Category: News

A “Fair Usage” API policy for Cloud Hosted customers

Filed Under: News by midas — Leave a comment
August 26, 2021

The MIDAS API allows developers to interface with a MIDAS booking system from their own code, applications, or websites.

This powerful addon is available as an option for both cloud-hosted and self-hosted MIDAS systems for an additional cost.

To help ensure maximum quality of service for all our cloud hosted customers, we will shortly be implementing a “Fair Usage” policy for API calls.

To clarify; this will only affect cloud-hosted customers using the optional MIDAS API. This does not affect self-hosted customers using the MIDAS API, and it does not affect non-API users.

Why the need for a “Fair Usage” API policy?

We recently became aware of a customer who was retrieving over 1GB of data each day from their cloud-hosted MIDAS system via automated API calls. On some days this would exceed over 1.5GB/day.

Now, we should stress that this customer was not acting maliciously in any way. They were not making an excessively high volume or frequency of API calls, but the calls that were being made were returning extremely large data sets every 10 minutes.

As a business, we obviously have to pay for our bandwidth (the amount of data transferred between our servers and customers), and so a customer pulling over 1GB of data from our servers everyday via the API becomes costly.

Therefore, going forward, we’ve decided to implement a “Fair Usage” policy on API calls made to cloud-hosted MIDAS systems.

What is the “Fair Usage” API policy?

The Fair Usage policy sets limits on the number of API calls that can be made in any given hour, and the amount of data that may be retrieved in any given 24 hour period.

Initially, these limits will be as follows *:

  • A maximum of 720 API calls per hour
  • A maximum of 480 MB of data per day

We believe API limits for cloud-hosted customers are generous, and from our analysis will not impact the vast majority of cloud-hosted API users.

* We reserve the right to review and amend these limits in the future. The current limits may always be found here.

What happens if I exceed these API limits?

Most API users will not be impacted by this change. However, should you exceed these limits, API access to your MIDAS system will be temporarily suspended, with subsequent API calls returning an error. API access will be automatically re-instated once API usage falls below these limits again.

We’ve also provided useful advice on how you can reduce API usage by optimizing your API calls.

Can I monitor my API usage?

It would be unfair of us to introduce a “Fair Usage” policy without providing a way for customers to monitor their API usage.

As such, we’ve just released an updated API (v2.48) in which you can view your current API usage via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage Addons → API Access.

NEW: API usage monitoring in API v4.28
NEW: API usage monitoring in API v4.28

API usage may also be monitored directly through the API itself via a new “util_api_usage” call.

When will this policy come into effect?

Cloud-hosted API users can now monitor their current API usage as outlined above.

We’re allowing a grace period before we implement our new API “fair usage” policy.

The “Fair Usage” policy will start being enforced from Monday 13th September 2021.

Can I opt-out of the “Fair Usage” policy?

Our API “Fair Usage” policy (which only applies to cloud-hosted customers) cannot be opted out of.

However, if you find that you regularly exceed the new API limits and are unable to refactor your code to reduce the frequency of API requests and/or the amount of data returned by your API calls, then please contact us to discuss increasing your API limits.

Alternatively, you could consider migrating to a self-hosted MIDAS system. API calls to self-hosted MIDAS systems do not have any usage limits imposed.

We thank you for your understanding and co-operation in helping us to ensure quality of service for all our cloud-hosted customers.

Should you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us, and we’ll be happy to help!

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Introducing our new Refer-a-Friend program

Filed Under: News by midas — Leave a comment
July 28, 2021

We’re pleased to announce the launch of our brand new “Refer-a-Friend” program.

Many of our customers discover MIDAS as a result of a recommendation from another organization who already use our booking software for their scheduling needs.

We believe in the importance of these “word of mouth” referrals. They’re key to our success and longevity. That’s why we now offer a generous “Refer-a-Friend” program to our existing customers.

For every new customer you refer to MIDAS, we’ll give both them and you one month free! *

So if you’re an existing customer, get started and grab your free and unique referral link right here.

..plus, there’s no limit on the number of new customers you can refer. If you refer 12 new organizations, and you’ll get 12 months of MIDAS free!

