Ok, so. This is gonna be an interesting one. We’re an open source project called “Place Atlas” and we are documenting every single artwork that has been placed on r/place. This has been a massive project that we underestimated how many people would look at.
So much, that we’ve reached our bandwith limit TWICE already.
The reddit post we got (that has been marked by an official reddit administrator)
Reached a total of 1.7 million views once we made the post yesterday. Like HOLY, that is a lot. However we’re already reaching the bandwith limit today again, and we’re unable to afford a higher plan to just afford the bandwith for everyone to view the website.
We are an open source project, we even applied for the open source project. But we feel like the bandwith would still not be enough to manage all the requests we are currently getting on the website. Including the possible traffic we might get from streamers, content creators and other sources of media alike.
(Netlify is also listed on the “About” page)
Is there anyway we can get a HUGE bandwith increse, just before the end of the day? Keep in mind, we recieve no funding for this project at all. We would have loved to pay. But the prices are just to high.
In the good news department, we don’t shut your site down nor even charge you immediately for bandwidth usage, so your site won’t get shut down when you hit 400Gb, nor will you immediately be charged.
Our team has agreed to - for today - sponsor your bandwidth usage. We’ll re-evaluate later and may change our minds based on what your longer term usage looks like, but we will not require you to pay for past usage should we decide that - we’d let you know that e.g. next month we’ll stop sponsoring your usage over X amount so you can make plans to stop hosting or find other sponsors. I don’t anticipate that we’ll do this, but since we rushed this ask and the team that usually reviews these things is not able to do so, I did need to mention that it could happen in the future.
Before we flip the switch, we would ask that you put a mention of netlify on the page we host (which is already a requirement for all open source sponsorships, cf Open Source Plan Policy). Something like this on the existing page would be a fine place and size for our purposes:
Will you be willing to make that change? Let me know and assuming the answer is yes, we’ll get you switched over to the sponsored plan and forgive any oustanding bill in case one has developed in the meantime while we work through this.
THANK YOU BY THE LOVE OF GOD.
We’re gonna add Netlify there, so that will at least support us a great ton. As your service has been a massive help in our development. (And in some past projects)
Ok so, thank god for the quick assitance with this. As we speak, my team is adding the Netlify notice on the website and we’re HOPING to add some caching layers to negate some bandwith. Especially though cloudflare. (If you guys have any idea how to improve this further, please enlighten us. We want to work together on this). On the note of outstanding bills, we had to buy “Pro” to maintain the website the second day.
We’ve disabled cloudflare’s orange cloud in light of this development.
However on another note, placeAtlas is reaching on a global scale. We have never expected it to grow this big in such short time.
We have 2 requests, is there a possibility to unlink the payment card from our account and refund the pro subscription we bought to maintain our bandwith when this entire project started?
Also, I guess the interface will take a bit of time to reflect the changes. Correct?
@hillary
Thought we’d give you guys an update, we just finished an interview with Polygon and we have mentioned the great team you guys have to help us through the entire adventure!
Also a question, we’re working on releasing the timeline feature. HOWEVER, for this we need to send an image to the user every time they move the bar. From that moment on, the images get cached. Is this an issue for Netlify and the bandwith? Or will this be covered by the OSU plan?
We’ll sponsor all the bandwidth charges, but do appreciate anything you can do to mitigate - so things like setting a reasonable HTTP cache-control HTTP response header on images that won’t change (whether served directly from a Netlify deploy in which case you’d configure via custom headers, or via a proxy to some remote service, in which case our CDN will respect their caching directives) - would be appreciated.
I have attempted to refund your Pro account payment (got a weird error, but I think the refund went through). I could not yet remove your card since we need the refund to go through first, so please ping back either when you see the refund complete, or if you don’t see it within a week, and we’ll get things sorted out and get the card removed then.
Finally, in case a charge comes up as due on 5 May, please write back and we’ll be happy to get it sorted . Changing an account to sponsored with oustanding charges can have weird effects, which we can’t always predict. Since you’ll have no card in place, we won’t be able to collect the charge & you will have a few weeks of being in arrears before any impact will occur to your site hosting, so we’ll have plenty of time to resolve it.
Thank you! We’ll hopefully be able to do this!
We’ll put in cache headers and optimise the images as much as we can.
(We’re estimating around 82/83 to 174/175 images of a max of 945kb due to the fine requirement of the project)
These won’t all get loaded at the same time, only when someone searches across the timeline.
