Google Static Map Quota reached but nowhere close to 25,000 limit

Question

A client of mine is using Google Static Maps on his property lease pages. Twice this month he has gotten the dreaded Google Quota image in place of where the map should be on the page (see https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/staticmaps/images/quota.png).

He notified me after each time it happened, but the static map on the page loaded correctly for me. He and I both viewed the page through a proxy server and it appeared correctly through there as well.

I checked my site's logs for the 2 days in question, and there were only 841 and 1,910 page loads respectively for the entire site. These were both higher volume than normal days but by no means would explain reaching the 25,000 Google Static Map limit. The image size is only 375 x 275 pixels.

Question: why would he get the quota image and not me (or the proxy server)? If it's based on IP address, he's on a very small network and there's no way the office would collectively load that particular page 25,000 times. My client uses Google Maps a lot. Is it possible that maps.google.com adds its own page loads to an IP address's total page loads from other websites? Any explanation would be most helpful. Thanks in advance.

FYI: here's the image tag we've been using for at least a year now, without incident until this month (edited):

<img src="http://maps.google.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=28.4039,-81.337&maptype=terrain&mobile=false&zoom=13&size=375x275&markers=size:small|color:blue|28.4039,-81.337&sensor=false&key={omited}&style=feature:road.local%7Cvisibility:simplified" width="375" height="275" alt="Location" class="map_canvas" />

Answer 1

Google Static Maps API also indicates that there is a 50 requests per min limit.

• Without an API key:
  • 1 000 Static Maps requests per IP address per 24 hour period.
  • 50 Static Maps requests per IP address per minute.

This means that if you have a single page containing more than 50 maps, the page will exceed this limit.

StaticMapsAPI

I suggest you sign up for a key.