Refer-a-Friend to MIDAS and both get 1 month free

The new “Refer-a-Friend” program replaces our previous affiliate scheme, which is now being retired after almost a decade.

* Full T&C’s for our Refer-a-Friend program may be found here.

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MIDAS v4.28 Out Now!

Filed Under: News, Releases by midas — Leave a comment
July 23, 2021

During the global pandemic we’ve remained focused on both supporting our customer’s businesses through unprecedented challenges, and working to continually improve our MIDAS software.

To that end, we’re now excited to share with you our latest update – MIDAS v4.28 – in this our 15th Anniversary year.

Highlights of MIDAS v4.28 include:

New & Improved Addons

Our range of optional addons extend the capabilities of your MIDAS system. To coincide with the release of MIDAS v4.28 we’re launching two brand new addons, as well making improvements to some existing addons too.

New Addons:

Custom Branding MIDAS addonCustom Branding With this new addon, you can completely remove visible traces of “MIDAS” and the MIDAS logo from your booking system, and instead replace them with your own name and logo! Read more…
Domain Alias MIDAS AddonDomain Alias With this new addon, you can make your cloud-hosted MIDAS system appear as though it’s running on your own domain instead of your marko.mid.as domain! This makes it an ideal companion addon with our new Custom Branding addon. Read more…

Improved Addons:

MIDAS APIAPI We’ve added a couple of new API calls, allowed bespoke styling to be included in emails sent via the API, and also added support for returning more appropriate http status codes with API responses. Read more…
MIDAS Web Calendars AddonWeb Calendars Our improved Web Calendars addon now allows you to embed bookings for individual dates, as well as allowing your visitors to request/book directly from the calendar! Read more…

How To Get MIDAS v4.28…

“Self Hosted” Customers:

Self-Hosted customers with active Support Subscriptions will shortly be able to update to v4.28. It only takes a couple of clicks – simply log in to your MIDAS system and go to MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Update.

If no update is available, please check back again in a few days time, as we are staggering updates for self-hosted customers over the next few weeks.

“Cloud Hosted” Customers:

Cloud-Hosted customers don’t need to do anything! – All our active Cloud-Hosted MIDAS customers will be automatically updated to this latest version of MIDAS this coming weekend (24th – 25th July 2021)

How to get addons…

New Customers:

Addons may be purchased along with MIDAS, or may be added to an existing MIDAS system at a later date.

To purchase MIDAS and any of the available addons, please go to mid.as/pricing.

Existing Customers:

Any addons you already have installed in your MIDAS system will automatically be updated to their latest versions when your MIDAS system is updated.

However, if you wish to add any new addons to your MIDAS system, you can view pricing and add these via mid.as/upgrade.

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Domain Alias Addon

Filed Under: Development, News, Releases by midas — Leave a comment
July 13, 2021

In our previous blog post, we introduced our new optional “Custom Branding” addon.

This allows you to re-brand (white label) a MIDAS booking system, removing any references to “MIDAS” and replacing them with your own name and logo.

The “Custom Branding” addon is available to both self-hosted and cloud-hosted customers.

Now, for cloud-hosted customers, if you want to remove references to “MIDAS” from your booking system, you’ll still have the “mid.as” reference in the actual URL for your MIDAS system (i.e. “example.mid.as”).

Our new companion “Domain Alias” addon solves this issue!

It allows you to setup access to cloud hosted MIDAS system via another domain instead. – for instance a sub-domain of your organization’s own website domain.

So for example, if your hosted MIDAS domain was “example.mid.as”, and your organization’s own domain was “example.com”, you could use the optional Domain Alias addon and set say “bookings.example.com” to use as the URL for your hosted MIDAS system instead.

Domain Alias Addon for MIDAS
Domain Alias Addon for MIDAS

Setting up a domain alias is a simple 3-step process:

  1. Enter the domain/sub-domain you wish to “alias” to your hosted MIDAS system.
  2. Make a small DNS change on your organization’s domain using the information provided in the addon
  3. Confirm that you’ve made your DNS change

Once your changes become active, you’ll be able to access your hosted MIDAS system via your chosen domain alias.

For more information about this optional addon for cloud-hosted customers, please visit: https://mid.as/domain-alias

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