I use tinyurl and dwarfurl for reducing a large url into a smaller one. Though dwarfurl provides additional features such as statistics on the shrunk URL (for example number of hits), I have found acessing the site to be really slow sometimes. However what happens when any of these services are not available ? Obviously the shrunk URL is displayed with HTTP error code 404 (i.e. page not found) and this posting has an interesting analysis on the non availability of tinyurl.
