Bereits am 27. Februar 2008 wurde auf dem Geonames-Blog dieser besondere Service angekündigt. Dort heißt es:

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.

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