Discussion: affiliate links to cover our costs

I am very happy that safe.mn is getting more and more popular by the day. We recently switched to a more powerful dedicated server to ensure better reliability, and better speed. We also increased the number of tests we do on each short link to protect users better. Finally, we purchase additional storage for better backup.

We are currently looking at adding commercial tools for even better security. We would also like to add a second server in a different location for full redundancy.

Of course, all of this has the cost. We are looking at different ways to cover our expenses. One way we're trying is Google Adsense. But the revenues are low, and unpredictable.

We would like to try a different way to pay for the hosting services: affiliate links. The idea is to modify some links, like Amazon URLs, to include our affiliate ID. The links would still redirect to the same page, but we would get a percentage of the sales done by users. But we would not modify existing affiliate links: if you shorten an Amazon affiliate link, we would not modify it.

Would it be acceptable to you and your users? We'd like to open the discussion before we take any action. Please leave comments on this post.

Version 24 - Alternate domains clic.gs & go2.gs

You can now use 4 domains for your secured short links: safe.mn, cliks.fr, clic.gs and go2.gs. You can switch between the domains at any time: http://safe.mn/1 and http://clic.gs/1 point to the same final link.

Choose an alternate domain

We have also improved our statistics. You can see a map of the visitors by country.

Visualize where visitors come from

We improved our French translation as well.

Version 23 - en français / in French + clicks.fr

Safe.mn has been translated into French (well, most of it). We'll keep working on the translation in the coming weeks.

We've also added a new domain: cliks.fr It is the safe as Safe.mn, but with a more user-friendly name. We're going to add a few other domain aliases to Safe.mn, stay tune!

Version 23 - Custom screenshot system

Improvements

•  we rolled out our own screenshot manager. It is more reliable, and faster than the API we were using. Most of the broken screenshots have been replaced
• show a notification when a URL is copied to the clipboard
• works without Javascript or Flash
• improve compatibility with Opera and Chrome

Bug fixes

• improve URL matching: discard characters that could be appended to the URL in a tweet

Version 22 - Enhanced statistics

Improvements

• new hosting provider: faster & more reliable
• better display of statistics

 New statistics about short links

We are again working on Safe.mn. In the following weeks, we will polish and extend the existing features, as well as add new functionalities based on existing feedback.

We've just moved to a new hosting provider. The move was done with a few seconds down time only. The new platform is faster and more reliable.