| Posted: Monday 5th June 2006 by
Sam |
The various API's provided on the Samknows.com website allow end users and companies to incorporate some of our functionality in to their site completely transparently. One such API is the Availability Checker API. This allows you to query availability for all the providers we contain on the website using either a phone number or postcode. This is a very popular service, particularly with small ISP's.
However, this service also seems to be very popular with certain other forms of user too. In fact, some hosts were performing up to 60,000 checks per hour at the beginning of the year, which led to usage restrictions being placed on the API.
Whilst this has greatly reduced the issue, there is still a dedicated few who will perform the 300 queries, jump to a new IP, perform another 300, and so on. In an effort to prevent future problems with the service to legitimate users, I wish to stamp out this activity. For this reason, version 2 of the API will be completely locked down to specific IP addresses (or ranges) as of Monday 12th June 2006.
Those of you who contacted me in the past about wishing to exceed 300 queries per day need not worry, your IP addresses are already in the access list (email me to confirm if you like). Similarly, those of you using the new version 3 series Availability Checker will be unaffected (this is controlled by username, password and IP address). For anyone else that uses it and has not been in touch, please contact me as soon as possible.
Please note: The Availability Checker API is unrelated to the availability checker on the front page of this site. This will remain unaffected. |