So you’re saying we have to pay to use Google Maps API?
My response?
I’ve never owned a high traffic site that’s passed a google map quota limit so this is pretty new to me. Based on the documentation it looks like it.
I mean seriously.
When you’re using a third party service and/or API you just never know what’s going to happen next. And for Google, you’re going to deal with some super heavy documentation. Look, I didn’t have a problem perusing through it – the challenge was translating all of it in plain English – yeah, to the client.
This particular website I was working on was a pretty big one, well I’d say medium sized. But more importantly, this site relied heavily on using google maps and this only dawned on me after the maps stopped working. I’ve worked on enhancing and troubleshooting a good amount of issues on the site before – I had a pretty good handle on it, but this one was pretty new to me.
Back to the issue at hand – their maps weren’t working anymore. I dove into the code, everywhere looking for the core cause. Logic looked good, nothing wrong there and both clients and managers need to realize, this takes some time. Not a walk in the park, takes time to diagnose.
So yeah, it just stopped working? I was told that it stopped working the day before but I ran a cache operation and saw a cached snapshot of the site – it was broken for some weeks now. Now I could get really bogged down in who, what and why but that would just kill unnecessary brain cells – let’s fix the issue. I know what you’re thinking – yeah, some history would definitely help in troubleshooting. If you’ve been consulting for as long as I have you kind of already know when that’s not even an option – the client simply doesn’t know the technical details. But sometimes that’s a good thing – leaves you with a blank canvas to work with.
The google console sput an error to work with – DeletedApiProjectMapError. I didn’t get a chance to take a snapshot of this so to get a better idea of the error you’ll have to check out Google’s documentation on Google Javascript Errors.
So I checked out their existing API key and the call to the Google’s API endpoint – as mentioned already, didn’t see a problem there. I went ahead and created a new API key and figured something buggy was up with their existing API key – yeah, why not just create a new one. They only had two global include files in where this call was being made so hey, totally do able.
So this time around I got a different error showing up on the console. Now this, I did take a screenshot of. Check it out below.
Yeah weird right? Like, what was wrong with their existing API key. I didn’t want to spend time going down that rabbit hole, wasn’t worth it at this point – the error itself was in plain english.
You have exceeded your request quota for this API.
Well I understood that – but what did that mean for the client. Well I had to highlight several parts of Google’s documentation to translate all the technical details.
First, yeah even the standard usage of Google Maps had a quota.
And then, I took a screenshot of what they were more interested in – the solution. Yeah make sure you annotate it – because let’s face it, this is all they’re interested in. I don’t mean to be snarky here, this is money.
Alright so I fired the email off – no response that same day. But the next day the maps were working again. Yeah, seriously.