Hello alexh
We received lots of feedback and many questions from our members regarding our decision to block IPs belonging to hosting providers from participating in the Traffic Exchange. Read below for further explanations and about a change we are introducing to the rule.
We are perfectly aware that the change would cause inconvenience to some of our members, so let us further explain why we made the decision in the first place. As mentioned in our previous e-mail, the aim was to improve the overall traffic quality provided by the HitLeap service. How would blocking hosting provider IPs help?
It's quite simple actually. A lot of HitLeap Viewer instances running on hosting provider machines are running in low resource conditions. This prevents the HitLeap Viewer from fully loading all websites, resulting in reduced traffic quality for all members. On the other hand, home users would not be banned as part of the new rule and home computers are usually powerful enough to properly run the application without any problems.
After listening to the feedback and opinions of our members, we realized that this decision would cause unnecessary damage to many honest members - those who run the HitLeap Viewer on reasonably powerful servers or even home users running their internet connection through an IP belonging to hosting providers (e.g. VPNs). We figured we could do better and offer a solution that worked for everyone.
Hosting provider IPs will no longer be blocked. Instead, we are introducing Session Slots. Similar to Website Slots, you need 1 Session Slot for every instance of HitLeap Viewer. Regular members get 2 Session Slots and Premium members get 5 Session Slots. This will cover the large majority of home users. If you wish to start more instances, you can always purchase more Session Slots at very reasonable prices. This, along with much stricter quality controls we will be introducing, will incentivize people to contribute quality traffic to the HitLeap network, removing the need to apply a very broad ban by simply blocking hosting provider IPs.
We believe this change to be the most flexible solution, while still allowing us to improve traffic quality going forward.
