Update: I deployed the new delivery scripts at 07:00 GMT -0500 today, 02/21/2016. The transition went off without a hitch and the system is running very smoothly. There is a lot more data being reported now, performance is improved, and the "Image Retrieval Error" hasn't shown up 10 hours since (usually happens once an hour or every other hour). So I am hopeful that the "fix" I put in for that is properly handling the final reason for those errors. Time will tell. If so, then it looks like the system is running at 100% success rate. I won't get my hopes up too high, but things look promising!

I almost forgot: I wanted to document that this release also introduces a slight change in behavior for those who are on shared hosting where another Free account has already reserved the server's public IP. In those cases, the code now checks the original reserving account to see if it is inactive or banned. If it is, then the referrer IP is transparently moved from the original account into the requesting account and the request is honored.

No change is required for this to work. It all happens behind-the-scenes. The only evidence that this has occurred is that an entry will be put in the logs for the requesting account that shows "Referrer added to Allowed Referrers" and will show the IP moved. This will help alleviate the headache of having to open a support ticket asking for us to check and move the IP manually.

Some background: Unfortunately, the few ruined it for the many and forced us to ban shared IPs across Free accounts, but this new behavior will hopefully help out some users. Since hosting companies have been slashing costs by migrating to mega-servers that oversell thousands or tens of thousands of accounts on a single IP, it has been a growing problem of Free users running into not being able to use our "Advanced Method" because their server's IP is reserved.

I have, so far, been unable to come up with a better solution to avoid malicious users from stealing service to the point of putting me out of business. I had considered Google's method of allowing public access, up to 25,000 accesses per IP per day, but with our volume, that would lead to serious headaches. Once enough users from the same server accessed the service, ALL requests for that day would be denied. That's no good. Also, a malicious user on a server could eat up ALL of that days requests in a short time and leave everyone else on that server without service; also no good.

Do you have an elegant solution? I'd love to hear ideas!