Changes to conserve bandwidth
Hey everybody,
Most of you know that Tabulas is a fun project that I work on in my spare time - it is not intended to make any money. Lately, the costs have been starting to mount on the bandwith side.
When looking into what's causing the high costs, most of the problems come from file downloads - they account for about 3/5 of the total bandwidth costs.
To combat this, I'm changing the way file downloads are handled. Any files that are greater than 512K can be downloaded in a 24 hour period by as many downloads that fill a 80 megabyte quota (files under 512K can be downloaded an unlimited time per day). If your file is 1 megabyte, then it can be downloaded 80 times in a 24 hour period. If it's 5 megabytes, it's 16 times. (I will change this value for patron accounts soon). After that, visitors will be told that the bandwidth usage is exceeded.
However, users who are registered Tabulas users do not have this check implemented - that means if you are logged into Tabulas, these limits do not apply.
I know this sucks, but I need to keep costs under control
I've also made code changes to way images are being served. If you have any problems viewing images or files, please let me know!