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Fully Managed Yourls
as a Service

Deploy Yourls as a fully managed service starting at €9/mo. Get automated backups, SSL, updates, support and monitoring included.

YOURLS is an open-source URL shortener — your own short links, your own branded domain, your own click data — combining the convenience of Bitly and Rebrandly with the privacy and control of self-hosted infrastructure.

Free 7-day trial  99.9% Uptime SLA  No credit card  Cancel anytime

Free 7-day trial  99.9% Uptime SLA
No credit card  Cancel anytime

Yourls

Yourls

STARTING AT

€9/month
Automated Backups
Monitoring
Automated Updates
Auto SSL

USAGE

Unlimited
Human Support
Custom Domains
Terminal Access
File Manager Access
Deploy in your region 21 locations worldwide
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ABOUT THE SOFTWARE

What is Yourls

YOURLS — short for Your Own URL Shortener — is an open-source PHP project that lets you run your own branded link-shortening service on your own infrastructure. Your data, your domain, your click stats, no third-party preview pages.

YOURLS has been actively maintained since 2009 by Ozh Richard and a community of contributors. The project is MIT-licensed, hosted at yourls.org, and currently sits at around 9,300 GitHub stars and 1,800 forks.

YOURLS is a small, focused codebase — a few hundred PHP files plus a plugin architecture — that handles shortening, redirect logging, click analytics, and a JSON API. It runs on Apache with mod_rewrite or on Nginx, against MySQL or MariaDB. The plugin ecosystem (curated on the Awesome YOURLS list) covers everything from QR-code generation and Cloudflare Turnstile admin protection to bot filtering and bulk import-export — which is what makes YOURLS practical for production workloads beyond hobby use.

FEATURES

What Yourls does

YOURLS is a complete URL-shortening platform — shortening, click tracking, analytics, branded domains, a plugin architecture, and a REST API. Below are the capabilities you get with any production YOURLS install.

Short URL generation

Custom slugs or auto-generated short codes in base 36 or base 62. Up to 14 quadrillion unique short URLs per branded domain.

Click tracking and analytics

Per-link click counts, referrer breakdown, geographic origin, and a historical click timeline. Data stays in your YOURLS database, not on a third-party server.

Plugin architecture

Hook-based plugin system with a hundred-plus community plugins covering QR codes, password protection, expiry dates, A/B testing, and Cloudflare Turnstile.

QR code generation

Dynamic QR codes for every short URL via the Integrated QRCodes plugin. The QR resolves through the short URL each scan — change the destination without reprinting.

Branded short domain

Bring your own domain or subdomain — short.yourbrand.com or yourbra.nd — for short links that build trust instead of routing through a generic shortener.

REST API for automation

Programmatic short-link creation, expansion, lookup, and stats via a documented JSON API. Pre-configured with an API signature token for secure integrations.

Private and public modes

Run YOURLS as a private team shortener behind admin login, or expose a public shortening front-end with rate-limiting and spam-keyword protection plugins.

Bulk import and export

CSV-based import for migrations off Bitly, Rebrandly, or another shortener. Full database export for portability — your data leaves with you if you ever leave.

WHAT'S ALWAYS INCLUDED

Every app. Fully managed.
Nothing extra to pay for.

Every app you deploy includes the full managed service — security, backups, updates, and support from day one.

Automatic updates and patches

Apps run the latest stable version. Security patches applied silently, with rollback if needed.

Daily off-site backups

Multiple daily backups in redundant off-site locations. One-click restore if anything goes wrong.

24/7 uptime monitoring

Continuous monitoring with instant alerting. We respond before you notice.

SSL, firewall, DDoS protection

Auto-renewing SSL, hardened firewall rules, DDoS mitigation on every deployment.

Performance and scaling

We monitor resource usage continuously. When your app needs more headroom, we flag it and upgrade with your explicit approval.

Dedicated engineering support

Real engineers on chat. DNS, SMTP & migration help. All included in €9.

WHY MANAGED

Why teams pick managed Yourls

In February 2025, Bitly notified its free-plan users that an interstitial preview page with advertising would start appearing between every shortened link and its destination — applied retroactively to links created years earlier. By late 2025, the free tier had tightened to roughly 5 links and 2 QR codes per month. Buyers who relied on a hosted shortener as marketing infrastructure suddenly had a brand problem.

