Short hash generator

Question

I am working on some code that will generate a link with a relativly unique 10 character hash. I am not worried to much about colisions as long as they are rare enough that I could have a couple thousand links out standing since I soft delete after they are used and a colision between an open item and a closed item is not an issue. I would also like the method to be deterministic, the same input generates the same output so worst case I can recalculate the hash if needed. Here is the code I have and it works but am wondering if there is a better way.

string input = //Some input text that includes the datetime the hash was created;
using (SHA1Managed sha1 = new SHA1Managed())
{
 var hash = sha1.ComputeHash(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(input));
 //make sure the hash is only alpha numeric to prevent charecters that may break the url
 return string.Concat(Convert.ToBase64String(hash).ToCharArray().Where(x => char.IsLetterOrDigit(x)).Take(10));
}

• spyr03: If it is a link, why are you limiting it to 10 characters?
• holroy: To get a relatively unique 10 character string, it is way easier to generate a GUID and use the first 10 characters. They are also guaranteed legal in an URL. Regarding uniqueness, the first 6 or 7 are usually unique (commonly used within git to refer to a commit), so using 10 characters should be quite safe.
• RubberChickenLeader: @spyr03 I want to keep the URL short like a tiny URL. Other than that no specific reason
• RubberChickenLeader: @holroy I edited the question but I wanted to have a deterministic method not just a substring on a GUID.

Answer 1

This seems fine.

This should give you a key-space of 64^10.

If you have only a few thousand links then you're more likely to win the lottery jackpot than get a collision.