Wednesday, April 29, 2015

There will always be abusers of free things

I was shocked when someone reported that my service is getting slow. Upon checking, I noticed that there are devs who abused the service by send tons of requests in a short span of time. I setup a counter for my API and was more shocked to see the numbers.

How many? The top user sends more than a whopping 100,000++ requests to the server in less than one hour! This is crazy. The second highest sends around 10,000+ requests per hour. Because of this, I have to blacklist these abusers. I have updated my terms of service that the free API will have a limit of 3,000 requests in one hour which is more than fair. So far, everything is back to normal.

Guys, please be considerate of other users. Design your system well and do not abuse the free service. Thank you.