Things worked great, and it was easy to set up the custom url with bit.ly pro by changing the A record for the domain name, however this meant that anyone going to 511cc.org directly with no hash on the end would be redirected to bit.ly’s main page. We needed this to redirect to a URL of our choosing, in this case 511contracosta.org. This isn’t an option in bit.ly pro, according to their FAQ its only available for bitly.Pro Enterprise users which costs $995/month. This was way beyond our price range.

Fortunately, its pretty easy to use .htaccess to carry out this.

• First, you need to set up the short domain name to use namesevers that point to a hosting account you control. For us, this was Media Temple so we set nameservers to ns1.mediatemple.net and ns2.mediatemple.net.
• Next, add a file called .htaccess
• The contents of the .htaccess file should be:
  

  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteRule ^/?$ http://511contracosta.org [L]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://bit.ly/$1 [R=301,NC]

  view raw file1.txt This Gist is brought to you using Simple Gist Embed.

  


• You should replace “http://511contracosta.org” with the domain name you’d like to redirect the root to
• Enjoy bit.ly pro, with at least one feature of bitly.pro enterprise

This new domain name is easier to communicate and matches our company name. All links to the old site redirect properly and all @blnktag.com email addresses forward to their @blinktag.com counterparts.