When having a super short domain name, you’re probably using Bitly’s service to run you custom-looking URL shortener with full client support and nearly no setup costs.

But then you might ask yourself, why can’t I also have my simple static website on the same domain? Well, you can.

Set up Apache2 to serve files and short URLs

Using the following Apache VHost configuration, Apache will answer all requests locally, that match files within a certain directory. All other requests will be proxied to Bitly.

<VirtualHost *:80>

    # These rules just set up the serving of the static files
    ServerName short.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/short.com

    <Directory /var/www/short.com/>
        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>

    # Now we're getting to the interesting parts
    RewriteEngine On

    # Make sure, that / is associated with your index.html document
    RewriteRule ^/$ /index.html [QSA]

    # Set's up a conditional rewrite
    # When a local file is not found
    RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    # the request is proxied to http://bit.ly/
    RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://bit.ly/$1 [P,QSA,L]
</VirtualHost>

There are some things to note.

  • To make this work, you also need to ignore Bitly’s setup instructions and point your domain’s DNS record to your own server and not Bitly’s.
  • This works just because Bitly’s slugs are globally uniq and not tied to a single domain. So http://short.com/NArkjI will point to the same URL as http://bit.ly/NArkjI.
  • Every URL, that cannot be matched to your files, will be proxied to bitly.com, including favicon.ico and robots.txt. Also, this way Bitly may get a bit too much information, you might not want to share with them.
  • 404 error pages are delivered by Bitly, what might confuse your users. This might be fixable with some more configuration.
  • This setup is, of course, slower than the recommended setup where you change your DNS record. So do not use it on high traffic sites without further investigation.