A commercial version of our popular web services is now available to everybody. The commercial web services offer faster response time and higher uptime than their free siblings and come with two types of service level agreements. We recommend that professional users and mission critical applications upgrade to this premium service.
The GeoNames web services are incredibly popular and the growth rate is amazing. We regularly serve over 10 million requests per day. Donations, however, don’t keep pace with this increase and we will have to limit the number of requests per IP address on the free servers to be able to keep up with the exponentially growing demand. By the end of February this limit will be 100’000 credits per IP address and by the end of March it will be 50’000 credits. Luckily we have an alternative for heavy users with the commercial web services announced above. The credits policy accounts for the fact that not all web services generate the same load on the server. For most services a request equals one credit, some reverse geocoding services are more expensive whereas others like gtopo30 are less resource intensive and cost a fraction of a credit only.
GeoNames Blog 
Cool. Curious. I’m seeing a “null” on the page where the charting methods purport to show for commercial services. i take it there is a time lag.
Also to use your commercial service, I just need to add the username token I registered with in my web service request? username=XYZ? I didn’t see anywhere to modify IP blocks or add a password token.
Daniel
The chart is updated once per day and it is only available for users of the commercial service. The option to add allowed IP addresses and password tokens is on the same page and also only available for commercial users.
Marc
Thanks for the response (I am a commercial user), it showed up today so i see what you are referring to, there was just a processing delay for the CC I suppose.
Regards.
[…] GeoNames blog carries news of improved commercial service with performance guarantees. The flipside, of course, is a limit on requests that can be made to […]
You provide a fantastic service. Keep it up.
One question: You mention in this post that by end of March the limit will be 50,000 credits per IP-address.
Can you clarify if it is “50K per day per ip-address” or just simply “50k per ip-address”.
Thanks!
It is “50K per day per ip-address”. We actually don’t plan to enforce it if we don’t have to. This means at moments where our servers are overloaded we will block those ip-addresses that have been using more than their fair share of resources.