The historical search at flight-data.adsbexchange is currently down until further notice.
ADSBx hopes to bring historical flight info back to the public with a more cost effective solution that is secure, monitored, and potentially a subscription model.
We will investigate if ADSBx can extend the feeder historical search to 2+ years of data and maintain affordable infrastructure and storage. Data access is detailed at this link.
Limited history traces are available on a per aircraft basis in the global web ui.
2020-03-11 
2020-03-10
ADSBx offers the following features to feeders that not other site offers:
- Unblocked and unfiltered global tracking via Global UI Map.
- Discounted unblocked and unfiltered global live data.
These features are not available on ANY ADS-B site.
The costs below do not include all the volunteer time and effort to make ADSBx work. Nor does it include the occasional contract database admin to fix the rare issues that could not be corrected by ADSBx volunteers. Nor have we detailed any of the ingest infrastructure and cloud infrastructure that is running at data centers around the world.
The ADSBx is routinely abused by hedge funds, commercial entities, and other for-profit entities and at times we are forced to take action to prevent the project going bankrupt. The current unavailability of the historical database is one of those cases.
Over the last few months ADSBx had many inquires about data. The response was not positive when these entities were told they must support ADSBx for access to the data. A few, ADSBx later discovered, were already using the data in violation of usage terms.
After looking at usage patterns on AWS, it appears that someone may have decided to data mine the historical search starting in July, in violation of ADSBx terms and because they did not want to support ADSBx through a comparatively inexpensive commercial data lease. They generated billions of read IOPS at AWS and multiple terabytes of bandwidth usage.
Around the same time ADSBx was making headlines for aircraft tracking nefarious entities, we noticed the flight-data was running slow. We thought it was a temporary increase due to publicity, Cloudflare was placed in front and the PostgreSQL was scaled to compensate. This increase in resources simply increased the rate at which usage could burst and sustain. It snowballed into a massive AWS bill.
Why did this happen? If your database server runs a query that needs to read or write data to the disk you will use I/O requests. AWS bills for those I/O requests.
The ADSBx AWS archive normally functions on a ‘low’ cost r4.xlarge, but the storage size is ever increasing – which simply makes AWS unsustainable for ADSBx in the long term. The bill for the storage will need continue to grow to accommodate new data in the database.
Unfortunately, donations rarely reach $1,000 USD a month. Until we find a more cost effective way to make the data available, we must take it down to guarantee ADSBx long term viability.
If you can help, please donate HERE.
August: $12,281.56 AWS TOTAL
September: $13,158.96 AWS TOTAL
