Connection Limits for Popular Counterparties

When you make outbound connections from your Files.com site to third-party remote servers, those connections originate from the Files.com pool of shared IP addresses unless you have explicitly enabled dedicated IPs for your site.

Shared IPs work well most of the time. When you connect to popular third-party destinations that many other Files.com customers also use, shared IP usage can lead to temporary connection limiting.

Why This Happens

Certain counterparties, such as Walmart, Goldman Sachs, and other large trading partners, are connected to by dozens or even hundreds of our customers at the same time.

Multiple customers connecting from the same source IP can trigger connection throttling and rate limiting at the destination. When multiple customers share the same source IP address while connecting to these high-traffic destinations, Files.com automatically enforces connection limits to maintain fair usage and protect system stability.

In these cases, your connection may experience more aggressive parallelism limits, even if you have configured a higher number of maximum concurrent connections.

How to Identify This Scenario

If your connection attempt is throttled due to shared IP usage with a popular destination, you will see an error message referencing connection_limited_due_to_popular_counter_party in your site's outbound connection logs.

This error message indicates that your connection was temporarily limited due to high aggregate usage from our platform to that third-party system.

Normal connection rates are automatically restored when aggregate usage is reduced across our platform.

How to Avoid This

To avoid this type of limitation, we recommend enabling dedicated IP addresses for outbound connections to critical or high-volume partners. Dedicated IPs isolate your connection traffic from other customers, maintain consistent throughput, and reduce the chance of external connection limits or platform-level throttling from remote servers.

For help enabling dedicated IPs or optimizing your connection strategy, contact Files.com Support.