Avremy | Tech Director at MDY
MDY (Mercaz Daf Yomi) runs free daily Talmud classes online for a worldwide community. Between 60,000 and 70,000 people watch every day, from the United States and South America to England, Israel and South Africa. Nearly every contact with a member runs through a link: a WhatsApp group, the twice-daily live Zoom class, an invitation, an announcement.
Those links live on MDY's own name. fullwa.mdydaf.com opens the WhatsApp community, zoom.mdydaf.com the live class, sheets.mdydaf.com the daily sheets. A member who opens one of those expects it to answer over HTTPS, so each address needs a certificate of its own. Without one the browser stops at a warning screen, before the redirect ever runs. Early on that is what happened: members got stuck and the links were reported.
Those addresses run on redirect.pizza today, about five years in. Avremy puts the number of people using them at more than 50,000 a day. When a WhatsApp group fills up, the same link moves to the next group and nobody has to be told. "Just set and forget", says Tech Director Avremy.
At a glance
- Two domains and hundreds of subdomains on redirect.pizza, each one a link the community already knows
- More than 50,000 people a day on those links, by Avremy's own estimate, from a community of up to 70,000 daily viewers
- A full WhatsApp group repointed to the next one without changing the link
- About five years on the platform, started on the Free (Margherita) plan and moved to a paid plan
One domain members recognize, hundreds of subdomains behind it
MDY's audience is spread over most of the world, and the team reaches it through WhatsApp, Zoom, Google tools and AWS. Every member-facing link gets a subdomain on MDY's own domain, named for what it does. fullwa for the full Daf WhatsApp group, zoom for the live class, sheets for the daily sheets. Two domains carry hundreds of those, and the count grows with every new channel, class and event.
Why a branded address needs a certificate of its own
The destinations are a WhatsApp invite, a Zoom room. What matters is the address in front of them. The member clicks that one, and a browser will not open it over HTTPS without a valid certificate on that hostname.
Avremy first looked for rewrite rules to fix it himself. The real requirement was bigger than one rule: a certificate per subdomain, issued and renewed automatically, for a list that would run into the hundreds.
A builder who chose not to build
Avremy writes his own tools, publishes QR code readers and generators on GitHub and calls himself an open source person. He says he could rebuild this in a day. He still searched for a service that issues the certificate with the redirect, found redirect.pizza, and tested it on the free plan. It worked, so he moved to a paid plan and did not look at alternatives.
I build everything myself. But I don't believe in building something if the solution exists.
What the work looks like now
A new subdomain is one redirect in the dashboard. Avremy creates it and points it at the destination, and redirect.pizza issues the certificate through automatic HTTPS and renews it. It does not host MDY's classes, its WhatsApp groups or its DNS records. The link stays constant while the destination moves. When a WhatsApp group hits its limit, the same address is repointed to the next group. The twice-daily Zoom link always resolves to the current session.
When that WhatsApp group gets full up, we can forward it to the next WhatsApp group without the user hearing the difference.
MDY has grown from under 5,000 daily viewers when the links started to 60,000 to 70,000 today. Avremy puts part of that down to how fast the team can hand out a link and move it later. MDY's name is on every one.
What a link that never changes is worth
The community learns an address once. Behind it the channel can fill up, the class can move, the event can end, and the address keeps working. That is what MDY gets, and it holds for every subdomain on the account. redirect.pizza is the redirect and certificate layer, not a link shortener on a shared domain, so the links carry MDY's name and not someone else's.
I would build something myself in a day that does the same thing. I like to see a good service working and just know that I don't have to manage it.
Try redirect.pizza on your own domains
Put your community links on your own domain, certificates included, or talk to the team about running hundreds of subdomains.
Get started for free or Talk to the team
Related Reads
