GeoNames Forum

Since around 1:00 PST today I have been unable to do any reverse geocoding lookups on ws.geonames.org. Is this a known problem affecting others as well? A change in service? Or is it something specific to me? And is it being worked on? And if so is there an estimation on how long the service will be down for? Thanks.

As an example of the problems (server timeouts) I am encountering try accessing some of the links on this page from the documentation:
http://www.geonames.org/maps/us-reverse-geocoder.html

That page contains the following two links:
http://ws.geonames.org/findNearestAddressJSON?lat=37.451&lng=-122.18
http://ws.geonames.org/findNearestAddress?lat=37.451&lng=-122.18

I am currently unable to load either of those URLs. They time out when I try to access them. I initially noticed this problem when my application that uses the service stopped returning nearby intersection data.

Thanks a lot for any info that can be provided!

Jason Rosenfeld

Same goes for all services. http://ws.geonames.org/timezone?lat=40.095965&lng=-74.222130 is an example. I wish that there was a simple outage notice. Better yet, a very simple WS on a different server that could just be called/pinged to see if the free Web service server was up.

The free services are up again.

Due to the increasing load on the free servers the availability problems are increasing. A month ago it was mainly during the backup:
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/1958.page
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/1932.page
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/1974.page

This issue was fixed with moving the backup/dump to a new server.
Unfortunately the load is still increasing and we have to reduce the number of allowed request per day to 30k/day and 3k/hour. Let's hope this will improve the situation. You understand that we cannot go on adding additional servers to run free services. For those with important application we recommend the commercial services:
http://www.geonames.org/commercial-webservices.html

The others are welcome to help share the costs with a donation:
http://www.geonames.org/donations.html

Best

Marc