That trigger is what pushed the recent wave of teams toward self-hosted YOURLS. But "self-hosted" is a category, not a plan. Running YOURLS yourself is a real operational job: PHP version pinning across the 8.1–8.4 range, MySQL or MariaDB tuning so the click log doesn't bloat into a slow search problem, TLS certificate renewal on the branded short domain, a fail2ban-style guard on the admin login, daily off-site backups of the URL table and click log, and a defence against the bot-traffic spoofing that inflates click counts on unfiltered instances. The YOURLS GitHub Discussion #3817 — open since October 2024 — documents production installs where 30 to 60 percent of logged clicks turned out to be spoofed Android-Chrome traffic.

REVIEWS

Hear from customers ​like you​​​​​​​

Successful businesses and professionals around the world rely on DANIAN every day

USE CASES

Three teams who run Yourls on DANIAN

These are representative team types we set up most often. Each starts with the same flat €9 plan.

8-PERSON MARKETING AGENCY

Replacing Bitly Growth after the free-plan ads broke a client campaign

One YOURLS instance per client (5 clients, 5 instances), pinned to a region close to each client's audience. Custom branded short domain per client (links.client-a.com). The agency bulk-imports campaign links via the YOURLS API at the start of each quarter, and runs click attribution through their existing Matomo instance via the Hide Referrer plugin.

SOLO NEWSLETTER PUBLISHER

45k subscribers, branded short domain, unlimited tracked links

Runs YOURLS on links.publisher.tld with Integrated QRCodes for the podcast-companion site. The branded domain matters: free-tier interstitial ads were getting flagged in subscriber spam folders. Daily click-roll-up to a Google Sheet via the YOURLS API. Cost: one €9/month line item replacing a Bitly Core plus a Rebrandly tier.

4-PERSON SAAS STARTUP

API access for programmatic short-link creation from their CRM

YOURLS hosted in us-east, integrated with HubSpot Workflows: every new campaign autogenerates a tracked short link via the YOURLS API and writes the short URL back to the contact record. Admin endpoint behind Cloudflare Turnstile. The move was triggered by an interstitial ad breaking a co-marketing campaign with a partner.

COMPARISON

Four ways to run Yourls

Most teams arrive at managed YOURLS after pricing out the alternatives. Below is the same workload — a branded short-link service with click tracking — costed four ways: stay on a proprietary SaaS, run it yourself on a VPS, run it on a home server, or run it on DANIAN.

1 USER / LOW VOLUME5 USERS / MID VOLUME 10 USERS / HEAVYOPERATIONAL TIME
Bitly
(proprietary SaaS)
$10/mo
Core, 100 links/mo, 1 custom domain
$29/mo
Growth, 500 links/mo, 10 QR codes
$199/mo
Premium, high-volume tier
~0 hrs/mo. Free plan adds interstitial ads to your links since Feb 2025.
Self-host
on a VPS
~$44/mo
$24 VPS + $5 backup + $15 monitoring
~$44/mo
same infra, add MariaDB tuning
~$60/mo
larger VPS for click-heavy workload
5–10 hrs setup, 1–2 hrs/mo ongoing (PHP, MariaDB, plugins, TLS, bot filter). €60–240/mo in time at freelance rates.
Home server
(mini-PC or NAS)
€18–55/mo
hardware amortised over 36 mo
+€17–32/mo
electricity at €0.30/kWh
+€40–80/mo
business internet with static IP + €10 off-site backup
2–4 hrs/mo ongoing. Effective total path: €210–667/mo with operational time.
DANIAN Managed Yourls€9/mo€9/mo€9/mo0 hrs/mo. Backups, monitoring, patching, plugin tuning, bot filtering, TLS all included.

Bitly pricing reflects the published tiers as of early 2026. VPS path uses a $24/month production-class instance with 2 vCPU and 4 GB RAM as the internal reference. Home-server path assumes a Synology DS923+ or equivalent business-grade mini-PC.

BY INDUSTRY

Yourls for specific industries

URL-shortener workloads vary more by industry than the tool category suggests. The configurations below reflect what we tune by default for each profile — and the kinds of decisions a generic shared host won't make for you.

Marketing agencies are the most common YOURLS profile we host. The Federal Trade Commission's 2024 endorsement-guide update tightened disclosure expectations on tracked promotional links, which has nudged agencies away from third-party shorteners that inject preview ads or interstitials between the click and the destination. We pre-configure the yourls_log table for a 13-month rolling retention so year-over-year campaign comparisons survive — by default YOURLS keeps click data indefinitely, which sounds useful until the log table is the slowest query in the admin interface.

