Design short URL service with click counting

Q: Design short URL service with click counting

This question evaluates the ability to design scalable, highly available web services encompassing URL shortening, redirect semantics, API design, click-counting and analytics, plus related trade-offs in consistency, data modeling, and operational concerns.

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Question

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Design a production-ready service that:

Creates a short URL for a given long URL (URL shortening).
Redirects when a user visits the short URL.
Maintains a click counter (number of times each short URL was visited), queryable via an API.

Functional requirements

POST /shorten takes a long URL and returns a short code + short URL.
GET /{code} redirects (HTTP 301/302) to the long URL.
GET /stats/{code} returns:
- total click count
- optionally breakdown by time bucket (e.g., per day) if feasible

Non-functional requirements

Very low latency for redirects.
High availability.
Must scale to high QPS (both reads and writes).
Prevent obvious abuse (spam/DoS).

Clarifications to address

Custom aliases? Expiration?
Idempotency (same long URL returns same code or always new)?
Consistency expectations for click counts (exact vs eventually consistent).

Design short URL service with click counting

Quick Overview

Functional requirements

Non-functional requirements

Clarifications to address

Solution

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