Scaling

How Bitly Scaled Technically: The Engineering Story Behind Billions of Redirects and a $100M+ ARR Platform

When you click a bit.ly link, it feels instantaneous. Behind the simplicity is a battle-tested system that scaled to billions of redirects through Base62 encoding, heavy caching, NSQ async pipelines, and a major MySQL-to-Bigtable migration. This engineering foundation powered Bitly’s growth from a viral URL shortener to a $100M+ ARR Connections Platform. The story showcases how thoughtful architecture turns simple ideas into resilient global infrastructure.