GeoNames Forum

Dear GeoNames team,

I love your service and I'm using it for a small project of mine where different people around the world use it for data entry purposes.

Now, I have only seriously played around with it for the past two days but have seen quite some downtime so I was wondering what the average situation looks like. I don't need any fancy 99.99999% uptime or something like that but 50% would be too little on the other hand.

Can you maybe give me a rough estimate of your uptime?

Thank you very much once more and keep up the good work!

Best regards,
Jonas

Hi Jonas

We are pinging for services once per hour which results in 96 pings per day. Attached a graph of the number of pings that don't receive an answer. The graps starts with June 2008 and ends yesterday.

The zero days in January are the result of a DDOS effect when we had to turn of the domain name ws.geonames.org.

In the last days the availability has degraded a lot and I am working on improving the situation. I have so far blocked a couple of IP addresses of people who do several hundred thousand lookups per day. And I am enforcing now a credit limit of 5000 per hour. If this does not improve the situation we will have to further reduce the number of allowed credits per IP address to far below the current limit of 50000 credits per day.

Marc