Designing the clone
Cloning TinyURL is relatively simple but there is some thought behind the design of the application. We will be building a clone of TinyURL called Tinyclone, which will be hosted at the domain http://tinyclone.saush.com.
Creating a short URL for each long URL
The domain of the short URL is fixed. What's left is the file pathname. We need to represent the long URL with a unique file pathname (a key), one for each long URL. This means we need to persist the relationship between the key and the URL.
One of the ways we can associate the long URL with a unique key is to hash the long URL and use the resulting hash as the unique key. However, the resulting hash might be long and hashing functions could be slow.
The faster and easier way is to use a relational database's auto-incremented row ID as the unique key. The database will help ensure the uniqueness of the ID. However, the running row ID number is base 10. To represent a million URLs would already require seven characters...
