New usage policies to prevent outages

[Jeff Lindsay]

We went over quota again last night, rendering the service unusable. This was caused by a few users that (probably unknowingly) had too much data posting into PostBin. There is currently a 4GB incoming bandwidth quota, which is more than reasonable. It got there from increasing it as a quick fix for previous abuses. I'd like to lower it to keep costs down (ideally 1GB, which is the free quota). 

There are now two policies in place to prevent outages:

1) Bins will be deleted if more than 10MB of data are posted to it IN A DAY. Hopefully posters will catch on to the 404s and stop posting. This will not prevent the data being posted from being counted against our incoming bandwidth quota, but it gives a hint to users something is wrong.

2) IPs that post over 500MB in a day will be *temporarily* banned. This is currently the only way to avoid bandwidth costs from certain posts. It's less than ideal since it is possible the IP is a service used by many people, but it's currently the only way to keep the service operating. There is a link to the IP blacklist page on the homepage.

I'll be monitoring usage and these policies may change in the future. Any feedback is welcome!

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Jeff Lindsay
http://progrium.com