We would like to apologise for our recent site crash.

During the run up to the senior ODE, this site experience unprecedented traffic. The effect of several thousand visitors attempting to access the ODE times caused the servers to overload and fall into automatic shut down. Although we made every effort to divert traffic away from our servers, (by posting the actual times on the main Pony Club site) it appears that a large volume of the passing visitors, decided to stay and have a look at our site. We did not imagine this would happen, but it did.

The site is limited to the amount of  "data transfer" allocated by our hosting provider. On the small budget we run on, this allowance is more than sufficient for the normal usage of our members, but cannot handle the kind of traffic generated by the ever popular ODE. This incident has given us cause to deeply analyse our web traffic and we have decided that a few small changes will help us avoid a repeat of this crash.

The page containing "other clubs activities" attracts a lot of traffic. Far more traffic than can be accounted for by our members alone. The information on this page is all available on the main Pony Club site, through the calendar page which is frankly far more informative than our page. It would therefore be sensible to delete this page. We will over time archive some old blogs on the members page, some of these blogs contain particularly large picture files and therefore use up large amounts of bandwidth when viewed.

A clean up and purge of old files on the site will take place in the next few weeks, we will post a message on the pages concerned to inform our visitors that site maintenance is in progress, the purges should not take more than a couple of hours, and we will endeavour to schedule the down time for low traffic periods.

Happy riding and happy surfing!

The Web Geeks