Post by Admin Bear on Nov 3, 2016 7:50:39 GMT -5
The following was brought to the Team's attention.
Sorry for the delay in disseminating this information to the members.
Postimage.org is in danger and needs your help
Please contact us if you have a CDN that is capable and willing of serving 1.8 Petabytes of outgoing traffic per month free of charge, or if you can make a donation to help us pay a monthly $12,000 bill from CloudFlare that we are now facing....
On October 27, 2016, CloudFlare abruptly cut us off from most of their services except DNS for abusing their system. This came as a bit of a surprise, since although we've been using one of their cheapest plans for a long time, we had reached an agreement earlier this month that we would be upgrading our account when the next billing cycle started. A couple of Skype calls later we learned the following:
CloudFlare was very unhappy that the total traffic usage of our project had surpassed a staggering figure of 1.8 petabytes in the last 30 days.
The amount of money we had to pay monthly to make them happy again grew after each Skype call as more people in CF got involved in examining our case: $200 became $1000, which in turn became $12k.
The sales team was adamant that although CloudFlare did not officially have bandwidth limits, our violation of Section 10 of their terms of service could not be remedied by serving less image traffic and more HTML traffic (although, being an image hosting company, we have no idea how we would pull this one off anyway without blatantly gaming the system), and that at the level of petabytes of data, they would never allow that on a $200/month Business plan.
We were officially screwed.
Let us make this absolutely clear: we do not hold a grudge against CloudFlare for refusing to foot our traffic bill any further. We do realize that we are costing them a ton of money, and it is solely our own fault that our current business model is not sustainable. We also recognize that the deal they offered is probably as good as anything we could reasonably expect from other CDN providers. The only thing we disagree with is that instead of publishing estimates of how much traffic customers are actually allowed to consume at each service plan, CloudFlare insists that their bandwidth is unlimited and declines to comment on the actual terms of service....
A likely outcome is that Postimage.org will have to shut down, terminating nearly 140 million images embedded into some 450 thousand websites, first and foremost a number of great message boards (although a lot of online auctions, personal galleries and corporate websites will be affected as well).....
Obviousy this is horrible news and may effect a great many forums, including Stamp Bears.
If you notice broken image links please notify a moderator and/or the member via PM..
Sorry for the delay in disseminating this information to the members.
Oct 29, 2016 1:20:56 GMT -5 @michaelcayley said:
A heads up that Postimage is in financial difficulty and may suddenly close. If it does, there will be masses of broken image links on StampBears. See these extracts from a message on their homepage today (postimage.org). This is seriously bad news.Postimage.org is in danger and needs your help
Please contact us if you have a CDN that is capable and willing of serving 1.8 Petabytes of outgoing traffic per month free of charge, or if you can make a donation to help us pay a monthly $12,000 bill from CloudFlare that we are now facing....
On October 27, 2016, CloudFlare abruptly cut us off from most of their services except DNS for abusing their system. This came as a bit of a surprise, since although we've been using one of their cheapest plans for a long time, we had reached an agreement earlier this month that we would be upgrading our account when the next billing cycle started. A couple of Skype calls later we learned the following:
CloudFlare was very unhappy that the total traffic usage of our project had surpassed a staggering figure of 1.8 petabytes in the last 30 days.
The amount of money we had to pay monthly to make them happy again grew after each Skype call as more people in CF got involved in examining our case: $200 became $1000, which in turn became $12k.
The sales team was adamant that although CloudFlare did not officially have bandwidth limits, our violation of Section 10 of their terms of service could not be remedied by serving less image traffic and more HTML traffic (although, being an image hosting company, we have no idea how we would pull this one off anyway without blatantly gaming the system), and that at the level of petabytes of data, they would never allow that on a $200/month Business plan.
We were officially screwed.
Let us make this absolutely clear: we do not hold a grudge against CloudFlare for refusing to foot our traffic bill any further. We do realize that we are costing them a ton of money, and it is solely our own fault that our current business model is not sustainable. We also recognize that the deal they offered is probably as good as anything we could reasonably expect from other CDN providers. The only thing we disagree with is that instead of publishing estimates of how much traffic customers are actually allowed to consume at each service plan, CloudFlare insists that their bandwidth is unlimited and declines to comment on the actual terms of service....
A likely outcome is that Postimage.org will have to shut down, terminating nearly 140 million images embedded into some 450 thousand websites, first and foremost a number of great message boards (although a lot of online auctions, personal galleries and corporate websites will be affected as well).....
Obviousy this is horrible news and may effect a great many forums, including Stamp Bears.
If you notice broken image links please notify a moderator and/or the member via PM..