Typical workflow: bulk-import 500+ campaign links via the YOURLS API at the start of each quarter, one instance per client subdomain. At five clients moving off the $29/month Bitly Growth tier, the math swings about $145/month in the agency's favour at typical link volumes.
E-commerce teams use YOURLS to keep UTM-tagged paid-ads links clean and on-brand without any interstitial step between the click and the product page — which matters more when the click came from a paid impression you bought. We pre-activate the force-https and do-tls plugins so social meta-tag scrapers from Facebook, X, WhatsApp, and LinkedIn hit the canonical destination, which is what keeps preview cards rendering correctly on the destination side.

Typical workflow: a 500-product catalogue rotating two creatives per product per week generates roughly 2,000 tracked short links a month. A workload that lands a hosted shortener in the $199/month Premium tier sits comfortably inside DANIAN's €9 base price; the only variable is bandwidth on the genuinely high-traffic links.
Newsletters, podcasts, and online media run YOURLS to keep their outbound links branded and clean — a real concern now that free-tier shorteners route through interstitial ad pages that resemble phishing prompts to subscribers. We ship Hide Referrer on by default so destination publishers see their own traffic without the shortener attribution leaking through the referer header, and we tune the cron job that prunes orphaned click rows so the database stays compact across long-running publications.

Typical workflow: a weekly newsletter at 50,000 subscribers tracking 15 article slots per send generates close to 60,000 attributed clicks a month at typical open rates. Per-click cost on YOURLS at that volume is in the order of one-fortieth of an equivalent Bitly Growth plan.
Affiliate marketers used to run their own shorteners on cheap VPS instances and accept the operational debt. The 2024 FTC endorsement-guide update made branded short domains a disclosure asset rather than an aesthetic one — affiliate links that route through a creator-owned domain read as more legitimate to both audiences and platforms. We pre-activate Domain Limit and Advanced Reserved URLs so the keyword set cannot be hijacked for spam, which is the most common failure mode on public-facing YOURLS installs.

Typical workflow: a creator running three affiliate programs across eight platforms (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, newsletter, Twitter/X, podcast, blog, Discord) with channel-specific slugs. A single creator typically uses 1,000+ links a year — one €9/month bill on DANIAN versus the per-link tiers of every hosted shortener.
Small nonprofits and cultural organisations run donor-facing campaign tracking without wanting third-party analytics scripts on the donation pages themselves — the trust cost is too high when the audience is older and more privacy-conscious than the average web user. YOURLS handles the click-side attribution server-side, and we tune the YOURLS_PRIVATE_INFOS configuration flag so click-level data stays off public stat pages while aggregate counts remain available for board reporting.

Typical workflow: one branded short domain per campaign track (email, mailing, social, partner), with the same destination URL but different attribution slugs. An organisation running roughly 20 campaigns a year sits well under DANIAN's flat tier — predictable enough to put in the annual budget without revising it mid-year.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Everything teams ask before signing up — answered straight, without sales speak.

Three groups: technical setup, migration, and how DANIAN works as a service.

01

Technical and configuration

Out of the box, YOURLS logs every hit to a short link into the yourls_log table — including bot traffic. Spoofed Android-Chrome user-agents and headless browsers have been a documented problem on production YOURLS instances since at least October 2024 (Discussion #3817 on the project's GitHub). Inflation of 30 to 60 percent on click counts is not unusual on unfiltered installs.

We recommend the dont-log-bots plugin activated by default with a maintained user-agent list.
On the base €9/month plan, a single YOURLS instance comfortably handles around 50 to 80 redirects per second once the click log is on rotation.

If you have a single short link expected to take a large traffic spike — a TV mention, a Reddit front page — tell us a day ahead and we'll pre-scale. Otherwise our monitoring catches the surge and adjusts during the event.
We recommend: dont-log-bots (bot filter), Admin Turnstile (Cloudflare Turnstile on the admin login), Hide Referrer (so destinations see their own traffic), force-https (canonical TLS for social scrapers), and Advanced Reserved URLs (blocks spam-keyword slugs).

