Internet facing reverse proxy licensing

[SysOp]

Dear Qbik,

I am systems administrator of a small company with 20 employees. We are interested in WinGate for logging Internet activity outbound as well as inbound for our local web servers, and to require authentication and a client certificate before even allowing access to some of the local web servers.

I am foreseeing a licensing issue in this scenario: If we purchase WinGate Enterprise for 25 concurrent users, will all these licenses be consumed in no time by anonymous users visiting our websites from the Internet?
Because if this will require purchasing the license for unlimited concurrent users, WinGate will financially not be interesting anymore.

Best regards.

[adrien]

Hi

yes this is an issue we're aware of. As things stand currently, the external reverse proxy users consume licenses just the same as the internal users do, and so a small license size can result in denial of service to reverse proxy and/or internal users.

We have had several discussions about if and how we would address this. The main problem is that the license is consumed when the connection is made to the proxy, prior to any request being sent by the client. We only know if a request is a reverse proxy request after the request has been received by WinGate, by which stage the license already has been consumed.

Bear in mind that the licensing is done on concurrently-connected users, rather than per-seat, so since users aren't continuously connected to the proxy, statistically you can provide service to many more than the licensed number of users.

Is the site high-traffic? You may find you don't need an unlimited license. The standard example dashboards that come with WinGate have a gauge for licenses in use, you could run a trial to see how many you use. You can also customize the response page you get when over count to provide a better user experience if it came down to that.

Adrien

[adrien]

p.s. if you're serious that this is the only impediment, I'd suggest sending an email through to sales@qbik.com and we can probably cut a deal to resolve the problem.

Regards

Adrien