hi,
some update. First of all here is the exact error message from a normal website request :
HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 Date: Mon, 04 May 2009 19:06:21 GMT Connection: close AuthFailureAWS was not able to validate the provided access credentials
After logging into my AWIS account (as I have it since so many years) first of all I got the information ...
As part of signing up for Alexa Web Information Service, you must create an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account. Please enter your contact information.
... including to accept the customer agreement (changed on April 22, 2009) as where you can see that AWIS isn't sill longer on "free service" and is now still in "paid service" ...
Updated April 22, 2009
...
1.1. Free Services.
The Free Services include the Amazon Associates Web Service, Alexa® Site
Widgets, Amazon FWS, and all other web services that we make available to you
free of charge on the Amazon Web Services-branded or Alexa®-branded web sites
accessible from aws.amazon.com (collectively, the "AWS Website"),
except those web services for which we specifically provide a separate customer
agreement.
1.2. Paid Services.
The Paid Services include all web services and any related support services
that we make available to you for a fee on the AWS Website, except
those web services for which we specifically provide a separate customer
agreement. Our Paid Services include, but are not limited to:
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
Alexa® Web Information Service (AWIS)
Alexa® Web Search
Alexa® Top Sites
Alexa Site Thumbnail™
Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS)
Amazon DevPay Service (Amazon DevPay)
Amazon SimpleDB Service (Amazon SimpleDB)
Amazon Web Services Premium Support (AWS Premium Support)
...
... and after accepting that new agreement you come directly to the site for providing your credit card number as here is a screenshot ...
... and you can't login as long as you have not provided this data. Finally for that shit "cash out service" I have deleted "Alexa Ranking" on my site because I don't accept this kind of shit cashing.
I don't know if any script who will use Alexa-Rank inside of the script will have the possibility to get it longer as free charge because $0.15 for 1000 requests is a lot of money. Thinking about 1 script owner who has 100+ trader inside and will click many times to the overall and the stats will refresh.