Beyond that — YOURLS has a healthy plugin ecosystem and most teams want a specific subset. The plugin sandbox shipped in YOURLS 1.10 means we can install and test new plugins without risking the live instance.
Yes, via the Integrated QRCodes plugin, which we install on request. It generates a QR for any short URL on the fly and ships a download link in PNG and SVG. Worth knowing: QR codes generated this way are dynamic — the destination URL can be edited in YOURLS without re-printing the code, because the QR resolves through the short URL each scan.
YOURLS 1.10 introduced a plugin sandbox and a structured uninstall procedure, which significantly reduced the breakage risk that earlier versions had on minor upgrades.
YOURLS supports multiple admin accounts via its config file — we set up additional admin users on request and rotate credentials through the dashboard. For role-based access (a creator role that can shorten but not delete, for example), we activate one of the role-management plugins from the "Awesome YOURLS list". For agency setups, we usually recommend one YOURLS instance per client rather than role-gating a single instance — cleaner billing, cleaner data.

02

Migration and onboarding

We can activate your app on your own custom domain/subdomain. Examples: mydomain.com, anyword.mydomain.com.
Or, on our randomized free subdomain. Example: 963.apps.danian.cloud
If you wish to use a custom domain/subdomain, select that option when ordering your app (or notify us later). We will send you the required DNS records and if needed, our tech team will modify them for you.
21 datacenter locations across six continents. You choose the region at provisioning. Application data sits in the region you choose; pick whichever is closest to your users or matches your data-residency preference.
Yes. Request a region migration from the dashboard and we run the move in the background. The system emails you when the migration completes; total transfer time depends on data volume but typical instances finish in a few hours. There is no extra charge for a region change.
Yes. Full data export is available at any time, in a portable format you can bring to any infrastructure.

03

Billing, support, and platform

€9 covers everything we do for that app: hardware in the region you choose, daily off-site backups with one-click restore, automatic security patches and version upgrades, 24/7 monitoring, SSL and firewall, and engineering support on Email/LiveChat. There are no setup fees or hidden line items. For more info see our Pricing page.
If you decide to continue, we charge €9/app/month from day 8. If you don't, the trial ends and you can export your data. No card is required for the trial, and we never auto-charge you without explicit consent.
No. The €9/month is flat regardless of how many users log into your app. Add 5 users or 50; the price doesn't change.
24/7 Live chat and email support, both staffed by engineers who run the systems. We handle DNS configuration, SMTP setup, app integrations, performance tuning, troubleshooting, and migration help. Response time is typically under an hour. There is no tier system — every customer gets the same support.
Yes. Cancel from the dashboard. We don't charge a cancellation fee, we don't lock data, and we will export your data to you on request before deletion. data to you on request before deletion.
Every customer instance is backed up daily to a separate region from the primary. We test restores. You can request a restore at any backup point within the retention window — usually 7 days for daily backups.
Your application data sits in the region you choose at provisioning — 21 datacenter locations across six continents. Account-level data (billing, account email, support ticket history) is processed centrally. Application data region is picked by you, per app.
99.9% uptime SLA on every app, every tenant. Service credits are documented at danian.co/service-level-agreement. The status page is located at status.danian.co.
When your tenant approaches the resource ceiling — the base tier holds 1 vCPU/RAM, 30 GB storage — we notify you. Resource upgrades happen with your explicit consent; we will not upgrade your tenant or charge you without it.
We wait. We don't suspend the app or delete your data on the first failed charge. We email you, you fix the card on file, and we continue.
Invoices can be downloaded from the billing dashboard in PDF the day each charge succeeds. EU VAT is added where applicable and the VAT-reverse-charge regime applies for VAT-registered businesses with a valid number.
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Yes. Every instance comes with a web-based terminal and a file manager in your DANIAN management dashboard. Useful for managing your data and customizations.
Resources scale with your usage. If your app needs more vCPU, RAM, or storage, we add it — and we ask first before any change to your plan. €9 is the floor; resource-heavy workloads may price higher, but you'll always know in advance.
Yes. We have both a Partner program and an Affiliate program available. Anybody can sign up.
No contract. No minimum commitment. Cancel anytime from the dashboard with one click. The 7-day free trial requires no credit card. After the trial converts to paid, you can still cancel at any month without notice or penalty.

DEPLOY IN YOUR REGION

21 datacenter locations on six continents

Pick the region closest to your users.

United States, Germany, Finland, Singapore, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Netherlands, UK, Spain, Italy, France, Sweden, Malaysia, India, Japan, Mexico, Poland, South Korea, Chile, South Africa and more coming soon

Global Reach Map

Try managed Yourls for 7 days

No card. Cancel from the dashboard.