page with a single browser click
• Sequential or random IDs — control whether short codes are sequential numbers or random strings
• Multi-user support via plugins — extend with role-based access for team environments
• Lightweight footprint — minimal resource requirements, runs on standard PHP + MySQL
• Actively maintained — regular releases and a large community with long-term support track record

Why deploy YOURLS on Hostinger VPS

Running YOURLS on a Hostinger VPS puts every redirect, every click, and every piece of analytics data entirely under your control. You own your domain, your data, and your redirect rules — there are no monthly link limits, no analytics blackouts, and no risk of a commercial provider deprecating your account. A VPS also gives you the performance headroom to handle traffic spikes without throttling, and the root access to install any of the 300+ YOURLS plugins. As your link volume grows, you can scale the VPS vertically and tune MySQL without changing plans or paying overage fees.